As hated as Nixon is for his scandals, the only President since Nixon to not have any scandals is Jimmy Carter.
I don't see scandals as a bad thing. I would in fact be more suspicious if a president was squeaky clean. The only time something looks perfectly clean is when you're putting on a show.
Clinton's 'scandals' were hardly his fault, since they were either fabricated or trivial and irrelevant. This is reflected in his job approval rating. People don't like corruption, "scandals" are neither here nor there. Nixon was hated because he tried (and succeeded) at stealing an election, not because he was accused of stealing an election. This is something we'll see in the next few months with Obama, people with brains will gradually realise they've been sold a bridge by Republican politicians.
I don't see scandals as a bad thing. I would in fact be more suspicious if a president was squeaky clean. The only time something looks perfectly clean is when you're putting on a show.
You're pretty wrong on that score. Jimmy Carter didn't have any scandals because he was just an honest guy who didn't try to game the system.
He was also a shitty politician who refused to play the game at all and consequently had a hard time getting anything done, but he's since devoted his life to humanitarian efforts here and abroad. Simply put, Carter is a great human being but a horrible leader.
Carter was a pretty effective politician at the state level and in his first Presidential run. He dispatched Ford fairly comprehensively, in 1976. Ronald Reagan- or rather, the PR staff that invented Ronald Reagan- was actually losing to him for most of the 1980 election. It took some fairly substantial treason for the Republicans to win that election, repeating their efforts from 1968.
Of course, Carter was one of the most serious and effective policymakers of the century. He ended the Egypt-Israeli conflicts forever, started the beat-down of the Soviets in Afghanistan with none of the severe errors Reagan added to the program, he got the American embassy staff released in Iran, emphasised human rights in foreign policy- a major change in US foreign policy that would have made a significant difference had it not been immediately reversed- and how!- by Reagan. On the domestic front, too, he was quite an effective policy maker; he led the world's first serious response to the world's most important issue, climate change (again, immediately reversed). He's probably the best president of this half of the 20th century, maybe second behind LBJ. Compared with the prior and subsequent presidents, he looks like Lincoln.
