Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who ran for president in 2008, got his start in politics as a lawyer for the special committee investigating Watergate, so the “enemies list” joke is pretty resonant here. He’s one of the real losers of the new campaign book “The Battle for America 2008″ by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Short version: Thompson drove his own campaign into the ground through a combination of arrogance and laziness.

My recommendation is now and has been that the Administration — in placing minority members in visible jobs — stop concentrating on the “media’s minorities” (Blacks, Mexican Americans, Spanish-speaking) which are tough to crack, almost solid Democratic — and begin focusing on the large ethnic minorities (Irish, Italians, Poles, Slovaks, etc.), the big minorities where the President’s name is not a dirty word, where the President’s personal beliefs and political actions are more consistent with their own.

When we begin to recognize and act on the idea that there are as many Italian-Americans in the Bronx as there are Black Americans in Harlem, we will better begin to serve the President’s interests.

Later in the memo, Buchanan suggests a specific appointment that the president could use to prove that he cared about white ethnics: a seat on the Supreme Court.

[I]nstead of sending the orders out to all our other agencies — hire blacks and women — the order should go out — hire ethnic Catholics preferable women, for visible posts. One example: Italian Americans, unlike blacks, have never had a Supreme Court member — they are deeply concerned with their “criminal” image; they do not dislike the President. Give those fellows the “Jewish seat” or the “black seat” on the Court when it becomes available.

It’s striking how little Buchanan has changed in the intervening 38 years. In one of his anti-Sonia Sotomayor columns, he argued that the nominee had no more right to a seat than a “Polish- or Portogeuse-American” and that Hispanics would support her because “people often come out to vote for one of their own.”

(Hat tip: Rick Perlstein)

Sen. George McGovern with "Vote McGovern"

From The Los Angeles Times:

With the title scrawled like graffiti beneath an official campaign photograph not of McGovern but of his opponent, Richard M. Nixon, Warhol incisively pictured a cliché: Consider the alternative.

That camp dexterity with clichés is what made Warhol a big success in the 1950s advertising industry, and it’s also the key to understanding Pop Art. But there’s more. Color is wickedly deployed.

Against a flaming orange background and above a hot pink suit, Nixon’s face shades from sickly green into bilious blue. The hot and cold complementary colors vivify the image, which accomplishes the reverse of what Warhol had done to Marilyn Monroe. Intimately familiar with Catholic icons since childhood, he had made Marilyn’s publicity photograph into an idealized depiction of the queen of heaven, just days after her tragic death. Nixon, on the other hand, got the Satan treatment, like something from the hellish underworld of Hieronymus Bosch.

Of course, political posters can only do so much. McGovern lost the 1972 election in the second largest landslide in American history. At that point, the previous June’s Watergate burglary was just a brief newspaper item. Two years later Satan–er, I mean, Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace.