Richard Nixon would DESTROY Obama in debates

Nixon was awsome in 1960.

Gracefulll concession speech - despite losong A BRTUAL ELECTION.

And his speech when he won the GOP nomomintion in 1968 heard . was the best I heard.

It was an AWESOME speech.
 
Being old enough to have actually seen and heard Nixon on the stump, I must disagree with the OP. Nixon would not have done well against Obama in a debate. There's a reason why he never debated either Humphrey or McGovern. He didn't consider himself at top form in such a milieu.

My own view of Nixon differs somewhat from that of other liberals. I regard him as a tragic figure, undone by his own personal failings. He was undeniably a paranoid whack job who abused his power and committed offenses worthy of impeachment, which he would certainly have suffered if he hadn't resigned. However, he was also perhaps the greatest president of the mid 20th century in terms of accomplishment in office. He was Lyndon Johnson without Johnson's stupidity in Vietnam. He made mistakes in office, most notably his response to the OPEC embargo, but his achievements were amazing: peace, arms control, environmental protection, furtherance of civil rights. Had he not been such a messed-up man, he would probably go down in history as one of the four or five greatest presidents in U.S. history.

If I had to pick the three greatest Republican presidents in history, I would choose, in this order, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon. Nixon goes in third place only because Watergate drags him down; without that, I'd put him at number two. And it says much about the current state of the Republican Party that none of those three men would pass the litmus test today. The GOP is simply not as grand as it used to be.

On another note, Nixon is one of two Quaker presidents in our history, the other being Herbert Hoover, who like Nixon is not judged a success in the office. One could argue that the Quaker religion is incompatible with high political office, and that any Quaker president must, by betraying his faith, betray himself.
 

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