After all, a candidate who kept insisting that we should roll back the Soviet Union wouldn’t be greeted as a man of unbending principle, but as a loon. The Soviet Union is gone. The world has moved on. The issues have changed.

Even being generous on this point, the simple fact is that no former president of the United States would have an easy time getting elected today. Nixon wouldn’t fare well today not because he had “ideas,” as Dole ludicrously said, but because Nixon was a screaming liberal by today’s standards. And I don’t simply mean today’s Republican standards. Nixon started the EPA. He implemented wage and price controls. He didn’t just push affirmative-action programs but racial quotas too.

As for the Democrats, which one, exactly, would have an easy time getting elected today? Forget about the repugnant sexual antics; John F. Kennedy was a foreign-policy hawk and tax-cutter. Jimmy Carter? A haughty, born-again Christian Southerner? Sure, he’d sail through the Democratic primaries. Even Bill Clinton, despite his enormous popularity among Democrats today, probably couldn’t get nominated if he ran as the Democrat he was in 1992.