The Most Important Election in Living Memory?

I take issue with the editors of the New Yorker, who in the first paragraph of their most recent "Talk of the Town" editorial (October 13, 2008) state:

".....When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has - at the levels of competence, vision and integrity - undermined the country and its ideals?"

Try 1974. Nixon's adventures in Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia and of course Watergate were far more serious transgressions than anything Bush has done. We had a constitutional crisis in 1974. In the final paroxysm of the Nixon Presidency, there were fears - well-founded fears that Nixon would refuse the Supreme Court's order that he surrender the "secret" tapes he has harboring.

Had he done so, we would have been living in a de facto dictatorship. The editorial begins by asking rhetorically:

"Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching - that's the quadrennial cliché........And yet when has it felt so urgently true?"

Well as far as important elections are concerned, I agree that 2008 is the most important election we have had in many years.

To suggest that it is the most vital Presidential election in "living memory" however is hyperbole: 1932, 1940, 1960 and 1968 were far more critical election years- 1932 because of the Great Depression and the specter of social anarchy in the USA; 1940 because of the depredations of fascism in Europe and Asia and the specter of world war; 1960 because the Cold War and the specter of nuclear holocaust were very real threats to our republic and to the very survival of the human race; 1968 because the country was tearing itself apart over Vietnam.

Need I remind anyone, least of all the editors at the New Yorker? 1968 was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the year of the epic riots in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention. Talk of the Town continues:

“The incumbent administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction…”

Here is another inaccuracy in the editorial. The worst Presidency since Reconstruction? Aside from Richard Nixon's Presidency, that would include the Presidency of Herbert Hoover, who presided over the Crash of '29 and Act 1 of the Great Depression- catastrophes by any measure. Google “Hooverville” or check it out in Wikipedia. There was a rather large "Hooverville" on the Great Lawn in Central Park. As far as “most critical elections” are concerned, I was not going to reach back as far as the Civil War, but the New Yorker brought up Reconstruction, so; the election of 1864 is "ancient history" by many Americans' reckoning, and obviously does not qualify for "all-time important Presidential elections" using the New Yorker‘s "living memory" test.

Yet the New Yorker editorial poses the question, "And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true?" Perhaps it's a fine point but the reelection of Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War is but another example of a far more important election than 2008. And if I need explain or defend that statement, then I refer you to the history books.