Well, first, he actually proposed affordable healthcare.Originally Posted by theimage13
* He desegregated schools and instituted mandated busing programs
* the EPAIn ''One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream,'' Tom Wicker, a former columnist for The Times, assessed the president's efforts. ''There's no doubt about it -- the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years, or probably since,'' he wrote. ''There's no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration's desegregation effort. Halting and uncertain before he finally asserted strong control, that effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.''
* the 1970 Clean Air Act
* the Endangered Species Act
* the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
* food assistance programs
* the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA)
* 1969 Executive Order regarding Affirmative Action
See this article.
“The trouble with far-right conservatives like Buckley,” Nixon told Whitaker, “is that they really don’t give a damn about people and the voters sense that. Yet any Republican presidential candidate can’t stray too far from the right-wingers because they can dominate a primary and are even more important in close general elections. Remember, John,” Nixon lectured, “the far-right kooks are just like the nuts on the left, they’re door-bell ringers and balloon blowers, but they turn out to vote. There is only one thing as bad as a far-left liberal and that’s a damn right-wing conservative.” Whitaker wrote that this and other conversations he had with Nixon were indicative of “Nixon’s visceral tilt towards the moderate/liberal side when dealing with domestic legislation, coupled with his respect (maybe fear is a better word) for the political clout of the right wing, so necessary to win national elections."
In a single day in 1971, Nixon famously imposed wage and price controls in a naïve attempt to curb inflation, ended the U.S.’s last ties to the gold standard, effectively devalued the dollar, and imposed a 10 percent import surcharge. The list of agencies he created from scratch includes the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He signed the command-and-control Clean Air Act into law and instituted racial quotas as federal policy. “Incredible but true,” Fortune magazine recalled upon Nixon’s death in 1994. “It was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.” As historian Joan Hoff has noted, “Not until the Nixon administration did ‘affirmative action’ begin to become synonymous with ‘civil rights.’”
