Clearly you must have been sleeping through the election and 49-state re-election of Ronald Reagan, a mere 6 and 10 years after Nixon left office.
If Nixon couldn’t handle a few zingers from a righty, so what?
Schmitz, a one-term US Congressman, squashed himself, and his idiotic comments like, "I have no objection to President [Richard] Nixon going to China. I just object to his coming back," showed he was little more than a loose cannon prone to shooting himself in the foot - like most inflated-ego third-party types do and are.
Nixon made it personal and installed Hinshaw in Schmitz’s seat, a convicted criminal.
And Schmitz just didn't have enough political schmaltz to win it back, did he?
Hinshaw was not a convicted criminal when he ran for office and beat Schmitz in the primary in 1972. Schmitz' political intel was dismal. Schmitz just showed that he couldn't defeat Hinshaw when he wasn't convicted, and later even when he was. Since Hinshaw was convicted in 1977, how is it that Schmitz couldn't get his seat back in US Congress in 1978, and could instead only settle for CA Senate?
Given that there are fewer California State Senators than California Congressmembers, it’s actually harder to get elected to, and they’re often higher profile.
Geographic size of a representative area does not automatically translate into electoral difficulty to achieve political office.
In fact, since, as you say, Nixon's chosen substitute to supplant Schmitz was successful in doing so in the context of a smaller geographic footprint, Schmitz' loss to Hinshaw by your own measure was a double fail. Schmitz' later election to CA Senator could only be achieved by a greater sized area which allowed the dilution of his more concentrated home-based opposition.
But he just couldn't keep his pecker in his pants long enough to make his continuing presence in the CA Senate anything more significant and his behavior blew away his own wife's continuing career as a conservative political commentator.
What you do when no one is looking is what you really are, not all the pontificating you engage in so hypocritically and fraudulently as you seek public adulation and office.
The prestige and national influence one has in the US House is far greater than one has on a state level, particularly if one's intent is to have a national influence. Schmitz' failed run for the Presidency and later for US Senate indicates that his goal was to have influence on a national level.
40 CA State Senate members vs 55 US House members is a distinction without a difference. By the way he ran as (R) for CA senate in 1978 and as an (R) in 1982, not as some third party geek like he did in 1972 for President.
Schmitz crashed and burned on the National stage and the personal peccadilloes to which you aptly refer saw to it that he would never return to political life once exposed for the hypocrite he always was.
John Burton left Congress and later entered the State Senate where he became the President of that body, ostensibly more powerful than his House position. In any event, Schmitz was no “minor pest”, as a multiple-office winner. Sadly, had he not been derailed by personal peccadilloes, he would’ve ended up back in Congress by the ‘80s (and vindicated by his criticisms of Nixon).
How did Schmitz put it: "I lost by 44,000,000 votes."
He turned out to be a vanishingly small man when the truth about him came out. He made a living mockery of all he supposedly stood for, as he quipped when caught with his adulterous relationship and the spawn from it, "I ought to get the Right to Life man-of-the-year award for this."
Schmitz' hypocritical behavior and his shoot-off-at-the-mouth style allowed conservatism to be further pilloried for mockery by the detestable Gloria Allred.
Yet somehow you think he could have won his congressional seat back when he couldn't even make a show in 1982 for anything? He couldn't even show up to take fatherly responsibility for his two illegitimate kids in 1982.
And you say Nixon set back conservatism when this doofus made a living and verbal mockery of the conservatism he supposedly championed?
I’m also sure there is no comparison between Ted Kennedy, a traitor who was responsible for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne (whose “military service” was the equivalent of attending a country club in Europe, safe from the front lines of Korea), and John Schmitz, a Conservative patriot who served in the Marines for over 30 years.
And Schmitz is still your hero, I see.
Oh yes, a conservative paragon of virtue he was, wasn't he, sort of like Strom Thurmond, with his 50-year hidden, paid- off, posthumously exposed love child, or Newt Gingrich's serial divorces and adulteries, toe-tapping Larry (Craig), all done in the same hypocritical Elmer Gantry-styled spirit as the religio-politico-peccadilloes of the contemporary Jim Bakker's, Jimmy Swaggart's, Ted Haggard's and most recently, today's Jack Schapp.
It was you who tried to make it appear meaningful that when someone is buried at Arlington with full military honors it is something that by definition is meaningful.
Both my boys are Marines. Schmitz was a disgrace to the honor of the Corps and what it means to be a Marine every bit as much as was Jack Murtha.
In any event, Aggie, you have this rather nasty habit of savaging Conservatives on this website who don’t blindly support the Republican (establishment) party.
I savage the self-righteousness of third party acolytes who voted for the likes of Schmitz in '72 and who intend to repeat the same meaningless vanities with the same kinds of third party snake-oil salesmen in 2012.
Like Schmitz, your American Party guy is procreative, but unlike Schmitz he's never served as anything more than someone's political field op guy. All hat, no cattle.
I might remind you that Free Republic is not an appendage or propaganda arm of the GOP, it is a Conservative website. If you have a problem with that, this is not the website for you.
Spare the lecture. FR is not the place for the likes of you to champion serial adulterers and those who repeatedly father children conceived in illegitimacy, who at the same time try to raise funds and run political campaigns all the while calling themselves "conservatives."
I happen to have been around here substantially longer than you, and by the way you reason and write it appears that you didn't start posting here until sometime just after you tried to pass your GED for the third time.
When exposed for his adulterous affair with a student (ever wonder where his daughter Mary Kay LaTourneau got the idea to mimic daddy's behavior?...), fathering as he did not 1 but 2 children out of wedlock -- both of which he refused to support, I'll remind you again that he mocked a core set of principles he and his wife supposedly stood for "I ought to get the Right to Life man-of-the-year award for this."
He had enough staying power to father 2 little kids illegitimately, but not enough staying power to remain in office after having been exposed for having done so.
And in the end he died just a two-bit candy bar kiosk peddler.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't his illegitimate children that he had entirely abandoned from birth that petitioned for his interment at Arlington.
