the angry people

Obama was much criticized for referring to some people as bitter and as clinging to their church and guns, but now it has become official: there are angry people out there and they have a right to be angry (J.McC. in the last debate). This did not make me feel better for much of his campaigning, by succesfully focusing the anger of his audience on his opponent, made me pretty upset. There is negative campaigning, for ex. one could say that while JMcC opposed Bush on torture he sat for a foto-op with Bush after B. signed the so-called anti-torture bill to which he had attached a "signing statement" that reserved his right to suspend the law in cases he deemed appropriate. And then there is negative campaigning that becomes character assassination, and not just by inuendo. Think of my surprise when Colin Powell made some very thoughtful remarks rejecting that type of campagning (10-19-08).

At the time of Watergate, I discussed with some interested students how an apparently humorous and trivial prank in a political campaign could become more serious and gradually, with each campaign, develop into a sorth of one-upmanship strategy to beat the opponent. The then Attorney General justified Watergate etc. with the phrase "Think of what the alternative was" to Nixon. Or as my mother was wont to say: "If you want to beat a dog, you can always find a stick." It reminded me of the biblical warning that the sins of the father are visited on the children of the 3d and 4th generation (Number 14,19; Det. 5,9) when every 4 years is a generation.

The idea in the following QUESTION isn't new. I picked it up in my High School history class when we examined the use of war to sustain the French Revolutionary government and its excesses after 1789. Then too enemies made war seem necessary for survival, not of France, but of the government.

My question:

Could it be that the Cheney-Rove policy of creating a permanent Republican majority (perhaps the 2008 election will show the strategy failed) made the "permanent war against terror and an invisible enemy," the justification for creating an imperial Presidency (a term used to describe the Nixon administration when Cheyney received his training)?