U.S. Presidents - Cold War and New Millennium Edition

viva la revolucion, comrade

I think Shakey's a Contra

I'd add Truman to your list for sure, maybe also Ford; the doddering aside (exaggerated thanks to Chevy Chase), he seemed to be fairly comfortable with who he was.(I still remember getting my issue of Sports Illustrated with him on the cover--Jerry the college football star--right after he took office.) Psychologists might point to JFK's obsessive womanizing as betraying some deeper issues, but I look at Marilyn Monroe and I say count me in. I think we'd all agree that Nixon's way at the bottom; I don't think I'd want to cross LBJ, Carter, or Clinton, either. Bush II...beats me. Palin would be off the charts; she'd be Nixon all over again. I thought Hillary had lots of Nixon in her during the campaign, but she seems to have settled down.

I approve of this colloquial usage of the term "Nixon" ("he's okay, he's just got a little nixon in him")

HRC does have some Nixon in her, actually.

Absolutely agree--it spilled out all over the place during the campaign. (One of many examples: her own mini-version of the Southern Strategy, in her case more of a White Working Class America Beer-Drinking Strategy.) But she's stayed surprisingly low-key in her current post--I thought for sure she'd start making mischief from within, but nothing of the sort yet.

McCain had, and continues to have, a lot of Nixon in him. By all accounts, he's still really bitter about losing, and doing whatever he can to gum things up for Obama.

her presidency would have been even more nixon than her campaign, I think

McCain is a cretin.

HRC seems genuinely interested in doing something w/her job, learning, moving on. I think her cynicism was ill placed compared to the groundswell of idealism Obama's campaign generated but I wouldn't rule out her using it again. That kind of cynicism worked well for her husband.

Though I think Bill isn't as mean as she can be.

her presidency would have been even more nixon than her campaign, I think

I think you're probably right. She's acquitted herself well as SOS, but I'm still inclined to go with my initial sense of her as a president: disaster. I'm sure that's not fair, but it's a gut instinct.

HRC seems genuinely interested in doing something w/her job, learning, moving on.

This too. She really is fascinating; she was like fingernails on a blackboard to me at the start of the '08 campaign, now I'm of two minds on her.

i believe that her failures and betrayals would be roughly similiar to the ones we've seen from obama anyway... the only wildcard for me is whether she would be as adroit or standoffish (or manic in wanting to appear adroit and standoffish, if you like) in dealing with the right-wing freakout.

I think it's easy to forget how much the right-wing hated her before she temporarily became the one they hated less. she was the most evil woman in the world! and that was before there was even the idea of her maybe becoming president.

I think it would be much nastier, much more personal

it would be so much worse. right-wing more comfortable with being sexist than racist

I wonder if the right-wing freakout would have been as severe. I really don't know--would Republicans have reverted to their visceral Clinton loathing of the '90s, or would Hannity and Limbaugh and the like have been so relieved that the terrorist-loving black guy didn't win that they would have taken a step back. She seemed to earn some of their approval during the campaign, but I don't know if that was just smoke and mirrors.

average americans are too xp

absolutely smoke and mirrors. these people didn't just suddenly forget about a decade of their lives.

yup, that was one of my primary reasons for supporting obama -- the right wing has been practicing for 20 years on how to take down HRC. i really didn't want to live through that, and i doubted her administration's ability to govern through it. my reasoning seems a little pallid now, considering what we're dealing with vis a vis "the one" etc.

the tea party and birther jamboree has retained a kind of madcap incompetent quality that allows me to laugh at it enough to retain hope, if that makes sense. i still believe the psychotic reaction to a President Hillary would have been much more focused and lethal. it's shitty to think that way i guess, but there it is.

xp he seemed to earn some of their approval during the campaign, but I don't know if that was just smoke and mirrors

these people have the memory of a goldfish and motivation of a venus flytrap. they'll turn on a dime as soon as they have to, and the primaries would be forgotten instantly.

There is no reason to believe Limbaugh and what is now the tea party would have given HRC a break. None.

and considering how she responded to attacks when she was First Lady and during the campaign, I'm sure we would've been in for an ugly four years.

I basically agree with all that you say--just thinking aloud. I'd listen to Hannity during the campaign, and it was insanely funny. He started with the "Stop Hillary Express," smoothly transitioned to the "Stop Obama Express," took credit for the first working, tried at the same time to prop up her candicacy so that the second would work...it all got very confusing. Trains were pulling in and out the station left and right.

amazed me was how quickly her 'down to earth folksy moderate' character was bought by the public. I guess because you had her campaign + the right wing machine going at the same time.

jesus 08 was tiring. washington media bods who wish it was election year every year need to check theirselfs.

"You know, my dad took me out behind the cottage that my grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton and taught be how to shoot when I was a little girl," she said. "You know, some people now continue to teach their children and their grandchildren. It's part of culture. It's part of a way of life. People enjoy hunting and shooting because it's an important part of who they are. Not because they are bitter."

Who can forget that? Priceless!

Nixon?

jesus 08 was tiring.

Was it ever, even for someone in Canada. But you know what? If Palin ever did get the nomination, I think '08 would be barely a ripple.

I would buy tickets to that event

not enough talk about reagan w/r/t economics, more important than anything else he did other than, I guess, his noble decision not to nuke russia. tax cuts were one of the greatest poor->rich wealth transfers in history, fucked the deficit in the long-term, created millions of mini-reagans - like, his effect on the GOP and american economic-thinking is probably as bad the actual things he did.

war on drugs, war on unions, so many ways he fucked millions and millions of people the middle and lower classes in ways that are easily felt ~3 decades later.

carter/ford/jfk types might have been worthless, but impossible to say that they damaged the country like he did in the long-term - even nixon didn't come close. don't care about the history professor 'but did he accomplish his goals?' perspective - other than dubya, he's the worst one here, absoultely, no question imo. could argue he was worse than dubya too.

― iatee, Thursday, August 5, 2010 9:37 AM Bookmark

Cannot OTM this enough. Anyone with even slight progressive sympathies getting misty-eyed over Reagan needs a reality check - guy gutted progressive programs going back to the New Deal which everybody here, I think, is fairly giving Eisenhower, Johnson, and even Nixon credit for preserving and in the latter two cases aggressively expanding. Even setting aside the tax cuts, just the savage assault on the EPA and the SEC in the Reagan years has wound us up with things like the 2008 crash and the Deepwater Horizon spill. I'm an amateur in these matters but my sense is that neither of those things would have been possible in the regulatory environment under Nixon. We can blame Bush II more immediately but the map was redrawn by Reagan in a way that nobody has been able to reverse.

Picking a winner is pretty hard though. Shrewd move to begin right after FDR who would probably win handily if given the chance to compete. Even his most heinous negatives (Japanese internment I think is the worst thing that can be confirmed as a policy of his administration) go nowhere near the stuff Truman and Johnson have against them. Johnson without Vietnam would win this bracket easily. Clinton probably "least bad," although it's hard to work up a lot of enthusiasm given free trade, DOMA, "welfare reform" and all the other capitulations to Reaganism.

Whatever the black helicopters/anti-UN crew thinks now, Bush Sr., and Baker were magisterial in putting together the Gulf War UN coalition, suppressing the Israeli (Shamir's) determination to always repond to attacks and defending limited goals in that war (contra Shakey, I still think he was right and that it didn't necessarily lead to the 2003 confrontation).

while the gulf war didn't make the iraq war inevitable by any means, it's hard to imagine the later war happening without the example of the first one. americans hadn't been that enthusiastic about foreign meddling since the fall of saigon (leaving aside a few isolated moments like granada), and the gulf intervention -- a seemingly easy, straightforward, morally unambiguous affair -- gave them a reason to feel good about the whole war thing again. (as poppy put it himself, "we've kicked the vietnam syndrome once and for all.") even if you think the intervention was justified, it's hard to ignore the bad effect it's had.

plus, it gave us "voices that care," still my vote for the single worst record of all time.

as far as military types go, this dude seems allright

whoops wrong thread

plus, it gave us "voices that care," still my vote for the single worst record of all time.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, August 6, 2010 4:40 PM Bookmark

I always associated it with "God Bless the USA" but it turns out that was an '84 campaign song that just got a renewed boost from Desert Storm. Huh.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

hrm. was about to stress the importance of JFK and Reagan slashing the top federal income tax bracket but, apparently, it doesn't matter much.

LBJ yall

yeahh I don't think that Hauser's Law thing is taken very seriously

"Fuck the lot of them."

plz do a Mafia don poll next

:D

i think that i voted for LBJ (very reluctantly as did Alfred) largely b/c IMHO the good that he had a hand in (Civil Rights and Voting Acts, the War on Poverty, his genuine commitment to making America more tolerable for the less fortunate, and his relentless sticking-it to his opponents) was so strong that i am almost willing to forgive Vietnam (and his relentless sticking-it to his opponents and corruption). then again, i live in NJ so my toleration of corruption may be higher than others.

i mean, Vietnam was a tar-baby that would have brought just about any President down. i am not one of those who believed that JFK would've ended it, or even avoided LBJ's mistakes.

right, not sure any of these dudes would have, if they were then and there

But Oliver Stone said Kennedy was just about to get out in JFK. Oliver Stone never embellishes!

back in the day, they used to call Reagan and Reaganism "friendly fascism" for a reason. i see it as a lesson that just because a politician is "likeable" as an individual (and Reagan WAS kind of likeable in a doddering grandpa sort of way) doesn't mean that you should vote for him/her or support what he/she would do if elected.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

George W. Bush 3

joek? weird lurkers?

surprised HW didn't get anything too

not surprised that LBJ and Ike did as well as they did. i would've thought that Truman and Papa Bush would've gotten more votes, though.

Nixon would be thrilled that he pulled off a tie with the great bete noire of his life, JFK. As to how, I have no idea--"wow" to both totals.