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I don’t see how. JFK ran because it was His Time (you can be sure he had a strong sense of his own destiny), not because of anything happening or not happening in Vietnam.
JFK ran because:
[ol]
[li]He father had wanted his older brother Joe Jr. to be President but he died during WWII.[/li][li]The Democratic party knew that a Southerner couldn’t win and they didn’t have a wide selection of potential candidates who were both nationally known and NOT Southerners.[/li][/ol]
Nixon had the “Ike bump" and almost rode that into the White House had he won Illinois. He barely lost it and thus barely lost the election.
As for Vietnam: Had Ho Chi Minh been allowed to take over Indochina it would have had ripple effects throughout the West. Presuming that no war would have occurred (which seems to have been the direction that this thread is going) is simply ludicrous if for no other reason that a communist Vietnam could have been viewed a stepping stone to a communist Philippines, Thailand,Malaysia and perhaps even Indonesia.
All of those nations had weak and corrupt governments so they were ripe for communist infiltration. Indonesia fought a civil war about that in the mid 1960s (actually it was more a slaughter of Communists) sand the PI has had a communist insurgency on its far southern islands for nearly 50 years.
None of the above would have set well with the areas former colonial masters ( The US included) as so it wouldn’t have been allowed. The war Vietnam was always going to occur. Its intensity and how it was fought are the only matters which can be debated.
How does any of that help Nixon win in 1960? Seems if there were any public perception Ike had flubbed the 'Nam situation, that would have cost Nixon votes.
Lemme see. Nixon appointed Arthur Burns as head of the Fed because he was more compliant than his predecessor, William Martin, who believed himself to be a creature of Congress. High budget deficits, loose monetary policy and the 1973 oil embargo gave us high inflation during the the 1970s. If Johnson hadn’t fought Vietnam, we would have only had 1 of the 3.
I’m guessing that a Democrat would have been re-elected in 1972. In 1974 the Dems would have lost seats in the House due to the normal patterns plus the downturn associated with the oil shock. So 1976 would have been a promising year for the Republicans - though not if the economy was roaring back. So… would Reagan have been nominated in 1976? I’m guessing not. We could have had somebody like GHW Bush running the show from 1976-1984.
Would the 1980 recession have occurred, leading to a flip in the party in power? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been as deep: the 1980 recession was triggered by the appointment of Paul Volker, who sharply increased rates starting in October 1979. Volker was appointed to reverse the overly loose monetary policy of previous Fed chairmen and to bring down inflation. That’s a recipe for abrupt recession.
Regardless of who was in office, I don’t see a setup for the 1984 Reagan-Mondale blowout. Controlling for incumbency and the economy, Mondale didn’t do too badly. But Democratic insiders interpreted the returns as a repudiation of the New Deal coalition. So Democratic centrists rose to power (eg Clinton) and leftie loons were marginalized to an increasing extent. Put it all together and LBJ’s adventure in Vietnam led to today’s huge crazy gap. Without Vietnam we’d have more leftie lunatics and fewer Republican ones. The underlying mechanism is monetary policy.
The impetus for the adoption of the US system of Presidential primaries was the chaotic 1968 Democratic convention, itself a result of the Vietnam War. Take that away and there’s no McGovern–Fraser Commission and we don’t have the unintended consequence of a huge surge in state level primaries and the weakening of the party system.
Keep the party system in place and amateurs like Jimmy Carter don’t get nominated.
There were also ongoing tensions over Taiwan that could have easily gotten hotter. And the Chinese and the Soviets fought several shooting battles in 1969.
Kennedy would have won even if Illinois’ electoral votes had gone to Nixon.
No state governor is an “amateur.” I wouldn’t even call Sarah Palin that.
Well, I don’t know about that. The Reagan Revolution, and the whole pre- and post-Reagan conservative movement, was/is a reaction to cultural/social changes, not to economic conditions. I don’t see how a stronger economy could have prevented it.
Take away the Vietnam War and LBJ/Humphrey win easily in 1968. With no war to drive up government spending, the deficit never spirals upward. Johnson possibly dies in office, though the reduced stress of not having Vietnam weigh on his ming, he may not have. But let’s assume he does die. The 1972 Democratic fight for the nomination may have come down to RFK and HHH. I have to give the edge to Bobby, based on his charisma. Who would he have run against? Possibly Rockefeller. So in 1972 I have Kennedy beating Rockefeller. Then by 1976, without Gerald Ford inheriting the White House from Nixon, Republicans go far right and nominate Reagan. He gets squashed by Kennedy. No Reagan Revolution. We still get the oil embargo but the resultant inflation is mitigated by no Vietnam war debt. Beyond that it gets kind of fuzzy as you don’t know who was sitting on the benches of both parties and who could have run for president.
I think it’s quite conceivable that there would have been no Republican presidents since Eisenhower, no Republican Supreme Court nominees, and we’d be celebrating 50+ years of peace and prosperity.
See post #29.
I disagree. Carter made Reagan possible. I’m a big Carter fan and he was an outstanding president, but Reagan only got into office because he was able to say “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”. That plus the sorry state of the electorate.
There was more to it than that. Reagan didn’t ride into office just on Carter’s failures alone, he ran on an explicitly anti-government message that resonated thanks to the Great Society, ever increasing taxes(and the slick ways Democrats increased your taxes by not indexing them, so they could raise your taxes without ever having to vote to raise your taxes), government inefficiency which Democrats had become insouciant about, fraud which they didn’t care about, and weakness on national security issues, either through incompetence(LBJ), or naivete(Carter).
Reagan’s Presidency was transformative, and you don’t get transformative Presidencies out of merely kicking a poor candidate when he’s down. Reagan’s message was much larger than that. Now Obama, there’s a guy who squandered his chance. He beat down the Bush years, and never suggested a vision for governing to replace the status quo. His job was to restore Americans’ faith in activist government. He’s done more damage to the idea of activist government than Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater could have done while trying.
That is a vision for governing. One fruit of it is the ACA, which is going to win Dems a lot more votes than it loses them this November.
We’ll never know.
Had the electoral votes wasted on Harry Byrd gone to Nixon along with Illinois, it would have likely meant that Kennedy would have won the electoral college but lost the popular vote. Since we all know how elections like that go, it’s conceivable that Nixon could have squeaked out a win.
What is certain is that Johnson may not have been on the Kennedy ticket in 1964. He was never popular in the Kennedy White House and it is possible that Kennedy would have asked him to step aside. That would mean no Johnson Presidency.
Or…given Johnson’s health, it is possible that this could have prevented him from running as VP again if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated. Or if the scandal involving Bobby Baker had been more thoroughly investigated, the possibility that Johnson may have been asked to resign would have been present.
Or the scandal involving Abe Fortas had erupted sooner under a Johnson presidency and ensnared the former President things could have forced Johnson to resign.
This is why it is difficult to predict what might have happened as the disparate elements of history combine to make events occur as they did. Remove any one and it’s possible that things would have gone radically different than they did.
He passed ACA. If he’d done his job right, then the public would have supported ACA from the start.
What he did was the drug dealer’s way, not the visionary’s way. Get people addicted to it. He talked hope, but he’s really the most cynical politician we’ve ever had in the White House, at least since LBJ. And those types do damage the activist government brand, as we are seeing. Americans’ faith in government has decreased during the Obama years. And you can’t blame that on Republicans, because during the Clinton years Americans’ faith in government increased despite Republicans being just as much out to get him as they are Obama.
I think you grossly overrate Reagan, as does anyone who does not consider him a colossal failure. While I wish Obama had handled his presidency much differently, in all fairness to him he’s the first president in history whose opposition party met on Inauguration night and vowed to try to kill his presidency in the crib.
Let me guess: You don’t like President Obama?
How and why is he any more “cynical” than G.W. Bush who engaged the US in two lengthy conflicts that we can neither afford nor have which brought us any greater measure of security? Or Bill Clinton, who squandered “Pax Americana” on a series of failed foreign policy initiatives and gutted the American economy with his support of NAFTA?
Or Bush Sr. who led the US into three wars (Panama,Iraq and Somalia) none of which truly benefited the US and one of which (Gulf War II) led to the US reinstalling a monarchy back on its throne. Or Ronald Reagan who talked a big game but then punked out after the Beirut bombings and KAL 007, and then sold arms to the Iranians (who he also insisted upon fighting a low intensity conflict with at the time)
Cynicism is a cornerstone of the political process.People who fail to realize that, fail to comprehend politics beyond its surface.
But I’m not sure what this has to do with the original post…
Clinton faced the same challenges. As for Reagan, he was transformative in the sense that he changed the debate. From 1933-1980, activist government was ascendant. Since Reagan took office, Americans are skeptical of government. Taxes are now as much a third rail as Social Security is: moreso, since there’s bipartisan talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare, but no one proposes to raise middle class taxes.
Passing ACA was something the Democrats could do because they won an election in which the public was massively dissastisfied with GWB and it gave them a fleeting big majority. They knew they’d lose it and acted like they knew they’d lose it from day 1. Wouldn’t have been something they’d have worried about before Reagan.
In fact, we do know. Kennedy would have won 276-261. It’s long past time for this hoary old shibboleth to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart.