Bush was an idiot. Bill Clinton was a great President. I won’t say either were not cynical, they were, but not to this extent. Bush actually believed most of his BS. Clinton actually wanted to restore Americans’ faith in government the hard way: by making government work better. Obama can’t be bothered with that, and neither could LBJ. As career legislators, both seemed to consider their work done once the bill was passed and handed off to the massive bureaucracy. And if the laws were unpopular, no matter. They created loyal constituencies. In effect, the Democrats reversed political corruption: instead of buying politicians, they created the art of buying voters.
When you take it too far, it damages the cause you’re trying to pursue. Presidents like LBJ, Nixon, and GWB did tremendous damage to their brand. Obama is doing the same. His ambition was to usher in a transformative era of activist government, and he has failed completely. He even cited Reagan when talking about what kind of President he wanted to be. But it turned out that while he could speak as well as Reagan, it takes a lot more than that to be transformative.
How is that when Reagan himself raised taxes several times? I think Reagan was far less a contributor to the anti-government theology of the right than have been the right wing media. After owning talk radio for a generation, there are a lot of programmed robotic voters out there Reagan himself, if brought back to life, wouldn’t fit into the far right asylum that the Republican Party has become.
I think there’s a lot of truth to that. And a lot of the lionization of Reagan is revisionist history(but that’s true of FDR, the other transformative President, as well). Reagan as a President was mostly garbage. He succeeded despite his incompetence. Part of that could have been the very lack of cynicism that I’ve decried in Obama, GWB, Nixon, and LBJ. Reagan made it okay to like Republicans and conservatism again.
When Reagan was running for election, I believe it was a young Joe Biden who said that despite Reagan’s likeability, the Republican Party produced nothing but Nixons and Hoovers. Now we have Reagan, and Democrats simply don’t have a figure of the same stature that anyone actually lived through.
Until they produce someone Reaganesque, they can win all the elections they want, but they’ll still be playing by Reagan’s rules, just as Republicans had to play by FDR’s rules before Reagan came along.
[ol]
[li]You don’t like President Obama[/li][li]This really has little to do with the OP’s posting.[/li][/ol]
The overwhelming majority of US Presidents weren’t “transformative.” Most were simply placeholders or the people stupid enough to run for the job. At best, a handful were and their names are well-known. None of them were called “transformative” until AFTER they left office.
A wise man would withhold his judgement until history proves him right or wrong.
As you can see, Americans are more worried about big government being the primary threat than they were during the Bush years.
Also check out the Gallup poll from 2010, before the GOP had the ability to obstruct, that shows Americans liking the federal government more than only socialism.
When big business consistently does better in polls than the government, it shows that the Reagan Revolution is still very much with us.
This is due to five years (so far) of unrelenting right wing attacks against Obama and the increase in smears being shared via email, Facebook, etc. If Obama said “I like puppies”, then Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Levine, Savage, etc. would start thowing puppies into wood chippers. The Koch Brothers spend millions trying to get people to hate government, they’ve succeeded to some degree.
No one has a bigger pulpit than the President. Reagan overcame a lot of entrenched institutions’ propaganda to win that debate. Obama could as well, but he’s just not up to it.
But I agree we’re getting off topic. We got into this talking about whether LBJ would have led to Reagan, or whether it would have meant Reagan never became President.
My own opinion is that LBJ’s second term would have been irrelevant because he planted the seeds of the Reagan revolution himself. But we would have skipped over Nixon, so Reagan probably gets elected in 1976. We probably see 16 years of GOP Presidents, since his successor would have run for reelection in 1988. Then in 1992 things revert back to mostly normal with Clinton’s election.
Well, not totally normal. We probably avoid the Bushes too, since there’s no reason for 1976 Reagan to choose Bush as his VP. More likely it’s Dole, and Dole would have made a decent successor to Reagan, which means GWB doesn’t have the name recognition to dominate the GOP field in 2000. So then we get President McCain.
I think I’m liking this alternate history more and more.
With alternative histories, how far back do you want to go? If TPTB had granted Vietnam independence from France back in 1946 like they asked (Ho Chi Minh boldly plagiarized the U.S Declaration of Independence in a speech to the United Nations) there would have been no Vietnamese war. The VN were more interested in national liberation than communism anyway.
But anyway, if LBJ had won reelection in 68, I suspect there would have been a stronger U.S. post-Apollo 11 space program. LBJ was a strong supporter of an American space program even before he was VPOTUS. At least, the last three Lunar missions wouldn’t have been cancelled and maybe there’d have been a better Skylab program.
I wonder how things would have been different if they had come up with an Apollo Block III command module that was capable of landing on the ground.
Look, how are Social Security and Medicare any different in that regard? And I hope you will credit FDR and LBJ respectively with visionary status for enacting those.
I do not. They didn’t pay for their programs. They funded them on the cheap, forcing the bills to be paid later. The SS tax started out at 1%. Medicare was originally supposed to cost $9 billion over the first 10 years.
Thank God the CBO was created to prevent that kind of dishonest salesmanship. “Act now, and you pay only…”
The saving grace of the ACA is that it’s actually paid for. Which is part of why it’s less popular. In LBJ’s time, they just would have done it with minimal pay-fors and said, “OF course this will only cost $20 billion over 10 years!”
What makes you think that was dishonesty instead of an honest miscalculation?
Yes, FDR and LBJ were visionaries for founding programs no one today wants to see end, and Obama is a visionary for the ACA, and none of them did it “a drug dealer’s way.” :rolleyes:
Then again, thank God for the CBO, which put an end to that stupidity. Although I’m sure you have to admit, they had every incentive to lowball the cost of their programs.
And of course, we should assume that anything Democrats propose will be much more expensive than they claim.
The ACA does not (yet) appear to be; I’ve heard a lot of complaints about it, but not that.
“Republicans” would fit better in that sentence anyway. Remember how the Iraq War was going to pay for itself? Remember how W cut taxes at the start of a war?! :mad:
