Well, I guess the left needs Clinton, given that Clinton is the only successful Democratic President since Kennedy.
If you say so. Though that still gives them one more successful president than the Republicans in that time.
Reagan counts as successful, in the way that matters for now, politically. Reagan and Clinton are the only post-Kennedy Presidents to have approval ratings of 60+% when leaving office and maintain high favorability today.
Now my predictions get a lot of derision here, although I can’t imagine why, but does anyone think Obama will leave office with an approval rating of even 50%, much less 60%?
I predict 47%. He’ll manage to muddle through another four years without any major screwups or any real success.
Reagan is so successful that his party would denounce him as a liberal RINO if he ran today.
Current Republicans are in love with the idea of Reagan, not the actual man. I think he loses a few points in the successful category if his party hates what he stood for.
Republicans try to wear the mantle of Reagan. Democrats not only don’t do that with Clinton, but they had a chance to send the Clintons back to the White House and rejected the opportunity. I’d say the Democrats have moved farther from Clinton than the Republicans have from Reagan.
The Republicans have moved very far from Reagan - they just think they haven’t because they’ve forgotten what Reagan was like.
Well, I was alive then and I remember that he was satan to Democrats and they said exactly the same things about him that they say about Republicans now.
Now of course on economic issues, Republicans have moved right since Reagan. But on the flipside, they’ve moved left on social issues. The Democrats are the same, more right than before on economic issues, more left than before on social issues.
That’s because the trend is always towards more freedom in every sphere. Those who want to limit freedom will always lose in the long run.
I just hope nobody called him a Muslim communist Nazi antiChrist, because that would just be excessive.
Remind me again how the Democrats filibustered everything Reagan did, and how sitting Dems called for impeachment…
I can’t seem to recall that far back.
Nevertheless, Democrats’ current concessions that Reagan wasn’t so bad compared to modern Republicans is belied by the fact that Democratic rhetoric towards Republicans hasn’t changed since the 1960s.
It’s not belied by that fact, it’s just that democrats back then had no fucking idea how looney the republicans could become. Yeah, Reagan was a pretty awful guy as he played his fiddle while AIDS whiped out unknown numbers of Americans… but compared to the republicans of today, Reagan is quite, QUITE liberal.
As someone else said in the pit, who knew back in the 80’s that democrats would some day be looking back at the halcyon days of Reagan and wishing modern republicans could be more like THAT. It’s sad. It’s a testament to how terrible republicans have become. Not a testament to how democrats have always been nasty and terrible people.
I’m not sure how Reagan is more liberal. Yes, he agreed to tax increases, in exchange for spending cuts, but Democrats went back on their word on spending cuts and so now Republicans don’t trust them. Yes, he agreed to immigration reform, but Democrats went back on their word on that too and so Republicans don’t trust them. Is there anything else?
Whoa, there, buddy. I had to cover that campaign and I recall it a bit differently. The Gore campaign, up until the last month, had an enormously split personality on Clinton and how they wanted Gore to be associated with him. While at times working closely with him there was a strong aura of ‘we don’t want people to think we’re HIM’.
At one point, Clinton said in an interview that a Gore presidency would be the closest thing to a third Clinton term and his campaign managers contacted the press to denounce it!
Closer to the end, say Sept/Oct 2000, the press corps got a change in message about how close to Clinton Gore was and how much they admired his policies and such. I would guess they realized how close the election was going to be and that Clinton’s personal scandals weren’t actually having any impact on his approval rating.
Distancing himself from Clinton for the first two thirds or more of the 2000 campaign was an enormous mistake for Gore and one that likely cost him the election.
Adding: Oh, and I agree that, in this scenario…
- Hilary files to run.
- Clerks across the nation screw up and enter Bill instead of Hill on the ballot.
- The SCOTUS says, “Fuck it, let him run. It’ll be entertaining.”
Clinton would have a good chance of winning NOW, much less back in 2000, 2004 or 2008. I have, simply, never seen anyone better able to campaign or communicate than WJC. Reagan had the same charisma and ability to connect, but didn’t have the off-the-cuff ability to bring that charisma to bear on policy that Clinton had. We were (and are) in the presence of greatness there. The perfect American-style campaign animal.
He was also great at governance. Unlike many Presidents, he took his core job seriously and didn’t just leave it to underlings. Elizabeth Drew reported that he and Hillary would be up till 3am talking about the most arcane policy matters. They believed in activist government, but also understood that the public won’t believe in it unless it actually works. So they shrank it, made it leaner, made it more efficient. They took what they learned in Arkansas and brought it to DC.
Reagan, Bush and Obama, by contrast, never seemed particularly concerned about doing anything other than being President, making speeches, basking in the glow of power.
Hmm. Depends on what you mean. You’re correct that Clinton truly understood what he wanted to accomplish and was interested in how the whole thing worked. That’s part of his charm…he genuinely enjoyed the entirety of the process and it showed.
As for Bush, I’ll disagree with you if you’re meaning the first Bush. I’ve said this before but there’s a strong case to be made that GHWB was the most competent president since Ike. Smart and realist, Bush I knew both what he wanted to accomplish and what was realistic. When encouraged to drive to Baghdad in GWI, he knew what it would lead to and backed off. When taxes needed to be raised to maintain the budget he thought was necessary he did so.
There is a lot to be said for an experience, competent governing person in the presidency. Had Bush I had the communications skills that Reagan had he might have gone down as one of the all time greats.
Bush 41 was extremely competent at conducting foreign policy, but he was disinterested in domestic policy. Another one of the things I admired about Clinton is that he beat his opponents using positive, honest messages. He didn’t resort to the smears. His critique of Bush was spot on. Whereas the Democratic critiques of his son were often strident and hyperbolic. It’s not that they were wrong about GWB so much as they turned the stridency up to 11 and actually hit him on some things that weren’t a problem, such as his ability to see the world in black and white. THe Democrats and liberal critics thought they were so intellectually superior during that period, and watching old episodes of the Daily Show, at least for me, really makes me laugh at how childishly they held to their notions of superiority.
Of course Bush shouldn’t have been so stubborn and not everything is black and white, but those were the things the public actually liked about him. He stuck to his guns and he was the Decider.
In retrospect, I kinda see Bush41 as a proto-Tea Party victim. For some reason he felt compelled to make bold statements that would get a lot of cheers in the short term, but then would bite him in the ass when reality got involved.
Tea Partiers don’t like reality. They’d outlaw it if they could.
That’s an ability? Strange that it doesn’t come up in a lot of superhero origin stories.
Yeah, I used a bad term there.
That whole sentence needs to be factory-recalled.