He’s already hit one trifecta, and now Wellstone’s death is a hell of a big start for a second. I am reminded of Louis B. Mayer saying, while leaving Irving Thalberg’s funeral: “Isn’t God good to me?” I know that some will think that there will be a sympathy vote backlash, like the kind souls at the december-approved Lucianne.com:
but I am left only with sorrow, and the final, full realisation that the future in the USA is going to be much closer to what I see over here in the glorious new capitalist Russia than the society envisioned by Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, with his prescient view of The Carlyle Group:
As much as I admired Mr. Wellstone, and looked forward to the chance to vote for him again, I don’t really think this is necessarily a good thing for the Man Who Fell Up. Rural Minnesotans come from a Farmer-Labor heritage, Populist rather than left wing (as such) and rural people can be the tiniest bit stodgy. Wellstones rather unfortunate image as a leftist Jewish history professor didn’t sit that well with them, though the latest indications were that Wellstone was going to win against the vastly more telegenic Norm Coleman. Further, the latest flap about a million bucks worth of outside money coming in did not endear the Pubbies one bit. Just about anybody here could have told them that. What works elsewhere just doesn’t get it here.
Teddy Roosevelt was pretty lucky, too. Got shot in the chest, but wasn’t killed. Just put some pressure and wrapped the wound then got up and did his speech.
Man, I don’t think any president would be able to do that these days. The SS would have him in a hospital in no time flat. Kinda sad and boring, if you ask me.
Add Reagan to the Lucky List, also. Shot in the chest, and from what I’ve heard came an inch from killing him. Somehow, I think being shot by an assassin and surviving makes one a tad bit luckier than having somebody in the opposing political party die in a plane crash, but that’s just me.
Well, Teddy knew he wasn’t that badly hurt, he was shot in the speech. But he sure as hell knew that a golden political opportunity like that doesn’t come along very often.
can’t speak for your presidents but there are other world leaders who were in their time just as lucky:
Margaret Thatcher - the Prime Minister who almost single-handedly destroyed the British Welfare State would have been voted out after only 4 years if the bloody argentines hadn’t picked an election year to invade the falklands.
Similarly Churchil would NEVER have been Prime Minister if it hadn’t been for WW2.l
You guys are losing me here. TR was lucky and Reagan was too, because they were shot and survived? Wouldn’t the presidents who DIDN’T get shot be a little luckier?
Gerald Ford was really lucky, because his would-be assassin, Squeaky Fromme, was a helpless dolt.
If we’re talking about luck in the sense of outside forces making your presidency look better than it was, then I guess Kennedy was pretty lucky, because history has treated him far kinder than the people did at the time. FDR was ‘lucky’ in that WWII came along and took everyone’s attention away from the Great Depression.
Somehow, I don’t think any of these men felt particularly lucky.
George Bush may be elected again because of the war on terror, but he probably would have been elected again anyway - his popularity was pretty good before Sept. 11 2001. Not stratospheric like it was afterwards, but solid.
What do you think his workload is like, compared to Clintons? What do you think his security must be like? The man is destined to spend the next six years working his ass off, if he doesn’t get nailed by terrorists in the meantime. And if any part of the war goes seriously wrong, the man is going to come under tremendous heat.
Sure, it may allow him to make a mark on history that he otherwise wouldn’t have had, but he’s still got to do the right things, and in the meantime he’s going to go through a presidency in a pressure cooker.
Just to nit pick, Teddy Roosevelt was not President when he was shot. The date was Oct. 14, 1912. He had been out of office for four years, disliked the positions that Taft had taken, and decided to run again as a third-party candidate.
Luckiest had to be Ronald Reagan. He starts his job and the Iranian hostage situation ends that day. For some reason, people give him credit for something that happened of its own accord- the collapse of the Soviet Union. For some reason, people don’t hold it against him that the deficits in his term exceeded those of Presidents Washington through Carter combined. And as mentioned he gets shot and of course pulls through.
Unluckiest was Jimmy Carter. Only president to serve a full term without a single Supreme Court nominee. Got blamed for inflation that was driven by OPEC’s sudden rise in the price of oil. But for mechanical breakdown of helicopters, would have rescued the hostages and won re-election. And to top it off he got attacked by a mad rabbit.