I’m just under your age criteria, but remember the RR days well. The similarities are different, as Yogi used to say.
Religious Fundamentalists: RR gave lip service. GWB has lips superglued to buttocks of extreme right.
Foreign Policy: RR- invade small countries that can’t fight back. Take minimal casualties and get out. GWB- invade without an exit plan.
Taxes: RR- Give huge tax breaks to wealthy under the guise of having it trickle down to the working class. GWB- Give huge tax breaks to wealthy as spoils of war.
Scandals: RR- loose cannon Ollie North acting without president’s knowledge. GWB- loose cannon Karl Rove acting with president’s blessing.
There was a difference in how the two thought of their opponents. With Reagan, he’d always tell Tip O’Neill that it was after 5:00 and they could be jovial. Reagan seemed to genuinely like people. Bush seems to like only those that disagree with him. I don’t think Reagan would dream of having rallies with the attendees screened to include only supporters. With Bush, it’s imperative that he never hear a dissenting voice.
I was very proud to have voted against each man twice and would do so again in a heartbeat. I did not subscribe to their political agendas. But I liked Reagan as a person and dislike Bush intensely.
A 56-year-old liberal here, and I’ll say what I’ve said before: Bush makes Nixon look GOOD. Reagan’s presidency was the dress rehearsal; this presidency is the road show that’s honed its act to a killing edge.
I’m below the limits set by the OP, but I sure as hell don’t feel nostalgia for the Reagan years (I was in grad school already, fer cryin’ out loud).
I do feel a similarity between the Reagan years and the Bush years in that
1.) I can’t believe how they’re getting away with stuff
2.) I can’t believe what they’re saying – their vision of reality is not the same as mine.
3.) Some of the things administation officials are doing are outrageous. I really honestly believe that Reagan hoisted James Watt as a lightning rod to take some of the focus off more serious things in the Administration. How else to explain gratuitous and noisy hooplah over switching the direction of the bison on the Department Seal, or condemning the Beach Boys (the Beach Boys! How inoffensive can you get?). Wouldn’t surprise me if some of the Bush people’s doings were similarly motivated.
4.) You had this helpless sense of not being able to stop this obvious train wreck of administration policies you saw happening.
Some of Ronnie’s Biggest hits are coming back – Trickle-Down economics and SDI. when eagan made is March 23, 1983 speech I was appalled – I figured he must know something about weapons capability that I didn’t. Now we know what Ronnie knew then, and it didn’t warrant the “Star Wars” speech at all. Ronnie just wanted his ideology-driven expensive military boondoggle. Fortunately, we didn’t directly spent several billion on SDI. Unfortunately, Bush did get his.
I’m well above the OP’s target age range, but I certainly remember the Reagan years. I felt a mild disgust for Reagan; GWB is despicable. Reagan did have a certain charm; Bush is poisonous. Reagan might be credited with bankrupting the USSR; Bush may be credited with bankrupting the USA.
White working? Maybe we should all join the American White Working People party instead? Oh here we go again. The mandate. Election. Be more like us. Busg won by a whopping FIFTY ONE percent. For a wartime president AND an incmbent, that sucks. The only thing that saved him was his Swify buddies, and his television / radio talking heads. He won on spin and lies and smears. Maybe people see the GOP as racist, homophobic, power mad warmongering lying yahoos, because that is what they are, once you strip away the bullshit. We learned something alright. Lie. Smear. Distort facts or ignore them. Attack the peson, not the isues. Freedom. Stay the course. WMD. Yellow cake. Cash in on disasters and attacks for personal glorifcation. Chickenhawks wrapping themselves in the flag. Draft dodgers calling war heroes traitros and cowards. We were always at war with Oceania. Diebold. We learned that the People are even more ignorant and gullible than we gave them credit for. We learned tat not only does cheating and lying work, people don’t care.
Dredging up old elections is bullshit and you know it. It just poves some people are too stupid to vote.
You need to look at your own party, without prejudice, and then explain why you feel no shame for supporting them.
Good point. Bob Dole is going to be known as the guy who would have made a great president but didn’t (I also think the same about Humphrey). Dole is proof that there are Republicans of honor out there. Unfortunately, he isn’t in government anymore.
That’s all good and fine, but what in my post brings that up? My post had nothing to do with racism and yahoos. It had to do with blind loyalty. That can come about no matter what background one comes from.
Grenada. In my opinion, the quintessence of Reaganism, using a sledgehammer to boldly crush a flea. A real pity Barbara Tuchman didn’t live to write about it, she would have had such a good time!
By the way, how is that Grenada Monument coming along?
A possible ‘non-spin’ explanation is that the people who voted for Clinton placed less value on military service than Dole voters did. And more emphasis on traditional Democratic stances, like abortion rights and lower-income economic issues.
If, say, a Republican with an outstanding record on some liberal tenets (fighting poverty, civil rights, organized labor, etc.) were to lose to a Democrat with a weaker record on these issues, then I would have to wonder what voters were thinking.
But the 1996 election may have simply been a case of two candidates with largely disjoint constituencies. (In addition, there was a prosperous economy, which makes it very hard to defeat an incumbent president).
Well, what I learned was that truth doesn’t mean shit. Lies work. Slogans beat out real discussion. Smears from so called “independent groups” are acceptable. You can divert attention from your own fuckups as president by dredging up old history and distorting it. You can invoke relious heresies and pick any convenient scapegoat that happens to be handy, to be the target of your “righteous” wrath. You can wrap the most egregious bullshit up in the flag and brand any independent thought as treason. You can legalize and intitutionalize false arrest, torture, and murder (for freedom).I learned that people are more partisan and stupid than I first thought.
In short, the more disgusting and repulsive you are, the more people love you.
Clinton just liked to screw around. He didn’t piss on our laws, start wars on false pretenses, etc etc etc. He got “punished” as the result of a Republican backed Starr Chamber that was out to get him for anything they could. Nobody cared about his blowjobs until the tightyrighties glommed onto it (blowjobs aren’t illegal yet, Sunshine). His only mistake was in trying to deny it (not that it was anyone’s fucking business). If he had been smart, he should have told them to fuck off and stay out of his personal business. Want to talk about slime and disgustingness and lies? We all have plenty from Bush. Don’t go there unless you want to get deluged. Well hell, LET"S talk about sexual bad stuff. Who was it? Horsely? Apt name. A horse fucker from way back (Republican) who has the balls to judge where someone else sticks their willies. How about Bush himself? You want to bring up Ted Kennedy. Well Sunshine, Bush was known to be both a drunk and a coke head. As incoherent as he seems to be, without his handlers and Cliff notes, maybe he’s still on the juice?
The simple fact is that voters look at a candidate’s war record and say “That’s nice, so what else have you got.” They’ve been doing this for years, especially since for a long time a lot of politicians were in that bulge of WWII veterans and lots of them had creditable war records.
For instance, in 1972 two WWII veterans ran against each other. Nixon during the war supervised C-47 operations in the South Pacific as a Naval officer - and played a lot of poker, by all accounts. McGovern was a B-24 pilot, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for missions against Germany. There’s no question he had a better war record - and no question either that the voters weren’t in tune with his other positions at the time.
McGovern won one state in 1972.
The candidate with a better war record lost the Republican primary in 1980. The war hero lost to a draft avoider in 1992 and 1996. A National Guardsman won in 2000 and 2004 against Vietnam veterans, as was pointed out.
Given all of this, John Kerry’s decision to use his status as a Vietnam war hero to gain traction with the voters seems misguided. This has never been a reliable path to victory, and he should have been savvy enough to recognize this.