http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1944
Voted for President Roosevelt once again to win the war abroad and continue the New Deal at home.
Roosevelt. I would have voted against in 1936 and 1940, but by 1944 I’m going with the steady wartime leader.
No qualms with having the same guy running the government for 16 years, huh? Ok that’s cool. True Americans.
Of course I’d vote for FDR. In my opinion, there have been three irreplaceable presidents: Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. Eliminate any of them, and the US is in a much worse place to this day.
True-er Americans don’t poison wells.
I voted FDR, but I do like this quote from Dewey:
“we have in our party some fine, high-minded patriotic people who honestly oppose farm price supports, unemployment insurance, old age benefits, slum clearance, and other social programs…these people believe in a laissez-faire society and look back wistfully to the miscalled ‘good old days’ of the nineteenth century…if such efforts to turn back the clock are actually pursued, you can bury the Republican Party as the deadest pigeon in the country.”
My main concern would have been Roosevelt’s health and Truman as an unknown quality. But I think Roosevelt’s poor health was mostly in the rumor stage to the average voter so I probably would have assumed it wasn’t as bad as the rumors said and voted for him.
While the specifics don’t really apply to 2014, this applies to anyone who longs for the good old days. And it’s not just limited to Republicans. Democrats who wistfully remember 70% tax rates might as well get a shovel and bury their political careers now. As should any politician of either party who believes the economy can be centrally controlled in terms of prices, wages, and production, as was the norm when Dewey ran for President.
This is No Ordinary Time and No Ordinary POTUS.
No Ordinary Time, but quite the ordinary POTUS. Well, that’s not fair to someone who led us through the Great Depression and WWII, but what I mean is that he was ordinary in terms of being a typical dishonest politician rather than a transcendant figure like George Washington. And even Washington didn’t run for a third term despite the young country facing challenges that could have destroyed it(no sooner did he leave office than Adams almost ended up in what would have been a disastrous war with France).
While I would have preferred FDR in 1944, Dewey would have ably led us through the end of the war at least as well as Truman did. There are no crises this country has ever faced that require a President-for-life.
Washington was a general first and last. FDR was much, much more of a “transcendent figure.”
FDR is old and tired. Four terms is too much for any man. I vote Dewey this time. He was a crimefighting prosecutor in New York and is a centrist Republican who, by January 1945 when he will take office, is just as capable of winning the war as FDR.
Disagree. Washington resigned as general of the Continental Army even though there were those who would have made him a king. He presided over the Constitutional Convention. He served as President for two terms and, again, relinquished power when many wanted him to stay on. He practically invented the Presidency, avoided war with both Great Britain and France, adroitly maintained U.S. neutrality, established the fledgling Federal government, appointed the entire Federal judiciary, put down the Whiskey Rebellion and backed Hamilton’s economic policies, leading to a boom.
Since I fall back on popularity a lot, I’ll have to give you that one. FDR was easily elected to four terms, so the public believed in him.
But unlike Washington, he was actually a pretty typical politician in the way he did things. He was more LBJ than George Washington or even JFK. He was just an LBJ who had more of a clue how to manage a war. If LBJ had saved Vietnam, he’d be one of the great Presidents of our time.
Couldn’t be done. If LBJ had avoided Vietnam, he’d be one of the great Presidents of our time.
Maybe. Although it could have been done, it just would have cost more than we were willing to pay in blood and treasure. The Viet Cong was defeated in the Tet offensive and was no longer a strategic factor after that. At that point on it was the NVA’s war, and the US knows how to fight against organized armies.
Why we couldn’t keep on providing air support is beyond my understanding. Once we left, the South Vietnamese army defeated an NVA offensive with massive American air support. I guess some in Congress just wanted to be right so badly they were willing to sell out our allies.
Or perhaps they finally understood SV was not an ally worth supporting. Really, reunification under the Commies was the best way the story could have ended; which is no credit to Communism, it’s just that the SV government was even worse in terms of corruption and unpopularity, and reunification was the best thing for Vietnam, and SV never could have pulled it off, only NV could.
So was the South Korean government at the time. And Taiwan. It would have gotten better.
Agreed. Smarter, better, more widespread counterinsurgency coupled with economic aid, as pursued by JFK, might have won the war; the LBJ-style post-1965 massive conventional military buildup never could.
They needed military intervention, the NVA was massively supplied by the Soviets and China. The NVA was only content to let the Viet Cong work as long as they were doing well. Once the Viet Cong was mostly defeated, they went over to conventional warfare almost immediately.
Those were not allies worth supporting at the time either, and nobody at the time had any reasonable grounds to expect improvement.