Maybe he should have been President in 2000… but the John McCain who was running in 2008 was a very different one from the one who was running in 2000. The 2008 McCain earned his loss fair and square.
Which one, though? I am not sure the 1970s “Governor Moonbeam” was capable of running the country any better than Carter.
The one who pulled a Sully with California a few years back? You bet yer ass.
I believe his decision not to contest the outcome of the election was due to his knowledge he’d lose such a contest. Were there improprieties in the Democratic vote count? Probably. But there were also improprieties in the Republican vote count. Nixon knew any challenge he made would be matched by a Kennedy counter-challenge and he knew that at the end of any legal battle he’d end up losing the election anyway.
Absolutely. I’ve heard a variety of anecdotes about the night, both favorable and unfavorable to Nixon. I don’t know if any of them can be taken at face value, but all of them agree that he had lost and had no chance of success if he challenged the results. He used the ‘good of the country’ excuse another time later in his career and clearly had only his own interests in mind.
2000 McCain, or at least who I think he was at the time, would have been a great leader after 9/11, through Katrina.
He was his own worst enemy in 2008 picking Palin.
I wonder if we’d be having the health care meltdown now if Dole had won in 1996, since ACA is not too far from his ideas. If he had implemented it, it’d be harder for current Rs to destroy a popular plan from their own party.
One and the same.
I’ve always heard good things about Adlai Stevenson. Surprised no one’s mentioned him yet.
As far as William Jennings Bryan, I’m not on board with him. But most of what I know about him was from accounts of the Scopes Monkey Trial and I was less than impressed. I don’t have any problem with bimetalism as an economic policy, but I thought he just came out a decidedly distant second best against Clarence Darrow. Maybe Darrow would be a better president that we never had.
It is quite possible that a fair count would have Nixon winning in Illinois. A lot of gravestones voted in Chicago. But I also suspect Republican irregularities elsewhere and I think Nixon knew it. My mother felt that Nixon should not have been allowed to walk down the street without ringing a bell and saying “Unclean, unclean”.
I don’t know what Tilden’s policies were, but he was a Democrat and the Dems were dominated by the southern states in those days and I doubt reconstruction would have survived any better under him.
What I have read on Brian and evolution is that he believed that it necessarily implied social Darwinism and he objected strongly to that. It doesn’t. At any rate, he was an old man by the time of the Scopes trial, which he wasn’t in 1896.
Yes, Stevenson would not have sent “advisors” to try to help the French hang on to Viet Nam. I think Ike was blindsided by Dull-ass on that one. I think he would have made a great president.
Garner was FDR’s VP for two terms, then Wallace, then Truman.
I think McCain did himself in by choosing Palin. I could not trust his judgment after that.
Huey Long??? Really. I have the distinct impression that he had dictatorial tendencies. He is supposedly the model for Sinclair Lewis’s It can’t happen here, which I read last summer. And what do you mean, he would have confronted Hitler. FDR would have too, had the country been less isolationist. He did what he could to prepare for war and it sufficed.
A couple of founders: Franklin and Hamilton would have been interesting.
Franklin would have died in his first year in office.
John Kerry winning in 2004 would have prevented some things:
No Obama run in 2008, which would be good. Obama was not ready to lead the party in 2008.
The white nationalist element of the TEA Party wouldn’t be so strong, and 2010 might not have been a GOP rout.
Probably a rather different State Department from Hillary’s, and possibly avoiding committing to an unauthorized and illegal war in Libya.
The crash probably still would have happened. For the sake of argument, let’s say either McCain or Romney would have won in’08. That would give Ted Cruz & Mitch McConnell less opportunity to play games in the Senate.
Kerry winning in 2004 would have been disastrous for the Democratic party. He was never decisive or courageous enough to be the guy to take away the punchbowl, so the crash would have still happened on his watch, plus Iraq would have completely disentegrated. He could blame it on Bush all he wanted, but the fact would have been that Bush had only run the beginning and things didn’t start to really go downhill until Kerry. Kerry also would have largely inherited Bush’s FEMA, and it’s unlikely he’d have turned it around, or even made it a priority, so Katrina goes down pretty much the same way for Kerry.
… with 30 years of seasoning.
Point taken.
I recall a Dukakis interview where he blames himself for much of what happened after 2000: “If I had beaten the father, you never would have heard of the son.”
Henry Wallace in 1948!
And I second the nomination of workers’ candidate Eugene Debs for 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920.
Bill Bradley.
Henry Clay had the political skills and personal temperament to be a good President, but it was not to be.
Samuel Tilden would’ve been about as good as Rutherford Hayes, and really ought to have won, had it not been for the corrupt bargains struck in late 1876.
Eugene V. Debs was a man far ahead of his time politically, but was an ideological purist and probably would’ve been able to get almost nothing done as President.
Huey Long was a corrupt, authoritarian demagogue. He would have been a disaster, or dangerous, or both, in the White House.
Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy both had the potential to be good or near-great Presidents, I think.
I worked on the Dukakis national field staff for a year, and think he was a better person than GHWB (I still haven’t forgiven Bush the Elder for building his low-road campaign around the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU, Willie Horton, etc.). But Dukakis would certainly have raised taxes just as Bush did to address the huge Reagan deficits; would not have been as good as Bush in rallying international support for liberating Kuwait (assuming Saddam still invaded); and would have probably inherited the same recession going into the 1992 election. Dukakis might have been a one-termer and the last Democrat in the WH for quite awhile. No President Bill Clinton, at least not in 1992 or maybe even 1996. I hate to say it, but on balance, it might’ve been for the best that Dukakis lost in 1988.
Agreed. I could see myself voting for McCain in 2000; by 2008 he had lurched too far to the right, and the Palin pick was unforgivable.
Time to put the legend to rest that Nixon didn’t challenge the results of the 1960 election. More accurately, he personally didn’t challenge the results, but many other top GOP officials did, and he did nothing to stop them.
http://www.alternet.org/story/10100/like_gore,_nixon_wanted_recounts_in_1960
Stevenson becomes President in an alternative 1952 election in C.J. Sansom’s thriller Dominion, and takes a more aggressive line against the still-extant Nazi regime than his predecessor, Robert A. Taft.
Bryan was a pacifist and Christian fundamentalist. Just not sure he would’ve been a good President.
I’m tempted to start a thread about “The Worst Presidents Who Never Were”; but maybe that discussion could just go here.
What would a Spiro Agnew presidency have been like, if he hadn’t resigned before Nixon?
Agnew wasn’t the sharpest blade in the drawer and was obviously a crook (hence his resignation). He would’ve made Ford look like a great statesman, had he taken office upon Nixon’s resignation, and might’ve lost the 1976 election - assuming he ran for the Presidency in his own right - even worse than Ford did.
The most important macro thing in Bush v 1.0’s term was the collapse of communism and the end of the Soviet Union. And he dealt with it with a deftness which belied how tricky and difficult it was and how very very badly it could have gone.
Would Dukakis have the skill, experience and standing to do the same? Would he have been able to stand up to Thatcher and Mitterrand’s opposition to German reunification?