Ike
Harry S Truman, for not having a full middle name.
Please tell me you have a better reason for voting against him here. :rolleyes:
Morning vote count:
Polk 11
Truman 6
Eisenhower 4
Looks like we’ll have an epic Greatest Generation throwdown next round.
Oh, I do. I disagree with the decision to bomb Japan.
Are you speaking of specifically the A-bombs, or bombing in general?
The 10 March 1945 raid against Tokyo is estimated to have killed 100,000 using “conventional” bombs, and this raid was not an isolated incident. The “meaning” of Hiroshima was not that U.S.A. could destroy Japan – it was already doing that – but that it could destroy Japan with relatively little expense or risk of American life.
You might argue that the fire bombings were themselves immoral, but to accept them while condemning the A-bombs is absurd: the A-bombs certainly saved lives.
One can play the “What if” game about Japanese surrender plans (without the A-bombs, Japan might have ended up divided like Germany), but the fact is that even after Hiroshima (but before Nagasaki), many Japanese commanders opposed surrender, even knowing that defeat was inevitable. In their peculiar Samurai mentality, the suicidal death of the Japanese nation would be a “beautiful poem”!
The A-bomb decision has been debated over and over, but there’s one key point I’ve never seen mentioned: Atomic weapons would surely have been used in anger at least once – if not in WWII, then in Korea or Europe. Why? No mid-ocean demonstration would ever be as convincing as real military application. Seeing is believing.
I don’t support bombings that kill civilians indiscriminately. Obviously any bombing of military targets will cause some unavoidable civilian deaths, that’s just one of the cruelties of war. I disagree with the A bomb decision because I believe the Japanese would have surrendered without the bombs or the invasion and indeed Japan was trying to broker a surrender through the USSR. They were driven back to their homeland, it seems to me that a test drop on an unpopulated area would have made the same point as dropping a bomb on a city.
Polk
Vote count:
Polk 12
Truman 6
Eisenhower 4
James K. Polk, Napoleon of the Stump, has stumped for his last election.
George Washington (None, 1789-1797)
Abraham Lincoln (Republican, 1861-1865)
Theodore Roosevelt (Republican, 1901-1909)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Democrat, 1933-1945)
Harry S. Truman (Democrat, 1945-1953)
Dwight Eisenhower (Republican, 1953-1961)
Eliminated Presidents:
- James Buchanan (Democrat, 1857-1861)
- Franklin Pierce (Democrat, 1853-1857)
- Andrew Johnson (National Union, 1865-1869)
- Warren Harding (Republican, 1921-1923)
- Millard Fillmore (Whig, 1850-1853)
- Richard Milhous Nixon (Republican, 1969-1974)
- Herbert Hoover (Republican, 1929-1933)
- Ronald Reagan (Republican, 1981-1989)
- Andrew Jackson (Democrat, 1829-1837)
- Rutherford Hayes (Republican, 1877-1881)
- Ulysses Grant (Republican, 1869-1877)
- John Tyler (Whig, 1841-1845)
- James Earl Carter (Democrat, 1977-1981)
- James Madison (Democratic-Republican, 1809-1817)
- Martin Van Buren (Democrat, 1837-1841)
- Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-1921)
- Calvin Coolidge (Republican, 1923-1929)
- John Adams (Federalist, 1797-1801)
- Benjamin Harrison (Republican, 1889-1893)
- Gerald Ford (Republican, 1974-1977)
- Zachary Taylor (Whig, 1849-1850)
- George Herbert Walker Bush (Republican, 1989-1993)
- John Quincy Adams (Democratic-Republican, 1825-1829)
- Chester Arthur (Republican, 1881-1885)
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Democrat, 1961-1963)
- William McKinley (Republican, 1897-1901)
- William Howard Taft (Republican, 1909-1913)
- Lyndon Baines Johnson (Democrat, 1963-1969)
- William Jefferson Clinton (Democrat, 1993-2001)
- James Monroe (Democratic-Republican, 1817-1825)
- Grover Cleveland (Democrat, 1885-1889, 1893-1897)
- Thomas Jefferson (Democratic-Republican, 1801-1809)
- James K. Polk (Democrat, 1845-1849)
We are now down to presidents who I’ve liked, defended, and consider truly great. I was tempted to vote Teddy Roosevelt in this round for his quote about “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one”, but that came before he became President. In fact, his foreign policy seems to have involved speaking loudly, carrying a big stick, waving it around a fair deal, but not actually swinging it much.
Considering Truman, though in many ways he carried on the policies of Roosevelt, he also had to adapt and choose a policy for the new post-war world of two great power blocs, with the United States the unquestioned leader of one of them; his adoption of the Marshall Plan and his decision to base US grand strategy on the counsels of the likes of George Kennan and not the likes of, well, Curtis LeMay, may well have saved the world another great war.
Thus, I’ll reluctantly place my vote for Dwight Eisenhower, who unlike the rest of the remaining Presidents essentially followed the path laid out by his predecessor. He did so very successfully, but at this point we’re basically left with the elite, and it’s Eisenhower’s turn.
Voting closes Wednesday at 2 PM.
Yes, Eisenhower, for the reasons you state.
Ike
Truman. At least now Ike’s elimination won’t be unanimous.
Ike
Truman, Ike deserves one more round.
Truman
Ike
Ike
Truman
I hate voting out any of them at this point, but I gotta choose one, so it’s Ike.