Something of a logic paradox, eh?
The resistible force meets the movable object?
Not true. That was the first election I voted in as well as the first one in the wake of Vietnam and Nixon/Watergate. I recall lots of excitement.
Others touched on how the “failure of foreign policies” is not a good point or that it can be argued.
Here I have to point at what the experts said about what Trump is proposing:
Clinton has also talked about tariffs, but in more modest terms and targeted to issues like exchange manipulation, and other issues were the International Trade Commission is very likely to agree with the USA against China.
Couldn’t agree more. John Kaisch is not a nut ball. As a left leaning moderate, I might have voted for him over Clinton. But noooo. The GOP is putting up seriously delusional people as their front runners.
Worst choice ever?
Not even close. Off the top of my head
1920 - Harding vs. Cox. 1924 and 1928 weren’t a lot better, but Coolidge and even Hoover were better than Harding.
1972 Nixon vs. McGovern
I won’t even go into the 19th Century, but I do note that in 1836 Van Buren beat W. H. Harrison, while in 1840 Harrison beat Van Buren; and in 1888 B. Harrison defeated Cleveland for re-election, then in 1892 the voters said “I guess Cleveland was okay after all,”
President Al Smith in 1928 would have been the cat’s pajamas.
He could have averted the Great Depression with his huge infrastructure project of building a tunnel from Washington, DC, to the Vatican!
Cruz versus Sanders would be worse. A lot worse. An ultra-conservative lunatic versus a actual socialist lunatic. That’s fucking scary as hell. Both men could do a tremendous amount of damage, far more than Trump or Hillary.
IMHO, neither major-party nominee in any election from 1968 to 1988 was as good relative to their time as Clinton is now. Ditto major independent candidates (Wallace 1968, Anderson 1980). We really did go through quite a stretch where a lot of us had to hold our noses and vote for the lesser of evils. Certainly on the Dem side, Humphrey (damn you, Sirhan Sirhan), McGovern, Carter twice, Mondale, and Dukakis were all kinda disappointing IMHO.
But at least from the Dem side, from 1992 forward that hasn’t been the case, IMHO. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been good Presidents and were people you could vote for, rather than just vote against the other guy.
I personally feel the same way about Al Gore, who damn well *should *have been President, and John Kerry, who wasn’t a great candidate in the sense that he wasn’t particularly good at the job of running for President, but would have IMHO made a fine President if elected.
I’d have to let Republicans weigh in on which candidates they voted for with enthusiasm, and which ones they held their nose and voted for largely to keep the Democratic candidate out of the White House.
WIN!
(grin)
1872 had Grant vs Greeley. A failed president that had alienated many in his own paper versus a newspaper publisher.
Cox? After growing up on the farm, a schoolteacher-turned-newspaperman gets elected and re-elected to Congress, and then starts in on a third term as Ohio’s governor before running for President? That’s a damn Jimmy Stewart movie!
I thought historians’ consensus was Harding was the worst president.
Clinton is polling unfavorable 53%(-12), Trump 62%(-29).
Have we ever had a choice like that?
And your source is? Trump is dreadful. Ms Clinton may not be The Most Liberal but I’ll be glad to see her President.
I doubt there’s a real consensus, but there’s a solid argument available that he was the worst *person *ever to be President. The worst *Presidency *could be Buchanan’s or GWB’s, possibly Grant’s or Hoover’s, or, yes, Harding’s. Pity the choice is so difficult.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of this. Generally, yeah, it’s Buchanan or Harding at the bottom. Hoover doesn’t generally get a whole lot of the blame for the Great Depression (and no credit for dealing with the crisis effectively, of course), and Grant is undergoing a bit of an improvement in historical reputation. I imagine GWB will continue to drift towards the bottom of the list as time passes.
The guy I think is consistently overrated is Jackson. Historians tend to place a lot of value (presumably) on him ushering in the era of popular democracy, and severely underweight his enthusiastic approval of genocide and the danger he put us in as a Constitutional republic by refusing to comply with SCOTUS rulings.
I appreciate that you have a preference between the two, as do I.
But the OP’s question was if we’re facing a particularly crappy choice given that these two will be the eventual nominees. I thought that beyond opinions we might actually be able to apply some metric to the question.
So, to restate my question, since favorable/unfavorable polls have been around, have we ever had two nominees with such high unfavorables?
If we want to be pedantic and technical, one could make the case that the worst President was William Henry Harrison, who is usually disqualified because he died a month after taking office.
How dare you malign the first black U.S. President!