What heppened to the Franklin D Roosevelts, Dwight D Eisenhowers, and John F Kennedys?

Presidents and presidential candidates that were competent and generally well liked? I don’t know who their opponents were offhand, but I’ll bet that they polled far higher than our current choices.

Politics really isn’t my thing and I’m sure that someone will disagree with statements I make here, but my general question is still valid.

Trump and Clinton’s approval rating are both universally embarrassing falling into the 30s and 40s almost across the board. I’ll be amazed if the winner gets as high as 60 during their term.

Are there really no candidates out there that I could have voted for rather than just voting against their opponent? In the past I have said that we need a “None of the Above” checkbox but this time around I really want it to happen.

The twenty-four hour news cycle, and Watergate happened.

I suspect this will seem a very anomalous election in another four or eight years, if it doesn’t already. Hillary has a generation’s worth of accumulated bile among the GOP, and Trump is uniquely awful in so many ways. But there have been “competent and generally well-liked” candidates since Watergate, and there will be again.

Stroke, Congestive heart failure, assassination, in that order, is what happened to them.

It’s not just the GOP. It’s a time when the establishment is disliked and she is as establishment as they come.

Snort laugh.

I thought this would be about presidents with middle initials. Donald J Trump matches the pattern! Erk.

You’re ignoring that one of the candidates also has scores in fifties. Hillary’s approval ratings are not universally embarrassing.

You’re also ignoring that there has been a twenty year cottage industry among Republicans devoted to ruining Hillary’s reputation and pushing a “Both sides are equally to blame (so vote Republican!)” party line.

The truth is, both sides in this debate are very much not equally as bad. The Republican candidate is an objectively terrible human being and everything he does reflects that. The same is not true for the Democratic candidate.

I leaned toward Bernie in the primary but I’ve come to be excited about voting for Hillary. I especially like how committed she to reproductive choice, which is an important issue to me. I also like her stated goal to increases taxes on millions and squeeze money out of companies that move their jobs overseas. And I’m eager to see how she improves the healthcare situation.

Have you read Hillary’s plans? They’re on her website. Perhaps if you point to a specific issue, you could explain what exactly you dislike about her.

We all have our favorite reasons for why it’s happened, but there’s no doubt that it’s happened. I submit the following critique of a presidential candidate:
Some of his statements on foreign policy and defense have sounded either uninformed or frighteningly naive. Most damaging of all, his indecisiveness and his impulsive rhetoric have raised a serious question as to his personal capacity to handle the responsibilities of the presidency.
About Trump, right? No, it’s about George McGovern, from an editorial in LIFE magazine in October, 1972. McGovern for all his faults was a veritable King Solomon compared to a driveling imbecile like Trump, but those were different times, with different standards.

That same editorial began with the following proclamation: “Unless the polls and political seers are grotesquely mistaken, Richard Nixon will be reelected next month by a decisive majority. On the whole, we think this is a good thing for the United States.”

One might be tempted to scoff but in fact Nixon opened up relations with China, established the EPA, tried to put forward a health care reform initiative remarkably similar to Obamacare, and in general strove to be an elder statesman in his presidential years. Were it not for Watergate fatally exposing his weaknesses, he might have been regarded as at least an admirable if not great president. Yet Nixon at his worst was miles above Trump at his best. Trump has no moral compass whatsoever, no intelligence, and, worse, no ambitions other than ego gratification and self-enrichment.

The original ones, or clones?

Hell, John Adams was so disliked, people were talking about throwing him out of office without bothering with impeachment. According to one historian, Alexander Hamilton was thinking about a military coup.

(It’s mentioned in passing in “Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy” by Ian W. Toll, a truly fun history book. I’ve never found any other reference to this, and REALLY want to know more. How serious was Hammy about this? Had he actually started putting together a commando? Or was it just hot talk?)

Anyway, we’ve had Presidents compared to whom Clinton and Trump are as beloved as rock-star level celebrities!

That sounds like a lot of tedious work. Only losers care about the details. Sad.

Look up the Quasi-War of 1798 to 1800, when we almost went to war with Revolutionary/Napoleonic France. The Wikipedia account emphasizes the maritime aspect. Which involved the Revenue Cutter service–founded by recommendation of Alexander Hamilton.

George Washington, retired from the Presidency, was called upon to lead the military defense. Feeling his years, he put Alexander Hamilton in command of the military until or unless the French invaded. A treaty ended the Quasi-War in 1800; Washington had died in 1799.

John Adams didn’t get a second term as President because of the “war”–the treaty came late. And because Jefferson benefited from the 5/8 slave electoral advantage. Hamilton didn’t help–he criticized Adams in a letter & barely supported his fellow Federalist. (Adams had already turned his invective against Hamilton: “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar” came from Adams.) But, no. Alexander Hamilton did not contemplate a coup. However, he did spend those years in uniform. Another reason for Adams–who’d done his great service to the Revolution as a civilian–to dislike him.

Thomas Jefferson was another anti-Hamiltonian who had a long life in which to burnish his own reputation. He’d returned from France as a staunch supporter of the Revolution & his Democratic-Republicans were known for Francophilia. The Terror did not faze TJ–he finally saw the light after France began meddling in US domestic affairs.

George Washington was the original “beloved” president–but even he was not universally mourned. From the Mount Vernon website:

Still, Donald Trump is an ignorant troll with no good points…

A FDR type figure would be denounced as a naive socialist. American wars haven’t gone too well lately, so an Eisenhower figure is unlikely to arise. Obama is approximately the modern equivalent of JFK, except without all the supermodel banging. Probably.

American society has grown increasingly polarized over the intervening years, along with a decrease in trust in government, corporations, religion, and various cultural institutions. The modern media environment is a completely different beast. Stories that would have been huge scandals today were scarcely known in the past.

You know who else has J for a middle initial?

Elmer J. Fudd
Bullwinkle J. Moose
Rocket J. Squirrel
Homer J. Simpson

Yeah, cartoon characters.

I think we can put much of the blame on the demise of the “smoke-filled room”, in which the party bosses would gather and decide on a number of candidates who could compete for the nomination. While the group would almost certainly have a preference, the candidates running would all be at least minimally qualified and have a reasonable public personality.

The populist reforms of the last half century have removed that filtering process.

Our current president has trouble scoring hot babes. Very weak track record. Pathetic.

Speaking of names…

I’m betting Disney changes Donald Duck’s name to Barack Duck before this is over.

Actually, the Republicans hated FDR so much, they had an amendment passed to make sure that no president ever served more than two terms again. FDR may have been well-loved by those who voted for him, but the venom of those who did not was quite powerful. If we had approval ratings that were computed so that the approval of those who did like FDR was cancelled out by the hatred of those who didn’t like him, his approval rating would probably be just around 50%. And that was for someone who managed to get elected to four terms.

Eisenhower presided over one of the mellowest times in the US. Voter turn-out was low when he was elected, and Republicans tend to get elected when turn-out is low, so indifference was his friend. His rating may have been relatively high, but he benefited from post-war prosperity that wasn’t the result of anything he personally did.

Kennedy, according to my father (my late father-- this was a conversation that took place a long time ago), was actually not all that popular in his lifetime, and was elected by a lot of people who just liked the alternative less. He became popular in legend after he was assassinated. My father believed that if Kennedy had not been assassinated, he would not have been remembered as a particularly good nor effective president, and that had Johnson run after Kennedy’s second full term, probably would have lost, as there would not have been any reflected glory. As it was, though, Johnson may have chosen not to run.

Also, FWIW, there was less scrutiny of the candidates then than there is now. The public was deceived into believing that FDR could walk normally, and knew nothing of Kennedy’s Addison’s disease. Also, the public may have known vaguely that FDR and Kennedy had affairs, but they didn’t fill the tabloids, and people could put them out of their minds, or even, if they wished, dismiss them as rumors. The private lives of the candidates were not in people’s faces, and if some newspaper of radio reporter had tried to make them so, people at the time probably would have reacted badly to the story as being in poor taste, and the reporter would not have been successful with the story. I mean, even in my lifetime, in the 70s, people found prurience and general nosiness in celebrity’s lives as something to be indulged on the sly (and even then, media stars were in a whole different class from politicians). It didn’t really come into its own until the 1980s, and the days of hundreds of cable channels.

So, TL;DR: my answer is that FDR, Eisenhower and Kennedy are not much different from today’s candidates-- save Trump-- it is the public and the way they treat them that is different.

Trump is a bizarre aberration created by the media. I don’t fully understand him myself.

One final note: I think some of the venom Hillary Clinton experiences is simply because she is a woman. I think there are some men (and even some women) who can’t deal with a woman as president. I’d like to forcibly drag them into the 21st century, myself.

I wonder if it’s too late to start a rumor involving JLo, JLaw and ScarJo in a cabin at Camp David, or Halley Berry and Eva Mendez aboard AF1. Oh I know Michelle will want to rip my arms off, but my man needs some mythical aspect…

You want Presidents with approval ratings in the 60s? Well, Bill Clinton had that at the end of his 2nd term.