Bob Dole was a Republican. So’s his wife.
I was never entirely convinced by T. Kennedy as presidential material. Maybe it’s because he seemed to assume that the post was his by birthright rather than by merit. But who knows: he could have been okay.
Oh dear God no. But I thought he only seriously ran once (in 2004)?
Mr Foot-in-Mouth? No. He may be a shrewd behind-the-scenes operator but you don’t want him as Head of State.
I actually voted for Dole in 1988, not being a Bush Sr fan.
Not at all. Watch his show. Here’s a man who genuinely cares about the oppressed, whether they be gays, blacks, Hispanics, women, whatever. When he last ran, I was very impressed by his debate performances. When you take away the Tawana fiasco, it’s hard to find him on the wrong side of any issue.
I think the best argument in retrospect for a Hillary Clinton presidency is that she probably would’ve gone into it expecting rabid opposition and thus wasted less time on ultimately futile efforts at bipartisanship.
Absolutely. Obama’s biggest flaw has been that he genuinely believed he could usher in a post-partisan era. Sounds great, but the Republicans held a meeting to vow to sabotage his every move on the day he was sworn in. I’m still not sure he realizes that the opposition has no intention of compromising with him.
On the other hand, Hillary’s shields would have been up on the day she got sworn in. She wouldn’t be afraid to use the bully pulpit to marshal public opinion to her side and force the GOP to cave.
Dole. Libby Dole.
Bob would have been all right as well.
And the Republicans would have said, “This is all Hillary’s fault. We would have co-operated with Obama if he had been elected.”
Hubert Humphrey. Really unfortunate name for a presidential candidate, but a brilliant, progressive, charming, upbeat guy. Considering who we got and what followed, he would have been a bargain even without those traits.
Any of them might have been good presidents. With the exception of GWBush, it’s hard to predict how good or bad a president will be before he serves. Even with Nixon we can’t really tell from his eventual election what would have happened if he didn’t lose the first time.
However, based on my highly biased but none-the-less correct assesments:
Stevenson would have been good. But he wouldn’t have had the public admiration that Eisenhower had and may not have been effective.
Nixon’s paranoia may have kept us out of Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs. But if he faced the Cuban missile crisis we might all be speaking from beyond to any surviving psychics.
Goldwater probably would have been about the same as Johnson. His ultra-conservative image was just a product of naivety. I think he wouldn’t have done any better than Johnson in Vietnam. I think he was pretty honest and decent, and may have moved ahead with civil rights legislation.
McGovern may have been kind of weak. His leadership skills weren’t really there during the campaign. He would have brought us out of Vietnam sooner, but we faced economic problems at that time and I’m not so sure he was prepared to deal with those. But neither was Nixon, so in that regard he wouldn’t have been worse.
Mondale, I don’t really know. But I think it would have been a really dull administration.
Dukakis, loser. Who let him run?
Dole is hard to predict. He didn’t really have executive experience. His old fashioned conservatism may have made him better than Clinton on the economy. But it would all depend on how well he selected his cabinet and advisors. He was good at backroom politics, not so much in the front room. But there’s just not much to form an opinion from.
Gore, way better than Bush. 9/11 might not have happened because he wouldn’t have ignored the advance warning he was given a month beforehand. But if it did happen, he probably would have done about the same as Bush in Afghanistan, but he wouldn’t have invaded Iraq for absolutely no good reason. He wouldn’t have helped unload the treasury after Clinton opened the doors wide. We’d have economic problems now, but they wouldn’t be as bad.
Kerry? Og help us all. I think he’s a Romney with different friends. An empty suit, 2 dimensional, utterly ineffective.
McCain just couldn’t be a good executive. He’s a soldier, not a general. I have some respect for him, but there’s a lot that wasn’t looked at in the election. His dark side and errors in judgement were glossed over. And of course his selection of running mate revealed flaws in his ability to make decisions and evaluate advice.
“Take away” the Tawana Brawley episode? Good luck with that, pal.
That’s like saying “If you take away the fact that he’s a shrimp, Emmanuel Lewis could play center for the Lakers.”
[emphasis added]
Awhile ago, our computer room started to have a weird smell. We’d had a terrible problem with ants lately, and at first I thought maybe they’d built a nest inside one of our bookshelves (built from ancient Mac computers), so I cleaned all of them out, and eventually took them to be recycled. But the smell lingered, despite all my cleaning, and a line of ants kept going from that area to the cat’s food dish no matter where we moved the food dish to. It smelled like rotten shrimp.
Finally one night I took a look in a carton of cans of cat food, and OH MY GOD. The ants had built a nest inside the cardboard box, a nest built entirely of vomited-up cat food stolen from the cat dish. There were hundreds of rice-sized specks throughout the box, specks that I quickly realized were eggs. When I tore the cover off the box seeing if I could salvage any of the cans of food, the smell nearly made me puke. Close call for a few seconds.
Anyway, my point being, that carton of cat food would have been a better president than W.
That said, I’ll agree that Dole and McCain both would have been not terribly awful presidents. I’m honestly not convinced that Romney would be terrible, either, but maybe that’s because the current crop of Republicans has set the bar so low. I mean, he’s buttloads better than Santorum, and he’s way better than Perry, Gingrich, Mme. Crazypants (can’t remember her name), or almost any of the others in the primary, with the exception of Huntsman. Indeed it’s that current craziness that so drastically mellows my view of Dole and McCain.
I’m too young to really have any knowledge about this myself, but one of my old history teacher’s favorite almost-president: Barry Goldwater
2000 McCain was pretty cool… I lost all respect for the man after he cozied to the Bush administration after the low handed bullshit Rove and company pulled on him during the primaries.
James Cox would pretty certainly have been a better president than Warren Harding.
(The 1920 election was odd in at least four ways:
- the first where women voted – and it’s alleged that they voted for the better-looking Harding;
- both major-party candidates came from the same state Ohio – and the third-party candidate Eugene Debs came from the neighbouring Indiana;
- Debs received nearly a million votes despite being in prison at the time; and
- both major-party vice-presidential candidates – Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Roosevelt – went on to be president. Only Cox missed out.)
Barry Goldwater was an honorable man of deep conviction. Such people are worthy of respect and admiration. Unfortunately, that does not mean their political views would be good for the country.
Giles-I was reading a book on “almost Presidents”, and Cox is the only one without a biography.
Kept looking for Huntsman here. Would be a better candidate all around than Romney. I think he would do quite a fine job as POTUS.
Other also-rans include Bob Kerry (D-NE) in 1992. Republicans can’t argue with a MOH recipient and former SEAL about ability to be Commander in Chief. I don’t think we would have had Whitewater or Monica-gate type scandals under a Kerry administration.