Is George W. Bush the worst president in 100 years?

really, all presidents kind of suck except washington, lincoln, jefferson, fdr and william henry harrison.

"I'm meeting you halfway you goddam hippies!"

now how could you know this funky-cool statue and misspell Cincinnati? jk lots of ppl in Cinci misspell it that way, my old swimming team once had custom-made suits w/that spelling.

gw bush in a dead heat w/rm nixon in WORST PRESIDENT IN 100 YEARS sweepstakes. bet both guys are still revered in Cincinasty.

-- term coined by "Ike" in foreboding farewell speech

Did they look Cinci-natty in them?

"20th Cent. Presidents worse then Bush: kennedy, nixon, ford, clinton"

Seriously, how are Kennedy, Clinton, and even Ford on this list? Nixon was terrible in his own way, but at least he has China on his list of achievements, and his image was partially salvaged as an ex-President. Bush is the worst. Can you imagine any future Presidents turning to him for foreign policy advice?

Harding's currently the consensus pick for the 20th century's worst, right?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/images/wh9.gif

http://www.historylink.org/db_images/Harding.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/29/Franklin_Pierce.jpg/501px-Franklin_Pierce.jpg

... who is also on the short-list of worst presidents EVAH.

Warren G. Harding Is Not A Role Model for a Failed Presidency

Indeed, at the time of his death in office, he was widely respected and greatly loved. He was a president who actually cut taxes while helping the nation accomplish the transition from a wartime (WWI) economy. And he created new agencies of government that remain with us to this day: Veterans Affairs and the Bureau of the Budget.

Harding, a highly articulate president, spoke out against the plight of blacks and against racism when it was highly unpopular to do so. He hired for his cabinet men who were among the best and brightest, such as Herbert Hoover, his Secretary of Commerce, and Charles Evans Hughes, his Secretary of State.

The criminal scandals that engulfed Harding's presidency — after his death — were not of his making nor was he complicit in them. His alleged extramarital activities surfaced after his death, too. That meant, of course, that he thus had no opportunity to explain or apologize, to take or deny responsibility. Moreover, if infidelity determines the rank of a president, many who followed should have their ranking adjusted.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20010511.html

Bush is going to be one of those infamous mishaps that leads to study after study and book after book on how in the fuck did this ever even happen in a democracy and how do we never let it happen again.

true that. hoping the dems win back Congress this fall & the investigations begin.

Anyway, I don't agree with Dean--"a highly articulate president," haw.

just throwing it out there. Apropos I figured since Dean's deemed Bush worse than Nixon elsewhere.

WHIGGA

That's from way upthread, but I'm really interested to hear why Clinton is in that list. The others I may or may not agree with, but I think I get why they'd show up on some folks' lists.

Ford was just the Zamboni after Nixon's Icecapades anyhow.

a. I am opposed to his policies
b. he is unable to implement his policies
c. his policies have had measurably negative impact
d. history will judge him harshly
e. some combination of the above

But in Clinton's defense, I wasn't plunged headlong back into my childhood terrors of nuclear war thanks to his foreign policy like I have been since that Iran shit came out.

(NAFTA and rwanda excepted of course)

x-post Yeah, but Clinton didn't, like, grudgingly sign DOMA. He publicly spoke in favor of it prior to its passage.

the worst thing that happened on Clinton's watch by my estimation was him letting his wife delay public healthcare in the US by another 18 years via thorough mismanagement and a completely clueless (very similar to contemporary democrats!) idea of how to market said reforms to a wary electorate while not completely alienating every rich motherfucker who's ever sold health insurance

No one has mentioned Carter, either on the positive or negative tip. That kind of surprises me.

(then again, i grew up in a town where there's like zillions of buildings named after woodrow wilson [because he happened to be the dean @ PU before he became governor of NJ and president of the USA -- so maybe i am wrong about his fame.)

watergate and associated shenanigans too were really bad.

he also gets way too much credit for china, as they decided to open their doors and all he did was walk in.

bush i'd say is in second. he's got a shot at worst if he nukes iran.

nixon was a more competent leader than bush, no question. but he was a way worse guy and probably a worse president too - if tapes ever emerge of bush getting wasted and blaming the "jews" for everything, i might change my mind.

in the end, i think that THIS is the key question wr2 dubya. i mean, i could understand why someone would vote for either nixon or reagan (as loathesome as i found their policies and the people in their administration). but what IS there that dubya has done that his supporters can point to as a bonafide accomplishment w/t sounding like either (a) a total dumbass; or (b) a total ideologue (i.e., i voted for dubya 'cause at least he's not a stinky french cheese-eating "elitist" like john kerry).

(b) i can understand, the same way that i could understand a hardcore Democrat voting for jimmy carter or david dinkins (both of whom, however decent and well-meaning they may be as individuals, i also consider to be failures as elected officials). but that's hardly an inspiring rationale.

xpost

OTM but really it's a far less important/interesting issue in my mind that his/his administration's completely draconian stance on civil liberties in name of "patriotism" and "war support" and oops back to topic president.

We have the Espionage Act on the books thanks to him, under which Eugene Debs was sentenced for 10 years. Wilson had the chance to pardon him and delibeately didn't (Harding eventually did).

ha!

tell me why do we allow the illegals? after all they're illegal.

http://www.eadshome.com/images/fillmore%20banner%20big.jpg

Because he falls outside the 100 year time frame in the question??

s: chester a.a., teddy r., harry s t., lyndon b.j., (john q.a.)

d: john tyler, millard f., andrew johnson, calvin c., (rutherford b.h., alexander haig, george w.b.)

?: gerald r.f.

And Arthur was the collector for the New York ports, wasn't he? The most corrupt job in the Union. I think Conkling or one of those stogie-chewing machine types said, upon hearing the news of Garfield's death, "Chet Arthur in the White House!"

Dark Horse -- well worth the purchase.

But rather than strengthening our alliances, Bush has made himself a paraiah in the world community. Instead of concentrating on Afghanistan and central asia, he started an unnecessary war in Iraq that has sapped our treasury of half a trillion dollars.

God! There are soooo many things that half a trillion dollars could have bought us that were more valuable than Saddam-in-a-cell, sadism in Abu Ghraib, and just enough soldiers in harm's way to provide ample targets, but not enough to supply the stability required to build a few power plants.

His way of going about this may be resolute, but it is borderline insane and heavily dosed with incompetance. He has systematically destroyed or undermined many of our best options in order to commit us irrevocably to weak, bleak and foolish ones. After three more years of his misrule we will certainly be worse off than we are today. Possibly far worse off, if he starts another adventure in Iran and uses nuclear weapons to seal the deal.

ihttp://artfiles.art.com/images/-/WWII-French-Algerian-Propaganda-Poster-Giclee-Print-

http://artfiles.art.com/images/PRODUCTS/large/12183000/12183287.jpg

o rly? new cnn/usatoday says kerry would take bush 49-39

they don't help him as much as defeatist leftie cynicism does

"DLC" as meaningless "I-am-lefter-and-cooler-than-you-are" epithet is still the dumbest thing to come out of leftyblogdom

I'm not defending a team that's too uncool for you, I'm supporting the side that I think is right, and I'm wholly unconcerned with what you find pathetic.

I'm willing to give you that this was badly phrased, but I'm not sure I'm down with the whole idea of "If the Dems would just do what the Republicans do, they could win an election." Gabbneb is right -- this is not about being better, stronger, faster, it's ultimately about leading the country. And for that, you have to use you brain and your sense of morals. I am angry at the Democrats not because they're "always losing," and not because they're wrong, but because they do not make their positions clear enough. They're bad rhetoriticians, bad debaters, and I am angry that the people I have chosen (or tried to choose) to represent me are not expressing my values clearly enough to congress and to the country.

I also wouldn't advocate what CLinton did, which was basically tu turn his whole Presdency into an advertising campaign.

gabbneb, that't work again, just like barging into a cockpit with boxcutters won't work again. But it's not a mythical center, it's a real one, and Clinton's campaign for re-election will go down in history as one of the best examples or marketing ever pulled off. He was in the toilet before he started playing to the middle.

Not in a marketing sense. I feel like we are defining "middle" differently.

See also -- the mythical center that supposed to be really upset about the war on Xmas.

If there's any argument for Clinton being our worst President, it is this. This is his real legacy.

You mean, he did this to make himself more educated? TEH HORROR.

Everything you said about Nixon pales in comparison the the cover-ups. Just like everything Clinton failed to do pales in comparison to his success in riding a good economy and convincing a generation that the values of the Reagan administration were real. A President's policies always pale in comparison to thier cultural influence. Nixon convinced America that its government was untrustworthy, and Clinton convinced America that America's policies don't affect thier lives.

kennedy
a) excellarating vietnam
b) the beginning of status over style
c) almost got the entire country blown up at least 2x
d) horribly corrupt, and the logical extension of corruption
e) vaccous and most likely stupid.

nixon
a) kissenger
b) cambodia, laos, indoesia, vietnam
c) began the thinking, laid the groundwork for the extension of executive power as triumphant, dismantling slowly the systems of checks and balances.
d) his vaunted trip to china, gave legitmacy in the world stage, and finical support to Mao, and began the American attitude towards the far east, namely if we can get money from them it really doesnt fucking matter what they are doing to their own people (cf Rumsfield in iraq)
e) he behind the scene kyboshed the ERA
f) For minor inconvenice, he got rid of Breton Woods, one of the reasons for the randomness and instability of fnical markets, making them no more then Vegas for Rich People, was the gutting of Breton Woods.

ford
a) not actively evil, but useless.

clinton
a) he got elected because of the money from Fags, and for political and social conveience, in t he dead of night he signed a law that actually took rights away from americans, making us lesser citizens.
b) his work for welfare program, meant that millions of poor folks, no longer got to feed their children, and the eldery and the disabled were in the same situtation--a televised handjob to neo-cons that destroyed the poorest of the poor.
c) a variety of quite fun post colonial wars and bombings world wide, tied to his poll numbers (cf iraq, afghanistan, kosovo, places in africa)
d) his refusal to engage in genuine, needed humanitarian intervention in Somalia, Rwanada, the Sudan, etc
e) the taking of money from everyone, everywhere, a fucking whore, worst then all the rest, selling the lincoln bedroom like it was a dubuqe best western.
f) his televised, oleogenious, fake hick, bubba vibe, seducing the american people that his shafting them was a noble and good thing.

what we're talking about are "swing" voters who are easily swayed from one election to the next, not some bonafide centrist ideology.

Shakey, I disagree. I don't think these are people who easily change their minds about issues, but people whose positions are not completely served by either side. Hypothetical center dude:

supports the death penalty (score one for republicans)
wants to keep abortion legal (score one for democrats)
hates what he perceives as "wasteful government spending" (this is totally unfair, but perception-wise, score one for republicans)
isn't comfortable with batshit crazy economic theories that lead to massive debt (score one for democrats)
wants a strong military (score one for republicans)
wants a president that isn't so consumed with starting unnecessary wars, he can actually get some productive shit done domestically (score one for democrats).

So it appears our hypothetical dude is kinda fucked. He either has to look for a moderate candidate from either side, or if none exist, he has to prioritize those issues.

Do you think this dude doesn't exist?

I also think that centrist voters may not prioritize issues as much as go on personality/instinct. "I don't agree with everything either candidate believes, so I'm going to have to vote for the person I trust the most" (or respect, or feel is most earnest).

and referring to clinton as "bubba," christ, i thought only smug mid-90s columnists did that.

it also seems odd to call LBJ a great president (tho he was) and damn JFK for vietnam and "being corrupt."

clinton didn't "develop a bubba persona," he just happened to be a southerner, which meant that washington insiders and jerks on the street alike felt entitled to talk about him with hateful, classist condescension. it had nothing to do with the way he acted: carter got the same kind of treatment, to a much lesser extent.

vacous and most likely is not fair, but if we want to talk about buying elections, charisma over policies, nepotism, and having no career direction aside from power mongering, and how that relates to the nepotism of bush, the corruption of nixon, and the nepotism of Bush I leading to bush two, then kennedy is the pater familias--also his family connections to the mob, and to hollywood, meant that i doubt that he was running the show. There is also something to be said about the telegenic media presence winning the election (everything from the tv debates to Oleg Cassini making Jackies suits slightly too large, to look better on television) that led to things both absurd (dukasis and the tank, kerry and the duck hunting) and sinister (reagons evil empire speech, the stage managing of bush)

i dont think bush is a good president, but i think he is a cipher, through staff choices, clever maniupaltion of the media (stage craft), devolpment of an effective simulacric (sp) personae, paranoia, economic and social devolpment for the immediate short term, colonial wars, the war against the poor, treating racial and sexual others as less then full citizens, poor immigration policies, etc etc, are just an anthology of poltical trends in the last 50 years.

i'm also not convinced that americans are "afraid of smart people," they just prefer smart people with charisma (clinton, FDR, carter before his actual term started) to smart people without it (stevenson, al gore) (haha or as sarah vowell put it: gore needed to come off more willow and less giles).

i'm not much of a JFK fan but what's the point of blaming him for the rise of television? blaming him because he won the election with his good looks is a bizarre argument - what's he supposed to do, try to be less charismatic? you might as well blame nixon for the whole "emphasis on charisma over policies" trend because he LOST the election by NOT being charismatic!

the rest of your post reads like a bunch of notes you took at a howard zinn lecture. if individual presidents don't matter as much as "trends," then why are we wasting time talking about which ones were good and bad?

i think history is a seires of patterns--and i think that the patterns lead to bush

This may be the dumbest thing you have ever said, Anthony, and there are a fucking lot of dumb things to pick from.

Did she really say that? Because it's idiotic.

No, I understand what she was trying to say, what I'm saying is, it's idiotic.

Cause these three were so horrible, Keyth.

And what's more, I feel stupid just talking about this. Buffy references? Get a life.

And you should be thankful that you don't know Buffy references. I wish I didn't.

And you should be thankful that you don't know Buffy references. I wish I didn't."

...

Quite. I mean, she didn't understand the movie at all. She was a silly little thing.
-- Gilbert O'Sullivan (fluxion2...), April 16th, 2006.

http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_16_atrios_archive.html#114541916139426733

A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”

What scares me most about this is... a GROWING CONVICTION in military!! they are slowly, slowly beginning to suspect something 100% OBVIOUS to anyone paying attention for the last four years! WTF

is what's most disappointing. fucking egomaniacal jesus freaks running the country from inside a complete bubble of illogic. Yes water's fucking wet but it doesn't go around talking about how no other substance was brave enough to be wet and that's why people who don't enjoy rain are life-haters.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,192468,00.html

nukes are just a.. what's it, red herring.. WMD.. what's the difference

Tactical Nukes are "low payload" nuclear warheads delivered by bunker-buster bombs. Bunker-busters can't penetrate deep enough wrt a nuclear explosion. There is little demonstrable difference between tactical nuclear explosion and a nuclear explosion of equal megatonnage on the surface. Tactical=BS.

(be sure to take a gander at the comments, too)

I also predict that once he's outta office a whole lotta things that are being said/have been speculated upon will be proved true and he will be disgraced much the same way as Nixon was - provided he doesn't manage to Annihilate the world, start a “nuke-u-lar” war and get us all killed beofre he leaves office.

imagining w's nixon-style rehabilitation is seriously scary.

i'm a noob who'd love an example of nixon rehab! one that actually springs to mind is his treatment in second part of The Power Of Nightmares (just because i re-watched this the other night), concentrating as it does on 'foreign policy'.

There is no jewish cabal on wikipedia.

well i will certainly sleep better tonight now

Had Clinton waited till 1/21/99 to resign, Gore could leave (or some unparsable future perfect subjunctive to that effect) office in 2009, our second-longest-serving President.

I’m not going to keep those kids in there and have to deal with their loved ones. I can’t cover it up when I meet with a family who’s lost a child. I cry, I weep, I hug. And I’ve got to be able to look them in the eye and say, we’re going to win. I have to be able to do that. And I’m not a good faker.

Is he that deluded? He's almost admitting that he's standing there clicking his fucking heels together desperately chanting "theres no place like home".

Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon would have needed ten consecutive terms,
each, of perfect stellar public service, to make up for their
part in perpetrating their criminal war on Vietnam, the US,
Cambodia and the world.

In regards to Clinton, maybe nobody died but how can you
excuse lying under oath? Neither you nor I could escape the
penalties of perjury. Talk about giving special treatment
to society's elite.

m.

Slogans you can put under his face:

WASTED DECADE
WASTED LIVES
WASTED OPPORTUNITIES
WASTED PRESIDENT
WASTED

and yet the peace generation brings us?

sure, it's definitely no "vietnam" in terms of numbers dead and years spent... but shouldn't we know better? uncle sam fell off the wagon... AGAIN!

we're like a disfunctional family member or something... we beat you and kill our other family members and then we shower you with gifts cause we feel guilty.

and we do it again! "don't you see, it's tough love!"
m.

It was...I mean, sometimes the sheer incompetence, the number of times the narrator would say things like "At the same time that Bremer was drawing his constitution, Dr. Rice had no idea" or "Rumsfeld was enraged when he found out that Garner hadn't actually" and "when that day came, however, several realized there were not in fact any plans made to" tunred the whole thing into some hideous comedy that Python would turn down, thinking it far too absurd to happen in comedy, to say nothing of bleeding reality.

Fuck that--Tom Greene would find it too ridiculous.

They learned not to do body counts and not to allow freelance photographers in country.

I'm wathcing this exccelent doc on this Catholic preist serial pedophile and the Church's billion dollar efforts to keep him and his ilk preaching and baby raping, a movie called deliver Us from Evil.

I mean, this is some seriously horrid shit. One of the featured horror cardinals is this creep who lies to a DA and is busted for some minor crime, and ends up back in the Vatican where he's defending 540 other child rapist freak preists.

There's a series of taglines, During one, we learned that it was, of course, Bush who pardoned him.

It's like he has a natural instinct to do the degenerated thing.

HUH?

York stopped short of calling Bush deluded; meanwhile he will no doubt praise the president's "sincerity" on The Corner or "Meet the Press."

He's vexed by his own confused thinking on the matter. We're an occupying force failing to keep a country from plunging into civil war and he's still looking for an "enemy" so we can "win." This is like watching an animal lunge repeatedly at its own reflection and stunning itself into a stupor.

It's about all he can do. I'm still surprised this story ran.

Yeah, like we supported Lebanon when Israel was bombing the crap out of them.

I seriously can't read the rest of that transcript. I may black out from apoplexy.

The real head-slapper is the Bush fan club. One day, they will wake up screaming.

probably exceed my gag limit...

Ha! You're right on the money.

> How bad was Vietnam at 3.5 years in?

You have to remember that the U.S orchestrated the splitting of
Vietnam in the '50s, an act of aristocratic wrongheadedness.
The Saigon government was a propped up regime, never more
than a thinly-veiled American proxy. The war could
have been avoided by supervising an election and allowing the
Vietnamese people to have their say.

But Washington knew that they'd choose Ho Chi Minh, because he
was THE national hero of Vietnam. So they created South
Vietnam and one heckuva brutal civil war. Our presidents were guiding Vietnam into hell long before we sent infantry
divisions over there. The US military advisors who were
actually in the argued against the US occupation,
arguing that it would only inflame the insurgency.
But the paperwork generals and dullard politicos had their
way, just as they usually do, and the only tactic they
knew was brute force.

It was hard enough for native Vietnamese to figure out
who the enemy was. When the Americans showed up,
they didn't even have a chance. They just started
shooting every thing that moved, in a very literal
sense. Remember that general who said "in order to save
the village, the village was destroyed?" He wasn't an
isolated nutcase; that was the standard MO (to be
fair, the Saigon troops pioneered that "strategy").
Ironically, North Vietnam was relatively safe from
bombing, while in the southern Mekong Delta, any
village that was suspected of harboring guerrillas
was liable to be wiped off the face of the map.

To sum up, I think it's fair to say that the Vietnam
was an even bigger mess than Iraq, from many perspectives.
But a failed policy is a failed policy. Sure,
we haven't lost as many GI's or slaughtered as many
civilians this time around, but it's still
a reprehensible and pointless war. if the American
people had any good sense they'd demand an immediate
withdrawal.

I brought up the Vietnam issue not to vindicate Bush,
but to point out that LBJ and Nixon have a lot to
answer for themselves. And Kennedy, although I'll
give him the benefit of the doubt. He was determined
to intervene in in Vietnam, but I don't know what
tactics he would have used, and he may have been
willing to withdraw the troops when it became
clear we were they'd been sent to a quagmire.

I had a dream that George W. Bush ran in the 2016 election under the campaign slogan "I DO GOOD 69"

omg

BUSH/CHENEY: GOOD 69

Ah ha ha ha ha. Please don't give him any ideas.

this can't be a real picture.

http://totalbuzz.ocregister.com/files/2010/12/george-w.-bush-300x222.jpg

it is a real picture, just it's a picture of nick nolte

Was W the most consistently disheveled looking president of the last 100 years?

you had to wear a suit jacket to be in the oval office

just you didn't have to wear pants

blazer & shoes, house policy

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/02/who-is-the-worst-president-since-wwii/

woo!

sorry everyone the correct answer is Reagan

there's nothing i trust the contemporary american public with more than providing a thoughtful, balanced assessment of the truman presidency.

these types of polls always tend to be harshest on the most recent Presidents. as Maddow explained, most of this was due to the fact that Republicans were typically unanimous on their picks for Best and Worst (Reagan and Obama), whereas liberals tended to be more split on both topics.

I couldn't find the average age in the crosstabs either, but while one need not have been around to assess the quality of someone's presidency, the layman generally tends to gravitate towards the ones they remember. and of course, recency bias etc etc

the growing apparently universal consensus on reagan as a 'great' president is srsly depressing.

i make it a habit to shout "I SHOT REAGAN!" in public at least 3 times per day

..as Maddow explained,

Ugh.

I mean, I voted for Obama. And yes the GOP has stopped absolutely any forward movement for years. But that is a horrible way to start any sentence.

she's not wrong in this case.

not that these types of polls really deserve more than the 15 mins they get anyway, but....

Yeah definitely not wrong.

With all his atrocities, stupidity and wars we are still fighting, I might say Dubya, but dude DID make this:

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/08/bush1.o.jpg/a_560x0.jpg

the growing apparently universal consensus on reagan as a 'great' president is srsly depressing.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

in part because a week doesn't end without his name coming up in whatever context. Liberals don't discuss FDR often enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_FrB-hkiTc

what liberals, Alfred? The Dems who are misty-eyed over Bubba, Smiter of the New Deal?

Every prez since at least Reagan has seemed like the worst one we could have at the time.

nurse! nurse! he's awake again nurse!

the growing apparently universal consensus on Reagan

This is mainly media echo chamber stuff, but the more time that passes since Reagan's administration, the fewer the people who remember any of the details, and the more people (especially young people) who accept the most frequently broadcast opinion as the 'consensus'. Among those of us who were adults under Reagan there is no such consensus.

I don't know that the Reagan consensus is growing - I'm not quite old enough to really remember the end of Reagan's time but even by 1992 it seemed like he had been proclaimed the GOP's FDR, no serious look at or criticism of his terms would be undertaken except for fringe characters like Chomsky and Hitchens. That eased up a bit when Dubya was at his most unpopular, but even then the media and Republicans have treated him like a deity and Democrats were scared to actually criticize a guy who died of Alzheimer's out of the spotlight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oskP72Xqoio

Is it misguided to blame Reagan for all the income inequality going on these days? Reagan basically mainstreamed 'trickle down' to the point it was accepted by everyone including the media.

Unfortunately Clinton helped metastasize it with eliminating glass steagall and his neoliberal corporate whoring. =(

George W Bush just helped along its rapidly snowballing path.

and obama getting played like a nouveau riche pledge at dartmouth by "conservative" deficit hawks hasn't helped income inequality do anything but grow

http://theweek.com/article/index/264151

Is it misguided to blame Reagan for all the income inequality going on these days?

IIRC the current trend toward greater and greater inequality first ticked quickly upward during reagan era, although i think it started moving in that direction in late vietnam/nixon era

it actually decelerated in mid-late 90s IIRC and then accelerated again in early 2000s and has done so ever since

http://www.usnews.com/dbimages/master/50614/GR_120513_Stone1.jpg

jimmy carter is not innocent iirc. william greider: "A Democratic Congress and Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) enacted the Monetary Control Act of 1980 which removed all remaining controls on interest rates and repealed the federal law prohibiting usury (note that sky-high interest rates and ruinous predatory lending have been with us ever since). It was the 1980 legislation that took the lid off banking and doomed the savings and loan industry, the mainstay that used to provide housing loans and home mortgages. The thrifts were able to raise capital because they were allowed to pay a half percent more in interest to depositors. Bankers wanted them out of the way. The Democratic party obliged."

and others ~
http://articles.herald-mail.com/2011-02-20/opinion/28614285_1_jimmy-carter-deregulation-peanut-farmer

of course there are a lot of diff't ways to measure "income inequality"

xpost

oh yeah every administration shares blame, even LBJ since the hugely expensive war distracted from the great society stuff

Carter's defense budget for fiscal year 1980-81 was lauded by the Reagan administration.

carter legalized usury. look what's happened to inequality since. big business loves democrats. the DJIA is over 17,000 for the first time ever, and look who's president

if obama were a better president, there'd be republicans and plutocrats in jail for lying the country into war, and then crashing the economy. but he's a corporatist, and that's why people are pissed at him. that and he's not white. this is one racist stuck up country

Is it misguided to blame Reagan for all the income inequality going on these days?

No, IMO. Blame Reagan, blame Reagan fiscal and monetary policy and blame everything Reagan represents in terms of shaking your head knowingly and chuckling at what a fool someone would have to be to think that lowering taxes on the rich could ever be harmful to anything. There's a reason "Reaganomics" is a word - I'm all for laying bare the evils of the Carter administration but let's not forget that supply-side thinking and deregulation (the gutting of the SEC is particularly relevant here) was embraced, hardcore as national policy and over 8-12 years baseline assumptions were so altered that is now almost amazing to think the New Deal was once considered some kind of untouchable bedrock or third rail of postwar policy. I'm very comfortable demonizing that administration as especially if not uniquely destructive. Let us also not forget that it was all phony math based on bogus claims: "the increased productivity will balance the lower tax rates, government revenues will be fine" was always a lie, akin to "Iraq has WMDs." The game was always to simultaneously fill the pockets of the already-rich, and starve out government programs that Republicans objected to anyway on ideological grounds. To the extent that the gap was ever covered, it was done through payroll taxes so that your Gordon Gekkos could enjoy the fruits of a hard day's insider trading without those pesky old Eisenhower-style ultra-high rates on megabuck income. Wikipedia on Reaganomics offers some convenient nuggets:

In 1981, Reagan significantly reduced the maximum tax rate, which affected the highest income earners, and lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%; in 1986 he further reduced the rate to 28%. (...) (S)ince the Reagan tax reductions, top marginal tax rates have remained lower than at any point in US history since 1931, when the top marginal rate was raised from 25% to 63%.

So yeah, I feel okay linking Reagan up with income inequality in America. It's been impossible to put any of this shit genie back in the bottle and every administration since has very comfortably followed in these footsteps, varying only in how much they further expand on these policies. The greatest injustice is that him dying in obcurity of a terrible disease left so little room for protest, alternative narratives, or the kind of clearly satisfying, cathartic cheering that Thatcher's death occasioned. Fuck this guy forever. See also: U.S. Presidents - Cold War and New Millennium Edition

I just want to chime in and say that I live in the sticks, pretty much surrounded by conservative culture, and if you say anything bad about Reagan, you're opinion almost immediately becomes "invalid" to these people. They really put him up on a pedestal

meanwhile nobody in his administration could give two fucks about them

I'm all for laying bare the evils of the Carter administration but let's not forget that supply-side thinking and deregulation (the gutting of the SEC is particularly relevant here) was embraced, hardcore as national policy and over 8-12 years baseline assumptions were so altered that is now almost amazing to think the New Deal was once considered some kind of untouchable bedrock or third rail of postwar policy. I'm very comfortable demonizing that administration as especially if not uniquely destructive. Let us also not forget that it was all phony math based on bogus claims: "the increased productivity will balance the lower tax rates, government revenues will be fine" was always a lie, akin to "Iraq has WMDs."

otm. David Stockman's book is still the only conservative tome that has acknowledged the Oz-esque qualities of the Reagan administration, but the myth of small(er) government effected by Reagan persists, just like Dems want to believe Clinton was Good For America when he was really Reagan's Reagan.

The stuff about recruiting Romney for another run in the link that started this revive is bizarre:

An adviser close to the former Massachusetts governor told CNN that he received a bunch of calls Wednesday, following the release of the poll, from donors who contributed to the 2012 Romney presidential campaign.

I know about Nixon, and know that Stevenson was given a second chance to lose in '56. Neither party would ever run a losing general-election candidate these days--there's just too much money involved, and people get tired of everybody a million times faster now than then. Losing the nomination and getting another chance is almost the rule, but not the election itself.

trying to remember the last person to lose a general election to even attempt another run (not counting third party types like perot or wallace) - mcgovern in 84? and i'm not sure what the hell his 84 campaign was about but i don't think it was a 'serious' campaign. there was talk of ford in 80 but i don't think he ever actually considered it. the same w/ humphrey in 76 but he definitely didn't consider it since he was already dying of cancer. both of those lost close elections where history and public opinion had turned against the person who beat them plus it was close enough to an era where ppl lost general elections and ran again (nixon, stevenson, dewey).

Also, even though my point was general, I think it'd be especially inconceivable in Romney's case. The one thing you'd need for even the possibility of a second run would be fierce party loyalty. Pre-Watergate Nixon had that, and I'm guessing Stevenson had it too. The party loyalty to Romney lasted for about five days after the first debate.

Romney standing up there with Rubio, Cruz and Paul... I would be entertained.

there was talk of ford in 80 but i don't think he ever actually considered it.

He did! Reagan's people considered a "co-presidency" whereby Ronnie was the CEO and Ford the actual administrator but Ford got yellow at the last minute plus there's the uh Constitution.

Yeah, I think by that point Reagan had no interest in being vice-anything, and certainly it would have been goofy and diminishing for a former president to take that role.

Closest 'second chance' might be Ford/Dole losing in 76 and Dole/Kemp running twenty years later, but I never had the sense that the previous run in any way 'defined' Dole or really affected the campaign at all.

it defined him in the 'this guy is so old he ran as ford's veep candidate in 76'. i'd say 88 defined him more. obv plenty of veep candidates from losing tickets have made later attempts for top of the ticket - dole, mondale, quayle, lieberman, edwards.

Oh mannnn forgot about Lieberman's run. Quayle's was wonderfully pathetic, dude seemed genuinely oblivious to the fact that 80% of the country thought of him as a punchline and the rest just thought of him as a nonentity veep.

quayle was a bit of a hero to the conservative movement, it's a huge part of why he was picked in 88. he was young and thru the prism of beltway press he was somehow 'sexy' (ALOT of comparisons to robert redford). the story the right told themselves is that the left recognized quayle as a threat and immediately used the media to discredit him as an idiot as they would later do w/ sarah palin. by 2000 there had been enough vague rehabilitation - three bestsellers about conservative principles and family values, the atlantic's very high profile 'dan quayle was right' piece, various other challopsy takes - that he could run in 2000 and be penciled in as a factor. he wasn't. bauer stole some of his natural base, mccain became the anti-bush candidate, and if all the faces of 96 seemed too old and familiar - libby dole, buchanan, and alexander dropped out before the primaries, forbes dropped out after new hampshire - than a face of 92 was definitely ancient history. quayle had lost to clinton, bush had walloped a high profile clintonite governor. they went w/ the winner.

Let's give thanks to Quayle for giving Bill Kristol work.

God, those primaries. I followed that whole thing pretty closely. Really seemed, within the dubious bubble of the coverage, that at least for a while there Bush was not 100% a foregone conclusion. Would have been kind of amazing if he'd been knocked out of the race by a sex scandal or out-of-control watermelon truck, but after he'd successfully smeared the McCain campaign out of the running. Quayle positioning himself as the late-primary comeback kid, a who's-more-conservative slugfest with Alan Keyes...sigh.

But you're right - there was at least something there for Quayle to build on, or for his team to blind themselves with. But even if he'd rebuilt his brand a bit I'm not sure anybody ever found him compelling, or felt a connection when he was speaking or anything. Just seemed okay on paper.

I will never forget the day Quayle came to my town and pointed to a "now hiring" sign at a Burger King as evidence of the economy improving.

and at BK you can have it your way!

hey I think we have a new candidate guys

yeah fuck Joe Biden

stole my joke, dammit. That's what I get for taking a pee.

Trump didn't kill a million Iraqis. Nicest thing you can say about him probably.

xp
forgive me my Lord

also a pretty good display name / post combo there from Neanderthal