Happy Birthday to Jacqueline Bisset, 68. The real Jacqueline Bisset; not the one that Sam almost married.
To the good stuff:
1. Dan Drezner on ten years of blogging. Mazel Tov!
2. Facebook makes you vote? A new study, reported by Alicia Cohn.
3. Political scientist Amaney Jamal on Egypt.
3. And one way to have fun with US political history is to ask who you would have voted for in historical presidential elections, as Jeremy Young does. I'll try to avoid being a spoilsport and reminding everyone that voters are mostly partisans, and wind up supporting a party based as much on group affiliation and family as anything.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
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Not to go all James Fallows, but maybe this is 1948 all over again.
ReplyDeleteR is their own giant bubble (kenya, economy, Muslims, etc) thinking Dewey is the man.
I strongly suspect Obama will be as bas as Truman in the second term. When is the last time we had a good second term? Eisenhower? Reagan (sans Iran contra). I'd say Bush was resonablly successful if he hasn't gone for the SS reform.
I would take Bush's second term over his first.
DeleteMy father, a lifelong partisan Democrat, has told me that if there was one vote he could take back, it would be the one he cast for Jimmy Carter in 1976. (He voted for Anderson in 1980.) One of the advantages of retrospective voting is that you can take into account the long-term consequences of your choice. Had Ford won the 1976 election, he would have almost certainly faced the same recession that killed Carter's presidency, even though partisan Republicans like to pretend Carter caused it. With Ford in office during a recession, it's very likely a Democrat would have been elected in 1980. It's hard to know what the '80s would have been like without a President Reagan, but it probably would have at least been better for Democrats.
ReplyDeleteThen who would have been the Dem nominee?
DeleteWith all the provisos that PB notes, I think of TR as the most recent Republican I would have voted for. Just can't relate to Bryan's agrarian populism. (And the Great Monkey Trial, though of course that wasn't till much later.)
ReplyDeleteTR's imperialism is awkward, but it was a different era. And I don't have a problem with Obama's drone strikes.
Yes, this is full of inconsistencies and potential inconsistencies, but that's part of the fun!
Let's face it: For the elections of 100 years ago and earlier, we all would have simply voted for the better mustache.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually wondering how many elections up to, say, 1920 would actually have disagreement about who "should" have won, at least among the rather skewed set of super-educated 2012 political junkies who'd engage in this kind of debate. What do you think would be the closest call?
ReplyDeleteI can say that I'd be a D back to 1976 without any qualms. Between 1976 and 1948, the question would come down to WHERE I was. I'd be a Northern Dem, but a ticket-splitter in the South. For 1932-1948, FDR gets my vote, but I can honestly say that R vs D at the congressional level would have to be case-by-case. In the 1920s, I really can't tell you. Not because, looking back, I can't say that the R presidents of that decade weren't terrible (they were), but because I don't think the Ds were offering any better choices. I definitely would have been a TR voter, and that would have kept me coming back to R through 1910, but from 1911-1929, I really don't know how I would have reacted.
ReplyDeleteThe last time I'd have considered voting Democrat was 1932. The last time I'd have voted Democrat was 1892.
ReplyDelete