Posted on 08/12/2005 3:25:54 PM PDT by hang 'em
Clinton...hands down.
Carter by a country mule,.....oops, mile.
Leni
and introduced some kind of control over the growing corporations so that socialism would never have gotten a foothold
I'll never understand this thinking, that to dismiss something undesirable we must adopt part of it. We mustn't speak the language of what we do not want. The so-called "corporate" system gave jobs, organized capital, created goods, solved problems, and empowered a people to build the greatest civilization in history. Abuse? Yes, only in violation of traditional American standards. Poor people and living conditions? Yes, and in violation of American ways, and not because of them. We must speak of America unto herself, and not by some other definitions. To consider capitalism's excesses as responsible for socialism is to assume the tenets of socialism.
To what standard would you have President Grant hold the system: min. wages? hiring/firing rules? retirement programs? public ownership? Socialism wants nanny care, redistribution of wealth, and state control. American principles, on the other hand, demand honesty, fairness, fulfillment of contract, and good neighborliness. Whatever Grant might have done to promote these principles is in no way related to the advent of socialism. I agree with you that Grant missed the opportunity to hold corporatism to the higher standard. But that is entirely unrelated to socialism.
Socialism finds any convenient excuse, and it has held the corporate system as a straw man. The abuses of capitalism cannot be blamed for fomenting socialism. If we accept that then we are not holding socialism to account for itself. Eric Rauchway wrote a book all about this idea that we must adopt socialism in order to kill it: Murdering McKinley : The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (Amazon link).
[Btw, I use the word "capitalism" for convenience only. It is our politics that defines our economics, not the other way around.]
Even though a Democrat his conservatism would put any modern day Republican to shame. I wish GWB had one tenth of the balls for veto that Cleveland did.
Carter....hands down........
Let's not forget about Carters plea (via letter) to the Soviets to help him win his election against Reagan.....he was a complete failure at everything...there was nothing redeeming about his 4 years....the country was in a state of depression spiritually, mentally, and physically....
i'd go with either FDR or the elder bush. fdr for his socialism, old bush for breaking too many campaign promises which caused clinton, and for screwing up desert storm, which if he had finished right, we wouldn't be at war again so soon.
Thanks for reading my mind. I need say no more.
"Hillary Rodham picked this nobody from Hope..."
Yes, good point. During the 1996 presidential campaign a customer of mine in Arkansas who had a very low regard for Clinton had a sign in his office that read "Hope is not in Arkansas".
What's amazing about the Wilson presidency is that his first term was more Taft's 2nd term than his own.
Really? I thought Taft was the good guy and Wilson the bad one. You'll have to explain.
And when you say "Taft" are you talking about the man's own inclinations or the things he had to do to hold his party together and keep Congress in line? Would Taft really have kept the income tax out, or would the pressure to impose it once the Constitution had been amended prove too much? The income tax could well have been the price of tariff reform.
Taft's problem may have been that he was trying to drive a wagon with horses that wanted to go in different directions -- the conservatives and the progressives. Roosevelt could manage, but Taft couldn't, and maybe Roosevelt's example or encouragement of the progressives was part of the problem.
The era had a lot to do with that. Usually, when you get bitter ideological conflicts eventually things sort out so that each party is on a different side of the conflict, and the party rallies around one side of the issues, rather than tear itself apart, as happened in 1912.
But could the fact that Taft really didn't relish politics also have had an effect? A real "player," somebody who loves the game of politics, can really screw up the country, but isn't likely to get torn apart between party factions in quite the same way. Taft wasn't a Hoover or Carter, still less was he an LBJ.
Could you draw a parallel between Taft and Ford or Bush's father? They lived through some real changes in the GOP and weren't great campaigners or lovers of the game. Eventually these presidents got caught in-between factions of their own party. Johnson did too put is personality and his role in the unravelling were quite different.
About the tariff. It clearly was very much an issue in 1912. Wilson spoke about it a lot. A lot of it had to do with the idea that the tariff was the "mother of trusts" -- that it stifled competition and promoted monopolies. It was very convenient: Wilson could imply a lot about tariffs by talking about competition and a lot about tariffs by discussing competition, without going very much into details. He could signal where he stood and avoid talking about where revenues would come from or how to break up the trusts.
Without polling data, it's hard to know which were the key issues that most effected swing voters. In this case, it looks a lot like Wilson won without winning many net swing voters. 43% was a losing percentage for Bryan in 1908, but it was enough for Wilson to win against a divided Republican Party. The tariff -- understood as a question of competition -- won Wilson some votes, but it didn't need to, since he only had to hold his base.
It looks like the Republicans could count on 51% of the electorate a century ago. That's what McKinley and Taft both got against Bryan (Bryan's share was different in each election because of the third party vote). The Democrats controlled the South and could win votes in the (more conservative) East as Cleveland did or in the (populist, progressive, insurgent) West as Bryan did, but probably not both. That's why splitting the GOP was so crucial to Wilson's win. It meant a chance to win states in all regions without actual having a majority of votes outside the South. It probably also didn't hurt that Wilson was a dark horse who could be different things to different voting blocs.
Wilson did about as well as Bryan in the popular vote nationwide, but you might want to take a look at the state totals. In some strongly Republican states, Wilson's percentage was higher than Bryan's. I'm thinking the "Mugwumps" made the difference -- wealthy liberal Republicans from academic or professional backgrounds, who disliked the regular Republican party machines and wanted lower tariffs, but who were put off by demagoguery, which they associated with Bryan and Roosevelt. Also some LaFollette voters most likely held a grudge against Roosevelt for blocking their man's aspirations. They probably pulled the lever for Wilson as a result.
In a few Northern states where Democrats did better, Wilson's winning percentage was actually lower than what Bryan got when he lost. In this case, it may be that some ordinary farmers or city dwellers who might have voted for Bryan or not at all in 1908 were inspired by TR to vote Progressive. Wilson didn't have much personal magnetism, and was less appealing to ethnic voters than Roosevelt.
PS. I think this guy could use a few hundred extra pounds and a handlebar moustache.
Really? I thought Taft was the good guy and Wilson the bad one. You'll have to explain.Despite my heated views, I honestly don't look at it in a good guy/bad guy context, not even with our friend Mr. Roosevelt, who drives me nuts. I really do mean that Wilson's first term was an extension of Taft's. Outside of foreign affairs, what with WJB running that show and WWI on the way, there's not much more than the Democratic spin to differentiate 1913-1917 from 1909-1913.
Taft settled the business of direct democracy, the largest reach of which was already on the way into the Constitution by the time Wilson came along in the 17th amendment. Of course Taft wouldn't have asked for a personal income tax, but Taft's Sixteenth amendment settled its constitutionality, and all Wilson did was to replace Taft's corporate tax for a personal one. Whoever was going to reduce the tariff had to replace the revenue with something. Indeed, Taft's corporation excise tax was invented precisely for that reason. And no matter what Taft said during the '12 campaign, if he had continued in office he would have had to revise down the duties. His tariff board committed him to it. He only vetoed new revisions in 1912 to make a stand during the election. He was otherwise politically and personally committed to further revision, if not quite as much as Wilson did certainly not much less.
Elsewhere, where Wilson knocked down the Commerce Court, he merely removed its powers to the Commerce Commission. Where Wilson launched the Federal Reserve its distinctions from Aldrich's plan of 1911/12, which Taft promoted, were of little practical difference. While Taft never would have stood for the labor/farm anti-trust exemption in the Clayton law, it accepted, on the whole, Taft's after-the-fact anti-trust litigation over Roosevelt's preemptive regulatory strategy. The Clayton bill accomplished nothing that Taft's national incorporation idea wouldn't have, and, indeed, was probably more limited in its effect. Especially when placed in the context of what TR demanded in 1912, which I can only see as a pre-form of national socialism industrial policy, Wilson's anti-trust was little changed from Taft's.
(I'd like to think that Taft would have stood for more competition in the railroads, but who knows. Those matters were settled by the Commerce Commission, which the railroads themselves wanted. In any case, all ideas of nationalizing the railroads were killed in November of 1912. Wilson managed to half-nationalize them during WWI, and screwed the system as a result, but there was no longer any question of private ownership after 1912.)
These are just a few things that come to mind. Wilson, of course, adopted Taft's views on the automobile, which is of no little consequence. While Wilson never understood the Motor Age, especially its democratization, his generally neutral attitude on it presented none of the obstacles that a severely anti-automobile administration may have produced. (Wilson turned against the automobile to help fund his war. By carrying the restrictions and taxes into 1919/20, he nearly killed off the industry, and severely disrupted healthy competition in it.)
In other words, for Wilson's first term, it was a matter of degree rather than kind. Taft settled the major issues of the day during his four years. Certainly we can say that a Wilson presidency in 1913 was a vastly different thing from a potential Roosevelt presidency that year, and far closer to a Taft second term. Wilson lost his way managing the wartime economy and the Versailles Treaty. His views on world peace, btw, were, generally, out of Taft's book. I think Taft would have been quicker to get into WWI and back out of it, and he most certainly would not have nationalized the economy the way and/or for as long as Wilson did.
Frankly, I'm rather impressed by Wilson's 1912 campaign. While he didn't get many more popular votes than Parker or Bryan had before, he said and did everything he needed to get the electoral college, given the Republican split. Also, I fully realize that equating Wilson to Taft around here does not exactly, on its face, anyway, contribute to Taft's legacy... And I know from personal experience among Wilson historians that any thought that Wilson wasn't much more than Taft, even in his first term, drives them nuts. Arthur Link had an entirely unreasonable and almost pathological contempt for Taft that his historiographic (?) descendents have fully inherited.
All that make any sense? My ideas on this are entirely original in that there's no one out there that I have seen that has hashed this out in any way. In other words, these thoughts are untested. What say you?
US Grant always gets the bad rap wrt his Presidency. But he is #1 when it comes to memoirs.
Wilson did about as well as Bryan in the popular vote nationwide, but you might want to take a look at the state totals. In some strongly Republican states, Wilson's percentage was higher than Bryan's. I'm thinking the "Mugwumps" made the difference -- wealthy liberal Republicans from academic or professional backgrounds, who disliked the regular Republican party machines and wanted lower tariffs, but who were put off by demagoguery, which they associated with Bryan and Roosevelt. Also some LaFollette voters most likely held a grudge against Roosevelt for blocking their man's aspirations. They probably pulled the lever for Wilson as a result.It's both enlightening and misleading to look solely at the state totals, or the national totals, to figure out this election. In California, for example, where Roosevelt won by a hugely-small margin, it's hard to say what it means, for Taft was disenfranchised by the Johnson machine. (Taft's fifteen supporters at the LA Times office just weren't enough...) Whatever the meaning of Taft's 3,000 votes, it is clear that they could have easily tilted it to Wilson had that many chosen him over Taft. Clearly many more did. On top of it, what do we make of Debs' 70,000? (Other, that is, than to affirm the beauty of the two-party system...) Any attempt to read into the national results from the CA situation is meaningless. Local situations set the results as much as anything, such as in NY, which went Wilson first and Taft second. TR not taking his home state? Indeed, for Democratic Tammany had set up Wilson, and Republican Albany had already sorted through Roosevelt in 1910, and not to TR's liking.
The problem is that the results of the local and state-wide ballots on the Republican/Progressive side depended upon the particular local situation as much and often more than on the national scene. The results, then, were haphazard, and attempts to explain them, either generally, or particularly, often tell little. Local politicians made their choices based upon their own necessities, born of the national scene as distilled through the local politics. I could give particulars, if you like, such as Borah of Idaho, Hadley of Missouiri, or, as you suggested, La Follette of Wisconsin.
Ultimately, the national vote totals tell us that the old Republican majority held. I think there was a ton of cross-voting, but I also think it cancelled itself out. What I find so intriguing about the tariff is that it is the ONLY issue that year by which the traditional votes were aligned by the usual divisions. Every other issue was split either Wilson-TR, Taft-TR, or Wilson-Taft, such as the trusts, the recall, and foreign policy. TR's only hope was to generate enough hype to steal enough Wilson and Taft voters to push him over the top. The strategy backfired, for his excessive rhetoric scared enough Republican conservatives to Taft, and possibly as many Democrat conservatives to Taft as liberal Republicans went for Wilson.
It's all so confusing...
Bill Clinton followed by Jimmy Carter.
Clinton presided over the ruination of our national image but more and more I think all congress men and women are crooked as can be too.
Oh, and another variable we mustn't forget, and one that defies analysis, is the Roosevelt shooting that October. Taft had momentum through that September as manifested by some prelimary election results in New England that were cut short by the event and by Taft's own halt of his campaign in reaction to it. By that time TR's campaign had become a parody of itself, and he was fodder for satire and ridicule. The shooting and his subsequent speech turned the cartoons to live footage, and the nation went crazy over it. It probably attracted as many votes for TR as anything else that year.
Without Jimmy the Impotent's anemic response to the seizure of our embassy and the holding of American citizens for over 400 days, today's Middle East would be far different.
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