Personally I find Robert LaFollette’s support fo eugenics to be troublesome… that being said, I’m aware it was a fairly popular mainstream concept in that period.
Paul started as a big Reagan supporter, however he became greatly in the course of his presidency.
He accused Reagan of lying about his small government claims, that in reality he was the embodiment of big government. Presiding over massive budget deficits, noting how domestic spending had actually increased under him, being a big interventionist and with illegitimate actions in Nicaragua and Honduras, expanding the government, etc. by 1987 Paul actually abandoned the Republican party in disillusionment.
Paul did change his tune when he was running for the GOP nomination… that being said, one cannot help but suspect Reagan’s colossal stature within the party must have played an influence in this decision.
2024 was always going to be an uphill battle, but still… I don’t think it’s controversial to say Kamala Harris did particularly bad, losing all swing states.
Here are some of the names considered:
Elizabeth Warren, Susan Rice, Gretchen Whitmer, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Ro Khanna, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Kyrsten Sinema, Pete Buttigieg, Andrew Cuomo, Josh Shapiro, Michelle Obama, Laura Kelly, Kirsten Gillibran and Condoleezza Rice.
Inspired by a 2007 New York Times Op-Ed by Jonathan Rosenbaum entitled Scenes from an Overrated Career, in which he fiercely attacks Ingmar Bergman… which, fair enough, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
However there is one passage that had me absolutely cackling:
“mainly blond, blue-eyed cast members became a brand to be adopted and emulated.”
Lmao what? You telling me this Swedish filmmaker who worked mainly in the 50s and 60s… didn’t have the most racially diverse casts? And how exactly did this become a brand to be adopted and emulated?
And the funniest part is he spends the whole article raving about Dreyer and Bresson in comparison to Bergman!
In 1956, while Stevenson was going through his second presidential run, Bobby Kennedy joined in to aid the campaign and learn some lessons. But things turned sour. In his own words:
“I thought it was ghastly. It was poorly organized...my feeling was that he had no rapport with his audience – no comprehension of what campaigning required, no ability to make decisions...In 1952 I had been crazy about him...Then I spent six weeks with him on the campaign and he destroyed it all.”
Kennedy actually ended up voting for Eisenhower.
For their part, Stevenson and his camp equally resented Kennedy, viewing him as arrogant and self-righteous.
This drama would eventually spill over to the 1960 election tension that occurred between JFK and Stevenson.
Was Kennedy right to feel this feel this way? Or was he being overtly arrogant and judgmental?
I remember being really surprised that during his entire political career, Robert McNamara was affiliated to the Republican Party, only switching later in life during the Carter years.
Now granted, McNamara was a part of the moderate Eisenhower wing of the party… but still, it was odd for me considering how closely associated he is to that whole Kennedy-Johnson era.
Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie discussed the possibility that once peace came about, they could try forming a new liberal party that would combine the more leftist elements and members of both Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately things turned sour after there were leaks to the press, with Willkie feeling he had been manipulated, despite FDR’s attempts for conciliation.
Could this party have realistically worked then, or at some more future point in history?
This is from a 2013’s CounterPunch article written by Nader, entitled Militarizing the State Department:
“Because Defense Secretary Robert Gates was openly cool to the drum beats for war on Libya, Clinton took over and choreographed the NATO ouster of... Muammar al-Gaddafi, long after he had given up his mass destruction weaponry and was working to re-kindle relations with the U.S. government and global energy corporations. Libya is now in a disastrous warlord state-of-chaos...
Time and again, Hillary Clinton’s belligerence exceeded that of Obama’s Secretaries of Defense. From her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee to her tenure at the State Department, Hillary Clinton sought to prove that she could be just as tough as the militaristic civilian men whose circle she entered. Throughout her four years it was Generalissima Clinton, expanding the American Empire at large.”
James Stockdale being a war hero and philosopher, and Pat Choate an economist. Curious choices, especially considering Perot himself lacked political experience.
Now I’m aware that as a third party candidate, his choices would naturally be more limited, but still there must have been at least some former Rep…
It just feel really strange and tone deaf considering at this point (1968-69) everyone had accepted Vietnam was a failure, most of all LBJ himself. Like what was he aiming to accomplish here?
To combat illegal consumption during Prohibition, the Coolidge administration mandated they add toxic substances like benzene, methanol, and pyridine to alcohol produced for industrial use.
This of course led to the deaths and serious injuries of numerous people.
So I recently stumbled unto this quote by Chesterton regarding Wilde, from 1909's Daily News:
"He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs. ... Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the public. They professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois. The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes. ... One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization."
I must confess my first instinct was one of dismissal. The criticism struck me as weirdly personal, like there were less centered on the artistry, and moreso a projection of Chesterton's own judgment regarding the type of person Wilde was.
That being said, the more I've thought about it, the more intrigued I am by this quote, especially after reading more about his overall views on Wilde. It's this strange mixture of deep scorn and begrudging respect that Chesterton seems to struggle with.
So I'm curious to hear other perspectives on this.
As far as I’m aware, in modern history we have had only 3 real attempts at creating a bipartisan presidential ticket: 1968 Humphrey and Rockefeller, 2004 Kerry and McCain, 2008 McCain and Lieberman. Of course none of them worked out in the end.
This made me curious about what tickets could have actually worked, in the sense of broadening the appeal while not alienating the party base too much.
Let’s say for whatever reason HW Bush didn’t take position. Who would be best, both in terms of being VP, and more importantly, as a 1988 presidential candidate and President.
Some of the names considered include Donald Rumsfeld, Jack Kemp, John Connally, Howard Baker, Paul Laxalt, Anne Armstrong, Guy Vander Jagt and Richard Lugar.