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Did Lincoln win a majority? Did Clinton?
I notice that you guys are so high and mighty on George Bush...that he's a great president. That you call democrats .."demoncrats" (how childish) But riddle me this....if Bush is such a better president than Kerry ever will be.....why is this election so close? You would think that if he was that much better this would be a landslide. But it's not.
I'm not endorsing either guy...cause politics is not a part of my life, but if he really is so much better...he'd be crushing his opponent on everything from the debates to the pre-election polls.
Did Lincoln win a majority? Did Clinton?
Is Bush also running against a third (or even 4th in the case of Lincoln) party Candidate?Did Lincoln win a majority? Did Clinton?
Doesn't matter. Count Nader if you like. The point is that they didn't need a majority of actual voters voting for them to be considered as great presidents.
Secondly, I wouldn't rank Bush43 as a great president or a poor president. Definitely a better choice at this point than Kerry, no doubt.
So you're saying Clinton was a great President? Ooh don't let Yonivore hear you.
BTW if he is definitely a better choice at this point...then why isn't he winning all the debates, all the pre-election polls. Like I said, if he was as you say "defintely the better choice" then this election wouldn't be so close.
Why didn't prior "great presidents" garner a majority of the popular vote? I disagree with the premise of your assertion.
I only said that Clinton was regarded as a "great president" not that I thought he was one. Come to think of it, what made Clinton "great" was his willingness to sell out his political base.
If you have a disagreement with Yonivore, please address it to him.
It matters if you want your analogy to mean anything.Doesn't matter. Count Nader if you like. The point is that they didn't need a majority of actual voters voting for them to be considered as great presidents.
Actually it matters for yours.
Like I said Marcus...if he's "definitely a better choice" then why is this election so close?
Like I said, one does not need to win an epic majority of the electorate, or even a majority at all, in order to be considered to be a "great president."
Both Kennedy and Truman won their offices with less than 50% of the popular vote. In Kennedy's case his winning margin as a % of the popular vote was 0.2%. According to your argument neither man could ever be considered to be a "great president."
Secondly, again, in my opinion Bush43 is not a great president. However, I do think he is preferable to Kerry. The reasons why I do not think he is a "great president" have scant to do with his level of support in the electorate.
If you want someone to defend the claim that Bush is a "great president", again, ask Yonivore.
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 10-23-2004 at 06:17 PM.
Like I said..I'm not asking you to defend that...I know you're not saying Bush is a great president.
But you say he's "definitely a better choice" if it's such a clear cut decision...the election wouldn't be so close.
Again see Truman, Kennedy, Clinton, etc..
If only I made one...
Lincoln, Clinton and Kennedy each won their close elections in their first term. Lincoln followed that up with a decisive re-election in 1864. LBJ rode Kennedy's ticket to one of the most lopsided elections in Presidential History, and Clinton soundly defeated Dole in 96 for re-election. Truman's election is a decent analogy as he was the incubant, but he also faced a third party candidate who actually carried 4 states and 39 electoral votes.
Alas, Duff's question was not why Bush doesn't appear to have 50.01% of the popular vote, it was why Bush is not decisively ahead of his only viable candidate, Kerry. With the exception of Kennedy, none of the other elections were that close (Truman was relatively close, but he still beat Dewey by 4.5 points, Lincoln's closest compe or was 10.5 points back, and Clinton beat Bush 1 by 5.5 points).
All the Presidents (or their VP's in the case of an assassination - and by mentioning them in this thread, it is presumed you are nominating them as Great) you mentioned managed to soundly defeat their opponent when up for re-election, presumably after voters were able to get a feel for that President's ability to do the job.
Duff's question is a valid one, if Bush is a great, or even good, President, then he should be able to beat a guy like John Kerry by more than a point in his bid for re-election.
Clinton won "decisively" yet failed to garner a majority in his second campaign. Truman was president for a significant period of time before his 1948 campaign. Woodrow Wilson is another who failed to hit a majority in his second campaign.
Yeah, LBJ won in 1964, partly on sympathy and partly on successfully demonizing his candidate who admittedly opted to take some rather strident positions. Not exactly the best historical example. If you feel that is appropriate then I give you Calvin Coolidge's win in 1924. It was rather decisive. Historians regard him as a great president. No doubt. Lest we forget Tricky , who in 1972 surpassed Lincoln's 1864 winning margin and was a tenth of a percent off of FDR's 1936 winning popular vote precentage.
And of course we do not yet know what the results of this election will be. Seems like among the other things the original post provided was a bit of premature speculation.
Expecting contemporaries to accurately recognize greatness is a fool's errand or perhaps Coolidge and Nixon were great presidents after all.
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 10-23-2004 at 09:57 PM.
Duff, I don't know that Bush is the greatest president ever but he's better than his compe ion.
On the greatness debate...
If Bush does get elected it will be the first time in history a President who lost the popular vote, to become President, was re-elected.
So I'd say that just getting re-elected sets him apart from any other re-elected President...since he will have had less support to begin with than any of them. Historically these Electoral College Presidents have been unpopular, despised, and accused of being corrupt, from the instant they were elected, even though at least 1 of them did an excellent job as President.
I mean you have to look at it like this...if Bush does get re-elected by winning the popular vote..he'll be more popular now than he was in his first term. That means he won over voters as President...any President who does that is a successful President. Going from not being the choice of the majority, to being the choice of the majority, is a unique and amazing achievement among Presidents.
As for greatness....that's for history to decide.
When Regan left office he was popular...but we didn't learn how great he was as President, until he was well out of office. It was only then that even Democrats had to admit he succeeded in his ultimate goal...to beat the Soviet Union. Bill Clinton was slated to go down as arguably the greatest ever in the eyes of many Americans...until Sept 11th, 2001...which was born during his administration.
Bush will be similar to Regan..really he's got nowhere to go but up...if we end up bring lasting peace to the Middle-East...Bush and Blair are going to be remembered as great leaders for making a corageous move than went totally against popular wold opinion.
I'd say the chances are good that what Bush is doing in the middle-east is going to be more effective than what Europe has been doing over there for the last 100 years...trying to get despots to make peace. And we have already tried that approach for quite a while now ourselves. The power in the middle east is in the hands of people who do not want peace and are incapable of producing it.
Remember...the middle-east hole we have now is the creation of Europe. 100%. Why anyone thinks we should keep following their lead...when it hasn't worked for a 100 years and when Europe couldn't even make peace with itself without us....I don't know. I just don't know where people get these ideas from. But negotiating with corrupt despots was never going to produce peace. It just wasn't...it would have worked by now by now if it was going to work.
This approach might not work either...but there's a pretty good track record of legitimate Democracies, with popularly elected governments, not governments that came to power in a coup by gunpoint, bringing stability and peace to regions of the World...see Europe.
Last edited by whottt; 10-23-2004 at 10:52 PM.
Go back to The Club Duff and discuss music.....something you know something about!
Indeed. Some "great presidents" failed to register their "greatness" with the electorate whereas some presidents that history has judged to be failures attained significant popular vote wins. Also, I feel, "greatness" is ultimately decided on the basis of the vision of the eye of the beholder.As for greatness....that's for history to decide.
History will be the judge. Right now the Bush administration has been defined by Bush's response to the 9/11 attacks. Bush's decision to invade Iraq is what I feel really defines this election. It was a controversial decision, a bold decision. If the outcome of his aggressive anti-Islamofascist terrorism policy is generally successful, I think that history will be forced to acknowledge that. It might be what some future historians deem to have been an example of strong presidential leadership. (This is precisely why I feel that going by election results is not really the best measure of greatness, for it certainly eliminates the possibility of a president making an unpopular, yet correct and important decision). As we've seen in the past "great presidents" were not necessarily dominant re-election candidates in American history. I don't think that Bush will be regarded as a great president, primarily for his fiscal policies and the fact that most historians and other pontificators on American presidential leadership tend to have a liberal-left point of view (if you think the government should be active in dealing with X social problem then you probably aren't going to have good things to say about a GOP conservative president).
In the last quarter century there have been two in bent presidents standing for re-election who were widely regarded as failures: Carter and Bush41. Both men had roughly 60% of the electorate vote for something other than a continuation of their administrations. If you are going to assert that presidential greatness or failure is determined by one's performance in a re-election campaign then I think both Carter and Bush41 provide a good recent standard for presidential failure. Even the most favorable poll results for Kerry today do not indicate that Bush43 will have such a poor performance. Based on that standard, Bush43 is certainly not a failure. If he does get between 48 to 51% of the popular vote as the polling I've seen suggests, then I think that would be more indicative of the electorate viewing him as a good president than a poor one.
Of course, that is if you want to judge the quality of a president simply on their popular vote performance in a re-election campaign. And that, again, is rife with the problems that I have pointed out in this post and above in the thread.
History will be judge of the quality of George W. Bush's leadership, not the vote tallies from this election.
Last edited by Marcus Bryant; 10-24-2004 at 11:27 AM.
I'm not talking about him being the greatest president ever...but as you say..."he's better than his compe ion".....if he is then why is the election so close?
Duff...you must have asked "why is the election so close" a hundred times and it is begging for an answer. Here it comes.....because there are a lot of dumb f****** people out there!
Measuring the greatness of a president has little to do with what kind of support he gets at the polls. People vote on a candidate's willingness to address concerns that are important to them. But a candidate's willingness to take on these concerns tells us little about his ability to steer the nation in the right direction.
In reality, a third party candidate could be "better than his compe ion." It's hard to imagine that Nader or Badnarik would steer the country astray any worse than, say, Kerry or Bush, but they won't get many votes.
A candidate's popularity and ability to do a great job really should be considered separately. You're assuming that popularity translates into greatness, and that's a huge mistake to make.
Asshole. It's an honest question and an interesting discussion. Belittling somebody is no way to convince them of your point of view. It seems more like an attempt to convince people who already agree with you that your is proportionate in size to your ego.Go back to The Club Duff and discuss music.....something you know something about!
There are posters who, right or wrong, think before they type; and there are posters who are knee-jerk bandwagon twits. Look at your contributions to this discussion, compare them to Scott, MB, or Whott and tell me which one you are.
Is that really why you think Bush is ahead on some polls because they are dumb enough to vote for him?Duff...you must have asked "why is the election so close" a hundred times and it is begging for an answer. Here it comes.....because there are a lot of dumb f****** people out there!
I tend to agree but you reall shouldn't be so hard on the Bush supporters.
Dammit, I know there's a joke in there somewhere.
Ummm...asshole?
Shoot me for being honest Joe. I just call it like it is.
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