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Trump vs. Carter vs. George H.W. Bush
Three presidents in my lifetime were elected to one term but were not re-elected. I will leave out questions of voting fraud in 2020. My recollection is that both Carter and HW quickly became political nonentities. The Reagan administration did not fear a Carter comeback in 1984 and the same was true for Clinton and HW. Yet Trump is much discussed even though he’s much older than the other two former presidents. The Media, Democrats (yup, there’s not much difference) and NTers continue to be obsessed with him. Perhaps the reason is that Trump, pre-Covid, was a very successful president. The same could not be said for the other two. The Iran hostage crisis hurt Carter but his economic record was poor throughout his presidency. Bush alienated his base by breaking his “no new taxes” promise. The military victory in Kuwait faded rapidly when a recession hit.
The Biden presidency looks like it will be a catastrophic failure. His VP is likely to succeed him soon. Harris flamed out quickly as a candidate and has shown no particular political skills. The kudos she will get as the first female president will only carry her so far. We can’t know what physical condition Trump will be in three years from now, but he’s likely to be a kingmaker if he chooses not to run. That was not the case with Carter or HW. So Trump remains a major political force. It’s possible that three years from now even major non Bill Kristol NTers will agree that they miss him.
Published in Politics
I remember, or maybe mis-remember, that G. H. W. Bush was less than four months into his term when articles started appearing claiming that he lacked focus and that his administration was drifting. The USSR was no longer a major threat and the old boy didn’t seem to know what should be at the top of the list then.
And it did not help that, in the name of stability, he tried to prevent the crackup of the Soviets and yank defeat from the jaws of victory. A CIA director for president? We must’ve been mad.
This is 13 minutes of Victor Davis Hanson. Must listen.
https://audioboom.com/posts/7840715-he-s-going-to-be-very-radical-it-s-his-way-of-saying-i-m-more-iconic-than-obama-ever-was
https://audioboom.com/posts/7840716-september-17-1939-berlin-and-moscow-april-17-2021-beijing-and-moscow-vdhanson-hooverinst?playlist_direction=forward
It would be interesting to study Grover Cleveland and see if there are any parallels to copy. I don’t remember how badly he lost his relection. Fortunately, Troy Senik is in the process of writing a book on Grover.
I don’t think Trump would be the best candidate in 2024, but if candidates copy his positives and learn from his mistakes they could bode well. Gov. DeSantis seems to be doing well in that regard. A Trump endorsement should have a positive influence.
Thus the hit piece by 60 minutes on DeSantis, they must start early to destroy him lest he lead a sweep in 2024. We can only hope it backfires.
Cleveland’s reelection loss wasn’t bad at all. In fact, he won the popular vote. It came down to losing a couple of key swing states (New York and Indiana).
Cleveland’s comeback owed in large part to the fact that Benjamin Harrison reversed him on almost all of the major policy initiatives of his administration, at least on the fiscal side. The consequences of those decisions went a long way towards getting Cleveland reelected.
Cleveland vetoed pensions for Civil War veterans left and right in his first term because the system had become porous and there were lots of fraudulent claims. Harrison threw the floodgates open and ended up presiding over the first Congress to spend over a billion dollars, which alarmed the public.
Cleveland arrested the expanded use of silver in the money supply, which he was worried would undermine the gold standard. Harrison signed off an expansion of silver, which played a significant role in creating the Panic of 1893, America’s worst economic downturn until The Great Depression (Cleveland had the misfortune of inheriting it when he came back to office).
Most importantly for purposes of his reelection, Cleveland had made cutting tariffs one of the central issues of his first term (in the late 19th century tariff rates were so central to federal revenue that arguing about them was the equivalent of arguing about income tax rates today). The issue had divided Democrats in Cleveland’s first term, but the enactment of the McKinley Tariff during the Harrison Administration was so clearly excessive that it unified Democrats behind the Cleveland position and made him seem like a visionary.
One big contrast between Cleveland and Trump: Cleveland represented the last gasp of a dying ideology within his party. He was the last classical liberal Democrat. By the middle of his second term it had become clear that he was getting overtaken by William Jennings Bryan and the populist wing of the party (Bryan would end up being the Democrats’ presidential nominee in three of the next four elections). Trump is closer to Bryan in representing an ideological inflection point. If we’re using a contemporary analogy (which always runs the risk of imprecision), the best way to think about Cleveland is ‘What if Mitt Romney was leading a party that was already halfway down the road to Trumpism?’
Wonder how NTers are going to react to DeSantis being the 2024 nominee.
The woke media seem to be doing their best to bring the guy down and I expect the same from NT and NAT. Unless he publicly turns against Trump, and I don’t think he will, the NT and NAT twits will take their marbles and go home. They’d rather have four more years of Harris.
Saw a guy on Twitter claiming that he was a Never Trumper and is staking his claim to already being Never DeSantis. I don’t remember who it was. I don’t think it was anyone big and was only in my timeline because people I follow were taking him to task, saying just call yourself a Democrat at this point.