I just heard former Senator John Danforth talk about GHWBush. The rafio interviewer hypothethized that Dana Carvey’s bits on Saturday Night Live hurt his election. Senator Danforth said no not at all, it was fiscally conservative Republicans who supported Ross Perot, the beginnings of the Tea Party, that took him down.
Ross Perot got so many votes!! We tend to forget that and it is very relevant in discussion of three party presidential elections.
Interesting that we all see the world through our own, sometimes warped, lenses. I saw no such self-celebration; I saw a consummate gentleman. He wasn't "classic" only because he wasn't white. And he certainly was the opposite of a public embarrassment.
And I think "identity politics" is a fiction and a Fox talking point. Unless you consider Evangelicals, right-to-lifers, Big Money, white nationalists/bigots, Pharma, Big Oil, gun lovers, etc. as "identities," which of course the right doesn't.
Some useful perspective.
HW was a bona fide war hero; I'll give him that. A holdover from a time when patricians still felt some sense of obligation to lead from the front.
But the celebration of his supposed good qualities--overdone as usual by the news media--needs to be kept in context. The Republican Party has succeeded in setting the ethical bar so abysmally low that almost anyone starts to look good, and he played as much a role as anyone in that. Saying he wasn't Donald Trump--or for that matter, his own son--is not exactly high praise.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein
to the extent that it really was people voting disgust with economics maybe. But this is probably overstated as a percent of the Trump voters. But yes the economy was in deep recession (depression is far more accurate) for years and years and only the bankers got bailed out. That was truly obscene and criminal really. There was extension of unemployment though. And people remember that if they had to go through it. This is somewhat the legacy of Bill Clinton too, of NAFTA etc., but it was much more directly the fallout of the great recession and insufficient programs for ordinary people.Larry Elder said this back in 2016: "The legacy of Barack Obama is Donald Trump."
Also of course some people back-lashed against a black man in the white house. Unlike the former there really is no legitimate basis to that so what can you say, that this was a real factor is shown by how many openly racist people have run recently and won. Add that to people who were never ever going to vote Dem anyway just your usual Republican base, and those who just liked Trumps authoritarian rich famous strongman bent - and there you go.
Trees don't grow on money
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