Opinion of Bill Clinton

[Mr. Smith]

FF for stopping Reagan Part IV

Anyway, Billy's just a Dwight Eisenhower in the middle of the Reaganomics Era...once the Tea Party and Libertarian wings feud meets the inevitable and allows an actual Liberal back into office.... it'll be the right-wing deifying Clinton.

And Democrats by that point will rightly quietly try to downplay him, the same way the GOP don't talk about Eisenhower much at all.

[Mr. Smith]

I mean, a fair way to measure how a president expanded a party's coalition is if he carried a state that went for the other party in the previous election, and stayed with his party until the present day. For example, George W. Bush definitely brought Arkansas into the Republican coalition. In 1996, it voted Democratic, but Bush flipped it, and it's remained GOP ever since.

By that standard, for the Democrats, we have-

Johnson 1964 - DC (3 present-day electoral votes) total: 3
Carter 1976 - MN (10) total: 10
Dukakis 1988 - MA (11), RI (4), NY (29), WI (10), WA (12), OR (7), HI (4) total: 77
Clinton 1992 - ME (4), VT (3), CT (7), NJ (14), PA (20), DE (3), MD (10), MI (16), IL (20), CA (55) total: 152
Obama 2008 - VA (13), FL (29), OH (20), IA (7), CO (9), NM (5), NV (6), NH (4) total: 92

The Clinton transformation clearly is what this country competitive for two parties again.

Minnesota was already solidly Democratic having only yielding to GOP for Eisenhower. A case for Truman or Kennedy? Maybe

But to claim Carter brought Minnesota in is just laughable,...Carter won an artificial victory with the last of old coalitions.

[Mr. Smith]

HP (D). No need to go over the list of reasons.

Although, the idea that Obama is "better" is nonsense. They were roughly the same politically, with Obama being even worse on foreign policy.

In 1992, the media ignored all the allegations of Clinton's criminal past in Arkansas (rape, murder, drug trafficking, ...) because he was "teh good Southern moderate honey boy".

I think the fact George Sr. had similar accusations was the real reason for the silence.

Yeah, that's right, two sides of the same coin.

It works out that way quite often.