Poll: Who wins in 2012?

[pbrower2a]

Incumbents have won 13 of the last 18 elections (which goes back to 1900). Losers:

1. William Howard Taft -- temperamentally unsuited to the Presidency.

2. Herbert Hoover -- messed-up economy.

3. Gerald Ford -- entered the Presidency through the back door and was barely defeated in his re-election bid.

4. Jimmy Carter --  Hard luck, bad economy and the Iranian hostage situation. Got caught in a political transition from the Sough voting Democratic as a block one last time to a norm in which the South usually voted Republican. An independent candidate drew away voters who would never have voted for Ronald Reagan.

5. George H. W. Bush -- he had no idea of what to do with the Presidency in a second term.

Heck, George W. Bush and Calvin Coolidge got re-elected despite two of the weakest Presidencies ever... Obama is a much stronger President than either of those.

[pbrower2a]

Incumbents have won 13 of the last 18 elections (which goes back to 1900). Losers:

1. William Howard Taft -- temperamentally unsuited to the Presidency.

2. Herbert Hoover -- messed-up economy.

3. Gerald Ford -- entered the Presidency through the back door and was barely defeated in his re-election bid.

4. Jimmy Carter --  Hard luck, bad economy and the Iranian hostage situation. Got caught in a political transition from the Sough voting Democratic as a block one last time to a norm in which the South usually voted Republican. An independent candidate drew away voters who would never have voted for Ronald Reagan.

5. George H. W. Bush -- he had no idea of what to do with the Presidency in a second term.

Heck, George W. Bush and Calvin Coolidge got re-elected despite two of the weakest Presidencies ever... Obama is a much stronger President than either of those.

Are you stupid?

Coolidge may have been popular at the time, but I'm going on a historical assessment of the Presidents. Coolidge was a ticking time-bomb of a President who fostered calamities that would explode after the end of his Presidency. The speculative boom of the 1920s has obvious parallels to the one of recent years -- except that it was more in securities than in real estate. Coolidge did nothing to mute a stock market bubble that began when he was President. Hoover had been President for only six months at the time of the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

Add to that, Hoover rigidly enforced German reparations payments when the country was undergoing hyperinflation. German politicians can get some fault for deciding to inflate their way out of war debt, but Coolidge had his role. It's worth remembering that in 1932 both Germany and the United States were ready for major change in political life. We got the Second Lincoln; the Germans (barely) got the Antichrist. Some relaxation of the reparation regime might have made a huge difference in world history.  

The dangerous 1915 KKK reached its peak during the second term of Calvin Coolidge.  

Calvin Coolidge is remembered for practically no signature reforms of American life -- but for a boom that would eventually go bust. You can contrast him to two peacetime Republican Presidents -- TR and Eisenhower -- and those two (who were great or near-great) utterly dwarf him.  

[pbrower2a]

The dangerous 1915 KKK reached its peak during the second term of Calvin Coolidge.  

Your logic here fails so hard.
This is just as pathetic as what I've seen from many blowhard far right conservatives. I mean really pbrower, I didn't expect such a fail of an argument to be used by you.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about to put it into better perspective:

Nazi Germany reached its peak during the second and third terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Just because Group X grows the most while Leader A leads B country doesn't mean that Leader A is most responsible for the growth of Group X.

Here's another example (a bit more fun):

Progressive Rock reached its peak during Nixon's second term.
See, those two have little to do with each other, yet this is the kind of argument you are employing in the quote. The idea that Richard Nixon was responsible for the popularity of Progressive Rock is crazy, so is the idea that Calvin Coolidge is responsible for the rise of the KKK.

I tell you if James Cox or John W. Davis were presidents during this era the KKK would be just as strong, if not stronger (if Davis was president). I am not denying that the KKK was popular amongst Republicans in the Midwest, but their strength at the time was due to environment and not just because one guy sat in the Oval Office. The president is not f***ing god and can not dictate the direction of society, there are other factors present.

OK, OK, OK. There's a huge difference between the KKK and progressive rock; the KKK killed people, and progressive rock didn't. Coolidge didn't encourage people to join the Klan, but he didn't tell people to leave it. Heck, bootleggers killed more people than did the Klan.

Coolidge may not have been a corrupt, reckless, and dishonest man, but he was certainly unmemorable for any noteworthy achievements. Minority rights? He wasn't called Silent Cal without cause. Economic achievements? He presided over the most destructive bubble in American history.

Coolidge (like Dubya) demonstrates that a President with few achievements can be re-elected (or in his case he could be said to have been said elected to his then-current office) -- and the issue at hand is that 13 incumbent Presidents won election and 5 didn't.  That is no insignificant statistic. Whether it is continuing a term to which he was originally elected President or a term that resulted from succession of a President who died in office or resigned is not my consideration. 

I wasn't talking about Cox (how could he have been worse than Harding?) or Davis any more than I was talking about Thomas Dewey or Adlai Stevenson.

[pbrower2a]

Coolidge may have been popular at the time, but I'm going on a historical assessment of the Presidents. Coolidge was a ticking time-bomb of a President who fostered calamities that would explode after the end of his Presidency. The speculative boom of the 1920s has obvious parallels to the one of recent years -- except that it was more in securities than in real estate. Coolidge did nothing to mute a stock market bubble that began when he was President. Hoover had been President for only six months at the time of the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

The president is not in control of the business cycle. The Federal Reserve set the conditions up for a bust. It was the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations that then proceeded to turn an isolated crash into the Great Depression. Had Harding-Coolidge policy been adhered to, there would have been no Great Depression.

Maybe not the President, but certainly the political culture. During the 1920s, productivity rose faster than wages. Such itself creates increasing economic inequality, and in the end the super-rich who get the gains can't spend enough to prevent the decline of the economy.  Much the same happened in this decade; in the 1920s the cause of productivity outstripping wages was  the electrification of factories; in this decade it was the use of computers that  made business able to do more work with fewer employees. As a symptom of the trend the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality) for income in the US rose to the high 40s, the highest that it had been since... 1929!

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Wait, the Germans were the ones who got FDR?[/quote]

Take a look at any US dime minted since 1946 for a clue. You know exactly who I mean by the Antichrist -- and he barely got a chance to wield power, and he milked that chance to establish one of the most vicious despotisms in human history. Hitler's Nazi Party was bankrupt, and his political support was beginning to shrink when some fools chose to let him get power.

I concede that Lincoln and Hitler had one thing in common -- death at age 56  by a gunshot wound to the head from a madman at or near the end of the war for which he is best known.   

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TR and Eisenhower as "peacetime" presidents? Please, you clearly haven't gotten a clue.

(Coolidge was still better than either of them, by the way)
[/quote]

Really?

Theodore Roosevelt is consistently considered one of our greatest Presidents, Eisenhower  is well above average in all but one scholarly poll taken two years after he left the Presidency, and Coolidge is on the borderline of the worst.

[pbrower2a]

Maybe not the President, but certainly the political culture. During the 1920s, productivity rose faster than wages. Such itself creates increasing economic inequality, and in the end the super-rich who get the gains can't spend enough to prevent the decline of the economy.  Much the same happened in this decade; in the 1920s the cause of productivity outstripping wages was  the electrification of factories; in this decade it was the use of computers that  made business able to do more work with fewer employees. As a symptom of the trend the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality) for income in the US rose to the high 40s, the highest that it had been since... 1929!

The blame for the initial stock market crash lies squarely upon the Federal Reserve. Coolidge is only guilty insofar as he failed to abolish the Fed.

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Hmm, is this Jeopardy? Who is Roosevelt? Or is it Lincoln?

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They were also both fascistic totalitarian megalomaniacs who started wars that killed lots of people.

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Yes, really. Thanks for the Wikipedia link making it apparent you don't think for yourself.

What's wrong with relying upon Wikipedia for objective treatment of history? What is my alternative -- to rely upon my own authority? I have no such authority.

Does anyone have a problem with the idea that Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were two of our better peacetime Presidents and that Calvin Coolidge was not one of the best? I well know that there is some controversy, but nobody is going to claim that Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan are among the greatest Presidents.  

[pbrower2a]

If it takes some saber-rattling to stop a war, then by all means mobilize troops and show the fleet. Pure pacifism has never stopped a war.