Running on a Democratic Party platform that made him sound like Grover Cleveland, which would have been great, Roosevelt instead was an unprincipled opportunist who had no intention of letting any tradition or precept of American government, or the Constitution, stand in the way of doing whatever seemed like a good idea at the moment. Mostly what seemed like a good idea was to continue Hoover's policy of driving up wages, which then kept unemployment above ten percent, and mostly above fifteen percent, for the rest of the decade. Thus, we have the rather awkward but undeniable truth that the beloved and celebrated New Deal failed to end the Great Depression, which was supposedly what it was for. Also, the other kind of thing that seemed like a good idea was to move to a planned and controlled Command Economy, such as Wilson had experimented with in World War I, and whose good results could be seen in the Thirties in the economic successes of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia. Indeed, Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, would have liked nothing better than to have collectivized farming as Stalin was doing so successfully in Russia (or at least so he, and countless acolytes, said -- the millions of people starving to death were perhaps just the eggs that needed breaking to make the omlette). When Roosevelt's Fascist style industrial plan, the National Recovery Act (NRA), was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, Roosevelt realized that he needed a pliant Court to stand the Constitution on its head and give him the power that he wanted. His "court packing" scheme was a fiasco, but as time passed his judicial appointments accomplished what more direct methods had not:  Soon the Supreme Court was conceding to the Federal government whatever power it wanted, to spend money or regulate anything. In retrospect, these powers seem to have been used modestly, but there was no longer anything in principle to stand in the way of their being used to their logical extreme, which would be the path promoted by subsequent activist Democratic, and even some Republican, Presidents -- as, for instance, in the expansion of the bogus and tyrannical power of administrative agencies. Also, even though Roosevelt enjoyed widespread support, his power base was still in the Solid South, which had voted Democratic since Reconstruction, and Roosevelt did absolutely nothing to alienate Southern white Segregationists. Indeed, New Deal public works and anti-business initiatives fit in with the kind of Populist (quasi-Fascist) anti-capitalism that was prevalent among many of just those Segregationists (e.g. Huey Long). Nevertheless, tears in the increasingly threadbare New Deal began to occur. Unemployment was back up to twenty percent in 1938, and New Dealers actually lost control of Congress in the 1938 midterm elections (to a coalition of Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats). There is no telling how disaffected the public might have become with Roosevelt had it not been for a deus ex machina:  World War II and his death near the end made for the sanctification and apotheosis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The ironies of this outcome are multiple. First, the wartime economic policy of frozen wages and fiat money inflation to pay for the war absolutely reversed the persistent policy of a whole decade, since Hoover, to drive up wages. Real wages now went down to so low a level that when the war ended, even with millions of men suddenly demobilized, unemployment in 1946 and 1947 was only 3.9 percent, lower any anyone in the Nineties even thinks is possible. Thus, World War II destroyed the economics of the New Deal, even as people thought that the wartime Command features of the economy were pretty much the same sort of thing. The other irony is the credit Roosevelt gets for a political naiveté on the international stage that makes even Wilson look good:  Roosevelt actually liked "Uncle Joe" Stalin, thought he understood him and could deal with him, and, all in all, saw Soviet Russia as a benign and democratic system. This credulous ignorance and folly endears him, of course, to the Left, from then to now, but it condemned Eastern Europe to forty-five years of tyranny, poverty, and murder, with a future still clouded by the expectations of people to have everything done for them. Thus, poor Poland, whose invasion by both Germany and Russia in 1939 started World War II, was left by the agreement of a sick and failing Roosevelt at Yalta, with Soviet spies at his side, to the non-existent mercy of Russia after the war was over. The whole grim and horrible record of Roosevelt's Presidency, of failure and deception, both domestic and foreign, of the end of Constitutional government, of the creation of the wholesale business of the Federal government to hand out subsidies and payoffs to large scale political constituencies, is nevertheless commonly viewed as the greatest achievement of America in the Twentieth Century, as the beginning of a new era to repudiate all the evils and failures of the old America. What the evils and failures of the old America were supposed to be, of course, was everything that made America different from countries like Britain, Germany, and France in Europe, everything that made America a place to which people flocked from supposedly more "progressive" regimes. That being the case, it is not surprising that one continuing characteristic of "progressive" thought is still just, very simply, to despise everything about the United States. Thus, some school districts have decided that schools should not be named after George Washington, because he owned slaves. This kind of hatred of America is implicit in the continuing myth of the New Deal, which is the formative myth behind most political trends for the rest of the century.

If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday -- H.L. Mencken

... the greatest fraud this country has ever known. An amusing and charming fellow but a man entirely without a conscience.... Roosevelt was the perfect politician -- H.L. Mencken, New York Sun, June 5, 1946

Two-thirds mush and one third Eleanor. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth

The Roosevelts & Delanos

Philippines Commonwealth, 1935

Harry Truman mitigated some of the worse features of the New Deal. When it came to the economy, Truman did very little, which was just the right idea. For two years he also had a Republican Congress, but this does not explain all his inactivity -- while he could blame the rejection of a nationalized health care plan on the "do nothing" Republican Congress elected in 1946, it was not passed either by the Democrat Congress elected, with Truman himself, in 1948. The result, however, was prosperity not seen since the Twenties. The horrible lie that Soviet Russia was more economically successful than the United States was soon to be decisively exploded. At the same time, Truman awakened to the Soviet threat. It was already too late for much of Eastern Europe, and it may have always been too late for China, but Truman drew a line, built an Alliance, and stopped Stalin's plans to infiltrate, corrupt, and take over the rest of Europe. This alienated the Left, and turned Henry Wallace into a "progressive" candidate for President against Truman in 1948 -- endorsed even by Albert Einstein. At the same time Truman had desegregated the United States military. This alienated the Segregationists, who then formed a Dixicrat Party and ran Strom Thurmond (50 years later still a U.S. Senator) for President. This made things look very bad for Truman, and Thomas Dewey more or less assumed that he would win the election. He didn't. Truman, disliked by both the Left and the Dixicrats, must have been all right. Indeed, Truman had a blunt style that makes other politicians sound like the con-men they mostly are -- Truman said he really didn't "give 'em hell" in 1948, but he just told the truth and "they thought it was hell." And Truman also knew how to tend certain political alliances. His recognition of Israel virtually the minute it was created is often thought of as complete political cynicism (he is supposed to have said, "Show me the Arab voters"), but Truman was probably sincerely convinced of Zionism by his friends in the substantial Jewish community in Kansas City. Truman was just not a very cynical guy, though this move certainly did not hurt him on election day. Nevertheless, soon things began to go wrong. Truman spent too much time playing catch up with the seriousness of the Soviet threat. He was genuinely surprised at Stalin's betrayals of post-war agreements, and incredulous that Americans might actually be spying for Russia right at the heart of our government. When Wittaker Chambers exposed Alger Hiss as a Communist and a Soviet spy, Truman called it a "red herring," and never quite got ahead of the issue that there were other Communists and spies in positions of trust and authority. It didn't help that Omar Bradley, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, decided to withhold from him the fact that Soviet spy networks had been exposed through the decryption of wartime cable traffic (the Venona project -- whose existence, however, was known to the Soviets, thanks to their spies). Then North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950. The Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project became public knowledge when the Rosenbergs were arrested. Convicted in 1951, they were executed, despite projests from incredulous "liberal" opinion, for giving atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. After a brilliant recovery in Korea by Douglas MacArthur, the war settled down into a miserable stalemate. The apparently wild charges of Joseph McCarthy began to appear reasonable to many people. Truman, stymied in Korea and haunted by the specter of Communist sympathizers in Roosevelt's government, began to lose popularity. Firing MacArthur for insubordination, although reasonable, was a very unpopular act. He decided not to run for President again in 1952. Although Truman was hammered at the time from the Right, by the scandals and failures of dealing with Communism, today he is mostly disparaged from the other direction, by the mostly Leftist historians of present academia. These worthies (although thoroughly discredited now by Russian sources) tend to blame the United States for the Cold War, and they must therefore blame Truman, who did stand up to Stalin -- recent "histories" of the Cold War by organizations like Cable News Network (CNN) are essentially continuations of Soviet propaganda, dismissing Truman as "naive" in foreign affairs. Nor did Truman have any grandiose economic or social schemes to destroy the economy or corrupt society. This means that trendy historians are more inclined to see Truman as a failure than, say, Wilson or Roosevelt. However, the truth is that Truman was no fool and no failure, no bigot and no opportunist. From the perspective of history, our estimation of him must rise, as it declines (or should) for the likes of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson.

The kind of government action that would be called for in a serious economic emergency would not be appropriate now. -- Harry S Truman (1949)

My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. -- Harry S Truman

Puerto Rico Commonwealth, 1952
Philippines Independent, 1946

The first professional military man to be elected on his war record since Ulysses S. Grant, Eisenhower's Presidency was more successful than Grant's -- and the first one since Grant's to begin assaulting Segregation again in the South. Eisenhower was, in fact, much better prepared to be President. While Grant was out fighting battles, Einsenhower, as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, operated at a rarified level of strategy and politics not unlike the duties of the President. Eisenhower as President tended to give people the impression of doing little, relaxing at golf, and often answered questions with double-talk. It now appears that this was largely an act. Eisenhower was accustomed to working behind the scenes, and so his agency in events was often concealed, like the Taoist ruler who is a "shadowy presence," and whose accomplishments strike people as having "happened naturally." What Eisenhower was then able to accomplish is impressive, both absolutely and especially in retrospect. Accepting stalement in Korea, Einsenhower quickly ended the war. Subsequently, Eisenhower both held the line against Communism and kept the country out of new wars. After the later disaster in Vietnam, Eisenhower's determination to avoid land wars in Asia appears as wisdom indeed. Similarly, the apparent excesses of anti-Communism were reigned in with the Senate censure of Joseph McCarthy, which Eisenhower seems to have coordinated, in 1954. Meanwhile, the domestic economy represented a return to "normalcy" not seen since 1929. Low inflation, low unemployment, balanced budgets, steady economic growth, and a falling poverty rate were all indicators of prosperty such as would not be combined in the same way for the rest of the century. The entire post-War Baby Boom generation grew up thinking that prosperity occurred naturally and was their birthright. For many, the Fifties consequently were a somewhat boring time of safety, happiness, and conformity. Not entirely boring, with the threat of the Bomb present to the minds of most adults, at least, and domestic disturbances like the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The intitiatives against Segregation that had begun under Truman continued and grew into a political movement under Eisenhower. Einsenhower's own appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, struck down Segregated schools in 1954, and Eisenhower had to call out the National Guard to preserve peace in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the same time, there was little hint that "Civil Rights" would later become an instrument of attacks upon freedom, private property, and Constitutional government, perpetrated by the Democrats and by Warren himself. Nevertheless, there was a deep flaw in the Presidency:  Eisenhower determined to accept the New Deal as a fait accompli. The prosperity of the Fifties then concealed the swindle of Social Security and the diseconomies that had been built into labor law and other Federal economic regulation. These problems, however, and the high tax rates maintained by Eisenhower (for the sensible purpose of paying down the National Debt from the War), hobbled the economy somewhat and resulted in two recessions during the decade. The last recession occurred just in time to hamper Vice-President Richard Nixon in his bid for the Presidency. Nixon's awkward personality, and a fair number of stolen votes, then passed the Presidency to John Kennedy. Eisenhower's fatherly tenure was not a case of inspiring leadership, but he got the country rather solidly on track, did the job, consolidated the anti-Communist cause and alliance, and did not tilt at what, at the time, would have seemed like windmills. What could be done with this, for good or ill, in the future, could not have been foreseen. -- The 48 star Flag flew for 47 years (1912-1959), the longest period for any of the 28 American Flags since 1775. The 49 star Flag only flew for 1 year (1959-1960). Although Alaska and Hawai'i were both admitted in 1959, Hawai'i was admitted after the Fourth of July that year, so the 50 star Flag was not raised until the Fourth in 1960. The 50 star Flag has now flown for more than 42 years (1960-2002).

+49. Alaska, 3 Jan 1959
+50. Hawai'i, 21 Aug 1959

A young, witty, and appealing President, and a genuine World War II hero from PT Boat action near New Georgia in the Solomons, who, with his wife Jackie and their two children, presided over what Jackie herself, after his assassination, called "Camelot." Although Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., may have made some of his money during Prohibition by rum running (perhaps, indeed, a mark in his favor -- today it all would be seized under tyrannical "civil forfeiture" laws), the Kennedy White House, more so than any time since, had a patrician aura of Old Money. Some of the dark side of this was apparent at the time, e.g. the Bay of Pigs invasion in which anti-Castro exiles were left to be slaughtered and captured on the beach after Kennedy backed out on providing them U.S. air cover. While this project was not Kennedy's idea in the first place, his clumsiness in dealing with it can be chalked up to "on the job training." What seemed to be his inexperience, however, led Castro and Khrushchev into thinking that they could get away with placing nuclear missles in Cuba. This "Cuban Missle Crisis" was handled rather better by Kennedy, and he seemed to find his geopolitical feet. More of the dark side of the Kennedy years emerged later. Some of it was political -- e.g. giving the go-ahead for the assassination of Ngo-Dinh Ðien in South Vietnam -- some of it was personal -- e.g. the extensive use of prostitutes by Kennedy. The most curious thing about the Kennedy legacy, however, is how it is that this dedicated Cold Warrior and Anti-Communist, who said in his inaugural speech that we were prepared to "pay any price, bear any burden" for the cause of Freedom, whose most famous statement, at the recently constructed Berlin Wall, was "I am a Berliner," and who was assassinated by a loser would-be-Communist, has become the endless project of Leftists (aided, we now know, by the KGB itself) who want to convert him into a crypto- or about-to-become Leftist himself, the victim of a diabolical conspiracy by the forces of the Right, the Pentagon, and Lyndon Johnson, who suspected, or knew, that Kennedy was about to abandon the South Vietnamese into the hands of the Communists. This seems to come from people who can't believe that someone so charming and appealing could disagree with them about Communism -- perhaps they really don't know that old Joe Kennedy was a great friend of old Joe McCarthy, who was quite welcome at the Hyannis Port Kennedy "compound." They later found Kennedy's brother Robert, who had been an attorney for McCarthy (who became his first child's godfather), agreeing with them rather more, but then he was assassinated by, of all things, a Palestinian, who, since he didn't fit into leftist demonology either, could not, either, have been the real assassin. Although the remaining Kennedy brother, Ted, then became a consistent advocate of socialism and anti-American causes in the U.S. Senate (fighting, also, the kind of tax cuts like what had been his brother's own brain child), John Kennedy's own children, Caroline and John Jr., chose to live private lives. After Jackie died in 1994, John Jr. founded a quasi-serious political magazine, George, but now himself has tragically died, in a private plane crash, in 1999. This has provided Americans with the emotional equivalent of the death of Princess Diana for the British. But the real heritage of the Kennedy Administration is still ambiguous. The Civil Rights Bill proposed by Kennedy was later pushed through (1964) by Lyndon Johnson, who, curiously, was rather less concerned about burning bridges with Southern white Democrats than Kennedy had been. The result has been the Republicanization of the white South. This all might have been avoided if Kennedy himself had gotten the Bill passed through a compromise that deleted the more egregious assaults on private property contained in it. This would have been better all around for the future. As it was, Johnson, with his popular mandate and legislative experience, railroaded through a bill that voided the Fifth Amendment (the "Takings" clause), destroyed the principle of freedom of association, alienated the white South, and cost the Democrats the 1968 election. On the plus side, Johnson also got the Kennedy tax cuts passed, the last serious tax cuts ever advocated by the increasingly socialist Democratic Party.

The enviably attractive nephew who sings an Irish ballad for the company and then winsomely disappears before the table clearing and dishwashing begin. -- Lyndon B. Johnson

The Kennedies

Karl Marx, in one of his more perceptive moments, said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, next as farce. If Bill Clinton is the final repetition of the New Deal as farce, Lyndon Johnson was its first repetition as tragedy. And it was tragic indeed. The President who ended Segregation through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, destroying the power of his own Democratic Party in the Solid South, also destroyed the rights of private property and freedom of association, guaranteed by the Fifth and Thirteenth Amendments, in the same Act. The President who finally enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, undoing the shameful compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction, also created the Welfare State with its subsidies for illegitimacy that did what, as Walter Williams says, slavery and Segregation had not done:  Destroy the black family -- or at least the family among the poorest and most vulnerable members of the black community. The President who decided to bite the bullet and do what it would take to resist another hydra head of Communism, by defending South Vietnam with the full might of America, ended up cursed, smeared, and reviled as few other American Presidents, stuck, not just with a Korea-like stalemate, but with a war that would go down as the only defeat in United States history (excepting the side that Johnson's own ancestors picked in the Civil War). Johnson declined to run again in 1968 and left office under a cloud that made Truman's leaving look like a Hawaiian vacation. Johnson never lived down the shame, neglected his health, and found an early grave (1973), ironically almost simultaneously with the aged and respected Truman (1972). The bitter fallout of Johnson's Presidency continues. The Left continues to dream that the squalid failure of the War on Poverty was just from lack of money (if more than five trillion dollars, enough to buy every business in the country, isn't enough, what is? -- Ah! I bet it would take all the money!). The Left also takes the failure of the war in Vietnam to have decisively discredited anti-Communism. Indeed, the standard account now is that McCarthyism already discredited anti-Communism, even though this is an anachronism of wishful thinking -- neither Einsenhower, Kennedy, nor Johnson saw Joseph McCarthy as doing anything of the sort. Consequently, the Democratic Party of the Seventies and Eighties became the anti-anti-Communist Party, thoughtlessly countenancing Soviet and Cuban penetration in Africa and Central America, until Jimmy Carter was rudely awakened, much too late, by the naked Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The later Fall of Communism was an embarrassing anomaly still neither digested nor explained by the Left (except by absurd theories, like that the Soviet Union was actually a capitalist economy!). Hence, the Democratic Party in the Clinton Nineties still struggled to "build socialism." The damage done by the Johnson Presidency, even while trying, and sometimes doing, good, is thus staggering. There have been few more tragic and catastrophic Presidencies.

Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There's nothing to do but stand there and take it. -- Lyndon B. Johnson

The only President ever to resign from office. The Watergate burglary became the paradigm for official misconduct for years go come (contributing the suffix "-gate" to multiple scandals). Nevertheless, Nixon left his mark on formative events, which would affect the future deeply, for good and for ill. Campaigning in 1968, Nixon claimed that he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Vietnam. Although Nixon never publicly said what the plan had been, in retrospect it would appear to have involved undercutting North Vietnam's support from Communist China and the Soviet Union through Nixon's initiatives to normalize relations with them. This produced the era of "Detente," engineered by Nixon's National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This produced arms control treaties with the Soviet Union and, most dramatically, an opening to Communist China, which the United States had previously never dealt with. Since Nixon had always been a staunch anti-Communist, it was politically possible for him, as it would not have been for anyone who might have been suspected of weakness against Communism, to make the move to open relations with China and to actually visit the country and meet Chairman Mao. Thus, it was said, "Only Nixon can go to China." Before too long, Jimmy Carter recognized Communist China as the only government of China, dumping America's long time ally, the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, into limbo and giving the Communists China's veto seat on the U.N. Security Council. Nixon probably wasn't interesting in going that far. As a stategy for disengagement from Vietnam, however, the Soviet and China initiatives don't seem to have helped that much. Instead, Nixon focused on "Vietnamization," training and supplying the army of South Vietnam until it could hold its own against the Communists, while American forces withdrew. This worked to an extent. U.S. ground forces were withdrawn, and U.S. air support limited the gains made by an overt North Vietnamese invasion of the South in 1972 (the Vietcong as such were so badly battered by their 1968 offensive in the South that North Vietnam had to give up the fiction that they were fighting a "civil war" in the South on their own). Nixon was excoriated at the time and faulted ever since for expanding the war into Cambodia in 1970. However, Cambodian neutrality was already no more than a polite fiction when Cambodian territory had become a major invasion route and sanctuary for the Communists. The outrage over attacking that sanctuary simply came from people who didn't believe in winning the war or saving South Vietnam anyway and whose scruples were offended that prudent and appropriate measures would be taken to win it. As it happened, attacking the Communists in Cambodia resulted in a pro-Western coup there. The tragic result, eventually, was that as South Vietnam was abandoned to the Communists, Cambodia (and Laos) went down with it also. By the time the North Vietnamese decided to void the treaty negotiated by Nixon and simply conquer the South in 1975, Congress and, apparently, the American public, were in no mood to exert the force necessary to hold the Communists to their agreements. Thus, all of Indo-China, the "Dominoes," fell to the Communists. Fortunately, the line was held at Thailand, where no serious Communist insurgency ever developed. The valuable anti-Communist fruit of Vietnam may simply have been to buy time, to delay and exhaust the Communists (who probably lost well over a million men, in comparison to the 55,000 dead of the United States). Any future Communist expansion was then handicapped by a falling out among themselves. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, while proceeding to murder more than a third of the population of their own country, also began attacking the Vietnamese. The Soviets lined up with Vietnam, while China, long estranged from the Soviet Union, lined up with Cambodia. Eventually the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew their erstwhile allies, installing a puppet government and, to the horror of the world, publicizing the genocide that had taken place. This showed the naked face of Communist terror such as previously never been seen so directly. This was embarrassing for the Leftists who had been arguing that the stories of murder in Cambodia were all CIA lies (as Stalin's mass murder is occasionally still said to have been). Some of the Left was also disillusioned that the Vietnamese instituted a regime of "reëducation" concentration camps in Vietnam, and that large numbers of people began fleeing Vietnam in small overcrowded boats. These were the "boat people," many of whom were taken in by the United States. Overall, more civilians died in Indo-China after the end of the war than in all the years of war preceding. While many of these events took place under the subsequent Presidencies of Ford and Carter, they vindicated Nixon's warning that the result of American defeat in Indo-China would be a "bloodbath." The response to that at the time was often little more than derision; but, when it proved to be the case, there was usually little acknowledgement that Nixon had been right and that the Communists were not entirely the popular, amiable, magnanimous, freedom fighters that the anti-war movement had made them out to be.

I wouldn't trust Nixon from here to that phone. -- Barry Goldwater (1986)

Only President never elected either President or Vice-President. When Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace only in 1973, after it was revealed that he had been on the take for years, Gerald Ford was nominated under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which had been confirmed in 1967, to be Vice-President. Then, when President Nixon resgined, Ford succeeded to the Presidency. Ford was well meaning and amiable but had no abilities superior to his predecessor or successor. Thus, nothing was really accomplished about inflation or energy. Ford had the bad fortune to preside over the actual fall of South Vietnam in 1975, about which, with Congress determined to provide for no real help, he could do nothing. He also had the bad fortune to slip and fall in public more than once, which gave him a clownish reputation -- that on top of the often repeated observation by Lyndon Johnson that Ford had played football without his helmet too much. All this, and the fact that Ford had pardoned President Nixon from any possible prosecutions, led to Ford losing the very close election in 1976.

He looks and talks like he just fell off Edgar Bergen's lap. -- David Steinberg

Jimmy Carter was an earnest, dedicated, intelligent, good, and well meaning man, a paragon of the post-Segregationist "New South," who, possibly for the last time, was able to carry all the Southern States for the Democrats. Martin Luther King Sr., at the Democratic National Convention in 1976, said that "God has given us Jimmy Carter." But Carter's Presidency did not turn out well. The Great Society programs had already obviously failed, to anyone bothering to look; the economy was limping along under high taxes and "stag-flation," which Carter inherited from Ford and Nixon but did little about; and, since it still seemed like a good idea, price controls were kept on oil products, which meant that shortages and rationing returned by 1979. The solution to all of these was outside of Carter's largely conventional universe... Except that Carter started the process of deregulation, as of the interstate trucking industry and the airlines, that began the trend to freer markets in the future, and that Carter appointed Paul Volker to the Federal Reserve. Volker would begin policies that later were able to kill inflation. However, Carter derived little benefit from these initiatives, whose good effects would be felt under Reagan (who would then get the credit from the economists and the blame from the Leftists). In foreign policy, Carter's decision to dump the right wing dictator allies of the United States out of human rights concerns, like the Shâh of Iran and Somoza in Nicaragua, became classic examples of why sometimes realpolitik is a good idea. When friendly dictators are just replaced with unfriendly dictators, who are also worse dictators, there is not a net improvement in the situation. The Shâh was replaced with the revolutionary Islâmic fascism, the mass murder, and terrorism of the Ayatollâh Khomeini. Somoza was replaced with the Sandinistas, clients of the Soviets and Cubans. There would be much grief to pay for this, as Carter himself was humiliated by the Iranian seizure of the American Embassy in Tehrân, and by the mortifying failure of the commando rescue team authorized by him. On the other hand, Carter had one great foreign achievement in his mediation of a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, though the problem of the Palestinians was just papered over, to fester and explode later on. Carter was conservative enough that he spared the country a lot of Leftist brainstorms to reform society, but he did set out to seriously move on one issue:  The "energy crisis." Unfortunately, the "energy crisis" all through the Seventies, with shortages, rationing, and lines at gas stations, was entirely an artifact of the price fixing instituted by Nixon. When Reagan became President, he immediately abolished oil price controls and the "energy crisis" disappeared as utterly as the morning dew. Carter, however, bought the conventional wisdom of the Seventies that oil was running out and decided that energy conservation was "the moral equivalent of war." Americans, however, were a little tired of war; and Carter's leadership style, despite his famous smile and his deliberate folksiness (rather forced, as when he insisted that he officially be called "Jimmy," rather than "James"), turned out to be sour, hectoring, and moralistic. When Americans didn't seem to respond much to his exhortations, Carter accused the country of suffering a "malaise" of spirit. This was Carter's political Waterloo. "Malaise" became the Republican title for Carter's entire Presidency, an effective one. In the 1980 Presidential debates, Reagan's own folksiness and humor threw Carter's personality into the worst light. With hostages in Tehrân and little to show domestically, Carter lost his reelection bid, the first time an elected incumbent President was defeated since Herbert Hoover. In retirement, Carter ennobled himself with work for Habitat for Humanity, a charitable organization dedicated to building low cost housing, mainly for the working poor. It was uncharitably suggested that building houses was more commensurate with Carter's abilities. However, what Carter's work there reveals is his own compromise between the Welfare State and the free market:  The fruit of Habitat for Humanity is infinitely superior to the squalor of public housing, but it also presupposes that there is a "market failure" in the private provision of low cost housing. The latter, however, is not true, since the availability of low cost housing has historically been suppressed by zoning, slow growth initiatives, and rent control, all violations of private property rights and the "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment (but all still beloved of the Left). Nevertheless, Carter's compromise might have made for a more successful Presidency in somewhat easier times, and without the fiascoes of the "energy crisis" and Iran.

Jimmy Carter as president is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton. The job is too big for him. -- Rich Little

If you're in the peanut business, you learn to think small. -- Eugene McCarthy

Ronald Reagan was one of the better Presidents of the Century. The hardest thing for the media elite, the political classes, and the intelligentsia to accept about this bitter truth is that Reagan often appeared ignorant and confused. When he later came down with Alzheimer's Disease, many figured that he had actually suffered from it for years. It was galling that some second rate, nitwit actor could outwit the Wise and the Anointed and get elected President twice. Of course, they also figured that it was all an act, though how Reagan could be a second rate actor in the movies and a first rate actor in politics was a little confusing. Indeed, Reagan was the same kind of politician as he had been an actor: Absolutely sincere, unaffected, humorous, and upright. Reagan's personality often still seems strangely hollow just because it was absolutely all on the surface. No one was left in any doubt about what Reagan believed or wanted. And much of what Reagan believed and wanted was wise beyond the reckoning of Ph.D.'s, lawyers, and the literati. It was, indeed, an illustration of F.A. Hayek's principle that some of the most important knowledge is implicit, and that this can be superior to any sophisticated book learning. But Reagan could also articulate the simple truths he believed, and a hostile press, mortified that he could speak right through their filter to the American people, grudgingly began to call him the "Great Communicator." What Reagan then communicated was just the old Jeffersonian principle that the government that governs best, governs least. Because modern government since the New Deal has tried to govern everything, it is obviously the problem. Unfortunately, reducing government was not a goal where Reagan was able to accomplish much. Part of it was that he tended to go along with Congressional spending, which ballooned during the Eighties. Unlike Clinton, Reagan did not play quite the kind of political hardball where he could veto the budget, shut down the government, and then get away with blaming Congress (of course, Clinton would veto a budget for spending too little). Reagan, oddly enough, may have been just too easy going. At the same time, he was determined to cut taxes, and with growing support from economists, he did. Like Andrew Mellon in the Twenties, and then Johnson in the Sixties, Reagan rolled back (again) the ever increasing bite of the income tax. The economy, which had experienced "stag-flation" through the 70's, and went into a deep recession Reagan's first couple of years, then took off into a seven year expansion that broke the bank at the Soviet Union, shook up American business as it had not been in decades, and, as Mellon had predicted in the Twenties and Laffer had described in the Seventies, produced more revenues from lower taxes (for which Congress spent $1.50 for every $1 that came in). The Democrats, who worship taxes like the Holy Grail, have absolutely never lived this down. They are in denial so deep that they still respond to the idea of tax cuts with rhetoric so stale ("tax cuts for the rich," "trickle down economics") that a dying goat would have no taste for it (though far too many Americans still fall for it). Despite tax hikes under Bush and Clinton, income tax rates are still nowhere near back up to where they were before Reagan (after Wilson and Roosevelt, perpetuated even by Eisenhower, the top marginal rate had been over 90%). The growth and shake-up in the economy in the Eighties (the "Decade of Greed"), where whole new industries (like personal computers and the video industry) lept into being, were the object of a torrent of ignorant vilification from the press, academia, and Hollywood. Business and finance were repeatedly smeared in movies, from the anti-anti-Communist Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987) to seemingly innocent fare like Pretty Woman (1990), which compared takeover buyouts to car theft. Breaking the Soviet Union was Reagan's other unforgivable accomplishment. When Reagan called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire," the snickers among the intelligentsia were palpable. Had Reagan seen Star Wars too many times? How naive could this guy get? Didn't he know that the Russians loved and trusted their government, and that the Soviet economy was doing just great? Of course, Reagan didn't know anything of the sort, and nothing of the sort was true. The Soviet Union was a brutal dictatorship, which completely ignored Jimmy Carter's fantasy "human rights" Helsinki Accords, had built a huge navy, had steadily pushed its advantages through the Seventies, had plenty of credulous or treacherous "peace" activists in the West to try and disarm NATO, and was bankrolling wars from Angola to El Salvador, often fought with Cuban mercenaries. But Reagan went after them like a bulldog. He was no longer going to back down on anything, at one point walking out on Gorbachev at a summit in Iceland. He was going to out-build them and out-spend them; and, in fact, the Russian economy, devouring itself alive when wealth creation was prohibited by law, couldn't take it. Also, the Russians had made the strategic blunder (rare for them) of invading Afghanistan, where they had to take on a rebellion by some of the toughest people in the world, absolutely fearless Mujâhidin, fighters for Islâm in a Holy War. We will probably never know how many Russians died, often tortured and mutilated when captured -- the "Hanoi Hilton" may have been hell, but it is not clear how many captured Russians ever made it back home. Congress, which Democrats began to win back, soon lost stomach for the fight. But when anti-anti-Communist Democrats cut off funds to anti-government rebels in Nicaragua, the darling of the Left in the Eighties, people in the Reagan Administration worked out a deal with Israel to sell surplus weapons to Iran (which was drunkenly fighting off an Iraqi invasion in the "first" Gulf War) and then divert the profits to the Nicaraguan contras (i.e. the counter-revolutionaries). The press and the anointed pounced on this as the Great Scandal of the Reagan Administration -- the "Iran-Contra Affair." A special prosecutor eventually got some convictions, some of which were overturned (e.g. Oliver North), but most of the country refused to be particularly concerned or outraged. Reagan's enemies did not get their Watergate. The "Sandinistas," the Communists who ruled Nicaragua, got so self-confident and cocky that they actually decided to hold an honest election in 1990. Fidel Castro has never been so stupid. So, with international poll watchers on hand, the Sandinistas were voted out of office. The Contras had won. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev had decided to lift the dead hand of Soviet power a bit, and immediately governments began falling in Eastern Europe. The saying was that it took ten years for Communism to fall in Poland, ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, ten days in Czechoslovakia, and ten hours in Romania, all in 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Reagan had challenged Gorbachev, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," at the Berlin Wall. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down by a tide of individual Berliners. Ronald Reagan had defeated Communism, in the same year after he left office. At the same time, Reagan's Presidency was flawed by some of the same kind of evils as Coolidge's Administration. Prohibition had now become the "War on Drugs," and Congress began to creatively think up one Police State measure after another to keep drugs out of the hands of the people who wanted them. The abuses of the Fourth Amendment, the outrageous and despicable evasions of the presumption of innocence, of due process (the Fifth and Fourteen Amendments), of excessive fines (the Eighth Amendment), and of simple justice and decency have grown and expanded ever since. The prison population has tripled since the early Eighties, and as many as half of Federal prisoners were involved in some breach of the (actually unconstitutional) drug laws. Alcohol Prohibition never involved so many shameless violations of the Bill of Rights. At the same time, the Reaganite "social" agenda of his conservative religious supporters, newly emerged as the politicized "Religious Right," received a lot of emotional and rhetorical support from Reagan; but when it was all over, they had precious little to show for it. The Supreme Court somewhat compromised Roe v. Wade but did not overturn it, even when packed with Reagan and Bush appointees; and prayer in school, evidently supported by a large majority of Americans, never got off the ground. Reagan was a Believer, but actually rather too easy going to accomplish the social agenda he supported. Indeed, Reagan was ironically the first President who had been divorced. Thus, the "Reagan Revolution" ended up accomplishing not quite all that its supporters wanted or that its enemies feared. It did not undo the Great Society or the New Deal. Indeed, the rot of those programs continued, as Leftist attacks on private property and freedom of association were folded conformably together with the police state measures of the War on Drugs. In those terms, Reaganism turned out to be nothing like an agenda to restore Constitutional government. So, despite the virtues and accomplishments of Coolidge, Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan, Grover Cleveland remains the Last Good President.

The kind of government that is strong enough to give you everything you need is also strong enough to take away everything that you have. -- Ronald Reagan

You and I are told increasingly that we have to choose between a left or a right. There is only an up or down:  up to man's age-old dream -- the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course. -- Ronald Reagan, Republican National Convention, 1964

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! -- Ronald Reagan, 1987, in front of the Berlin Wall, torn down by the Berliners themselves in 1989

Bush was a poor successor to Ronald Reagan. A clueless, inarticulate Country Club Republican, Bush started off by calling for a "kinder, gentler America" (Nancy Reagan asked, "Kinder and gentler than what? Us?"), which meant he didn't want to be perceived as "mean" like the tax-cutting, welfare-cutting Reaganites. This made Bush a perfect dupe for the Democrats, who got Bush to break his only real campaign promise ("Read my lips, no new taxes") and sign off on tax increases, which helped put the economy into recession just as Bush was coming up for re-election. Then Bush signed more phony "civil rights" bills attacking property, business, and freedom, wanting to be liked. He wasn't. And so, even though it was a short and mild recession, even though Bush put together a Grand Alliance that freed Kuwait from Iraqi conquest in a lightning campaign, Bush ended up widely disliked, Ross Perot took 19% of the vote, and Slick Willy Clinton got into office with a 43% plurality. Bush, the first Vice-President since Martin van Buren to be elected to succeed his President, dropped the ball, with neither the same convictions nor abilities as his predecessor, and was defeated after one term. For the President under whose tenure Communism actually fell, Bush was totally devoid of ability to lead and articulate the aftermath. The Fall of Communism had little effect on the popular Marxist precepts that are still promoted in American politics, and it was the failure of George Bush that he did not attack and explode them when the iron was hot and the evidence obvious.

All hat and no cattle. -- John Connally

The Bushes

Only the second President in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives and tried by the Senate, and now the first President to be found guilty of contempt of court and fined ($90,000+) by a federal judge (Susan Weber Wright):  A sickening, corrupt, unprincipled hypocrite, philanderer, and shameless, unrepentant liar, fresh from land and Savings and Loan swindles in Arkansas, Bill Clinton, like the Father of Lies, is gifted with savage and ruthless political instincts and a Satanic ability to ingratiate himself to voters and the "chattering classes." Thus, the only previously impeached President, Andrew Johnson, unpopular and bad but innocent of crime, was saved by the conscience of a single Senator, while Bill Clinton, guilty of certifiable felonies but popular, is saved by the shameless lack of conscience and the dereliction of duty of his Democrat lemmings and spineless "moderate" Republicans. Richard Nixon was condemned and recommended for disbarment by the American Bar Assocation (and resigned); but Clinton, found guilty of contempt of court for perjury, and recommended for disbarment by Arkansas authorities, was invited to deliver a keynote speech to the ABA. The hypocrisy and double-think of the Democrats and the ABA (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party) certainly follows the paradigm of Clinton himself, who could manage to admit that he lied under oath in the Paula Jones case, and publicly to the American people, about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while at the same time seeming to deny that he was lying or that he is culpable for perjuring himself (he just managed to give "a false impression") -- even as he previously finally admitted (also in the Paula Jones case) that he had had an affair with Geniffer Flowers while Governor of Arkansas, but denied that he had lied about it in 1992 when he said on Sixty Minutes to a national audience that he had not had an affair. In the Paula Jones case, Clinton and the Democrats are hoist on their own petard of the moralistic and totalitarian "sexual harassment" laws that have been cooked up over the last decade by feminists. If Clinton can claim that his perjured testimony in the Paula Jones case about his sexual activities was justifiable because it was all part of his "private life," and nobody else's business, then this would justify lying by any other defendant in a sexual harassment case also. It is unlikely that feminists and Democrats really want to allow that exception, for anyone else, in the perjury laws. But they do want to allow it for their guy. Instead of taking true responsibility by paying the penalty for his crimes, Clinton's constant strategy was to blame Kenneth Starr, the Special Prosecutor, and to send his supporters out to attack and vilify Starr, which is something that never occurred to Nixon or Reagan or Bush to do to the Special Prosecutors appointed to investigate them. Nixon fired a Special Prosecutor (Archibald Cox, in the famous "Saturday Night Massacre"), but he never launched an attack campaign against someone who, by law, cannot reveal the substance of his investigation. The only thing Clinton really seems to believe in is power, and he has done his best to extend the force of the Federal government into as many areas of American life as possible. This constant assault on the Bill of Rights is even acknowledged by Clinton defenders, like Alan Dershowitz. Although Clinton accomplished the extraordinary feat of losing both Houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in more than 40 years, he saved his own skin for reelection in 1996, and the Republicans, by choice, cowardice, and folly, have mostly gone along with the paternalistic and police state measures favored by him (as he cunningly went along with their "welfare reform") -- like a national identity card, with fingerprints, and Federal databases of all American workers and of the medical records of all Americans. Trying first to nationalize all of American medicine, and then at least to extend Medicare down to age 45, Clinton can still do no more that jerk to the socialist aspirations of his aging Sixties Radical friends (including the First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton), who have still not noticed that socialism failed. Although the Crown Jewels of the New Deal (Social Security) and the Great Society (Medicare) are both headed for bankruptcy, Clinton is a Pied Piper who is still able to lead most Americans down a path of further socialism and Federal power. With the Senate Democrats unwilling to convict one of their own, Clinton is free to do so for the pathetic remainder of his term. Clinton, the Democrats, and their accomplices in the Press and Academia have succeeded in deceiving a credulous electorate through a successful smear and belittlement of the investigation into his crimes. Thus, Clinton's lies are dismissed as (1) deceptive but not perjurious, or (2) perjurious but "only about sex," or (3) seriously perjurious but not "rising to the level of an impeachable offense," or (4) perhaps even impeachable but excusable anyway because his removal from office would hand a victory to the "vast right-wing conspiracy" of "mad dog" white supremacists and religious fundamentalists. The layers of sophistry in this defense betray the dishonesty and desperation of the Democratic Party, whose constant accusations of "partisanship" describe their own zombie-like chorus far better than the often confused, tentative, and undisciplined forces of the Republicans, whose party unity could not be maintained in either the House or the Senate, while dissent was all but unheard among the Democrats. Like Clinton himself, the Democrats ultimately value nothing but power -- just as they have succeeded in destroying the Constitution to allow unlimited power to the federal government. Thus, in Marx's expression, the New Deal has finally been replayed as farce, though a bitter and dangerous farce it is. Francis Fukuyama's "End of History," with the Fall of Communism, is now clearly nothing of the sort. The Left, as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." About Clinton himself, however, the words of Samuel Adams may be the most fitting, that this man has become "a monument of infamy and derision." Anyone who would give this person the time of day is contemptible.

I have never seen...so slippery, so disguisting a candidate. -- Nat Hentoff (1992)

There is nothing this man won't do. He is immune to shame. Move past all the nice posturing and get really down there in him, you find absolutely nothing...nothing but an appetite. -- Jesse Jackson (1992)

I would be happy to give him a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs. -- Nina Burleigh (1998)

The president responded to plaintiff's questions by giving false, misleading, and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process. -- Federal Judge Susan Weber Wright in contempt of court citation (1999)

In 2004 American history was due for a big change -- if the same 72 year cycle held true, as from 1788 to 1860 or from 1860 to 1932. The terrorist attacks on 9/11/01 certainly signalled a change, but the institutional response to the crisis did not involve much in the way of basic changes and definitely nothing in the direction of the restoration of Constitutional government. The basis of the New Republic is the New Deal. This is nowhere near being directly challenged in mainstream American politics. George Bush is just as much a New Dealer as John Kerry. Indeed, when Bush defined his program as "Compassionate Conservativism," this made it sound like he was more of a New Dealer than the President who might have been thought of as not very "compassionate," i.e. Ronald Reagan. This seemed about on the level of the Mensheviks in political wisdom. Nevertheless, it seemed to work for Bush. On the other hand, the 2004 election did indeed signal a political trend:  The Republicans controlled the House of Representatives since 1995 and the Senate for most of that time. The Republicans had won seven Presidential elections since 1964, the Democrats only three. Population has been moving from centers of Democrat power, like New York, to new centers of Republican power, like Texas. Texas is now the second largest State in the Union, after California. California, indeed, became more dominated by the Democrats than for many years -- until the surprise election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor -- but this is just the problem:  The Democrats have nothing to offer politically except more socialism. The best recommendation for George Bush may be the fury of the Left against him. Hollywood threw all it had against Bush in 2004, from a summer blockbuster movie (The Day After Tomorrow, which explicity lampooned Bush and Vice-President Cheney) to the no-holds-barred "documentary" that was a tissue of lies, distortions, and half-truths, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. And then there was the money. The Democrats must hate to think of it, but the Republican Party got a larger number of small contributions, and a smaller number of large contributions, than the Democratic Party. No millionaire spent as much money on politics as George Soros, but it was all against Bush. The principal public complaint against Bush was the war in Iraq, which developed into a difficult campaign in urban warfare; but when the Democrats did not complain about Bill Clinton's war in Kosovo, and were happy to pass a resolution under Clinton that US policy would aim at the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, it begins to look like the use of the war as an issue is purely political, while the real objection to Bush is that he cannot be expected to push for the kind of socialism that the Democrats desire. Indeed, although Bush instituted a prescription drug benefit in Medicare (perhaps meaning bankruptcy faster than otherwise), and cooperated with Ted Kennedy on a fat (and unconstitutional) spending bill on education, the constant Democrat refrain was always "not enough." Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, Democrat politics is always "more, more" -- unless, of course, with a Democrat President, when some limits have to be observed. But Bush also made noises about privatizing part of Social Security, and this was just enough of a threat, however modest, to the New Deal that the Democrats thought they could make a big issue out of it. It didn't work out that way. What the Democrats feared, and very properly, was a gradual drift of opinion away from the New Deal. When voters know that the Democrats will raise taxes, this doesn't help them either, whatever they say. We know them too well.

Or perhaps we don't. After winning Congress in 2006, perhaps because of weariness with the War in Iraq (as with Truman in 1952), the Democrats are back to their old tricks. Although the Republicans disillusioned their support with irresponsible spending, and the Democrats raged against such "corruption," we see them simply continuing in the same vein. The disgraceful "earmarks," which included infamous projects like the $398 million dollar "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska (i.e. to an island with only fifty people on it -- though it does include the heavily used Ketchikan Airport), the brain child of Republican Senator Ted Stevens, have simply been continued by the Democrats, with increasing levels of deception to try and conceal their existence, and who votes for them, from the public. But the public, who consistently rate Congress lower than the now unpopular George Bush, nevertheless seem prepared to vote more of the same.

In 2000 George W. Bush won the Presidency, in one of the closest elections in history. A minority of the popular vote, 48%, differing by decimals from Al Gore's 48%, translated into a majority of just one Electoral Vote. An election, in fact, much like 1960, where the Vice President of an apparently successful President loses by the thinnest of margins. Richard Nixon lost because of (1) a recession, (2) he looked bad on television (though, we now know, this was in part engineered by Kennedy sympathizers at the network), and (3) Mayor Richard Daley and Duval County Texas delivered the voting dead of Chicago and Texas to Kennedy. Al Gore did not have such problems. His burden was the shameful legacy of Bill Clinton, which, however, most Democrats stoutly denied was shameful at all. Indeed, the Democrats brazenly predicted that they would regain control of the House and Senate because of popular outrage that the great and glorious Bill Clinton was smeared and persecuted by nasty Republicans. There was certainly a Democratic base of voters who felt that way, but it was not enough to deliver a majority of the vote, and not a majority in enough States to win the Electoral College, or the House or the Senate (though the Senate ended up divided 50/50). Unlike Nixon, however, Gore never hesitated to challenge the result. On election night, the State of Florida was first declared to have gone for Gore (before all the polls were even closed in Florida, as it happened), and then, hours later, was declared to have gone for Bush, delivering the election to him. But in the wee hours of the morning Bush's margin of victory seemed to be eroding. It was already so small that a State-wide recount was required by law. Before that was even finished, Gore's strategy was already in operation. Frankly stated by a Democratic operative, it was to ask for recount after recount until the results came out "right." The recounts requested, of course, were in heavily Democratic counties, with mostly Democratic election officials. While the machine count of punchcard ballots was something without bias or ambiguity, designed to be so, hand recounts would turn on all sorts of ambiguities and imponderables. One Democratic election official baldly stated on television that a ballot with otherwise Democratic votes, but with only a "dimple" on the "chad" (the little piece of paper to be punched out) for Gore, should be counted as a Gore vote. Whether or not there actually was then a "dimple" was left to the judgment of the counters. The Democrats, who may have stolen the 1960 election with the traditional backroom techniques of their machine politics, thus found a way of trying to steal the 2000 election right out in the glare of the public spotlight. Even so, the clock was against them. The millions of ballots that helped promote the efficiency of machine counting now were a grave liability for hand counting, especially with Republican observers challenging the miraculous discovery of yet more Gore votes. The Florida Secretary of State, a Republican (a woman against whom Democratic partisans could freely direct misogynistic vitriol, without fear of reproach from feminists), was prepared to certify the election at the statutory deadline, long before the Democrats could have squeezed out enough Gore votes for a win. Thus, another tried and true Democrat strategy came into play:  Find friendly judges. The Florida Supreme Court, consisting entirely of Democatic nominees, simply voided the statutory deadline and gave the Democrats another week to recount. This ruling was later vacated by the United State Supreme Court, which asked for a clarification of the grounds on which it was made, but by then the point was moot. Other strategies were in operation. Hundreds of absentee ballots from members of the Armed Services were thrown out as not having the postmark required by Florida law. This may have been legally correct by State law, but it was contrary to the stated Gore principle of "count every vote," and may actually have violated Federal law. There was no doubt, however, that this was a plus for Gore, since the military vote ran heavily for Bush. Similarly, a lawsuit was filed, by a Democratic contributor, to throw out the entire absentee vote in some heavily Republican counties, because Republican workers had been allowed to fill in a voter ID number, mistakenly left off, on absentee ballot applications sent out by the county. A black woman judge, passed over for promotion by Jeb Bush (brother of George W. and Governor of Florida), was found to rule in this case -- and she refused to recuse herself. A case was also filed challenging the decision of some heavily Democratic counties not to do hand recounts. None of this came to fruition, however, before the second deadline passed and the Secretary of State certified the election. None of the recounts completed by that time had given Gore the advantage. This meant that Gore would henceforth not merely be asking for recounts but for the election actually to be overturned. No hesitation, however. But then things really began to go wrong. The black woman judge did not do what was expected (by anyone). She unheld the absentee ballots. Similarly, the other suits for more and more recounts were firmly and resoundingly denied. This was then appealed to the Florida Supreme Court again. With only a few days until the Electors were to be ceritified for the Electoral College, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision with bitter dissents, ordered recounts all across the State. The Democrats were jubilant. The search for friendly judges, on the other hand, was a game at which two could play, and the Republicans immediately went to the United States Supreme Court, still heavy with 7 Republican nominees. Not only did the Court agree to heard the appeal, but 5-4 majority stayed the Florida Court ruling. That stopped the recounts, on a Friday, with the Court unprepared to hear the case until Monday. When the Court then did heard the arguments, a 5-4 majority again decisively reversed the Florida Court (on some points, the majority was even 7-2). The Democrats were busted. Losing at their own game was so galling that some Democrats and sympathizers went into rhetorical orbit. Jesse Jackson absurdly compared the case to the Dred Scott Decision. Winning, indeed, may be a mixed blessing for George W. Bush, the first President since John Quincy Adams to be the son of a previous President (and the only one to succeed the man who defeated his father). His Presidency was going to be tainted by the closeness of the vote and the questionable result, and it might have been better to have a discredited Gore than a discredited Bush -- and the next President, according to the Curse of Tecumseh, is due to die in office. However, power is power, the American people mostly don't seem to have noticed how Clinton was disgraced anyway, and it was high time to get the Democrats out of the White House, whatever Bush was able to do with it. The only consolation of a Gore win could have been that, with a Recession in view ahead, a Gore who could have positively plunged the country into a Depression really would have helped third parties, like the Libertarians, and perhaps discredited the Democrats for a long time.

In one respect, George Bush had a charmed Presidency:  He beat the Curse of Tecumseh. Reagan had already beat it in one respect, since he didn't die in office; but there was a serious assassination attempt against Reagan, and he sustained a wound from which he might have died, like Garfield, in earlier days. But the closest that George Bush came to assassination, despite the hopeful reveries (including a movie) of the left, was when an idiot Iraqi journalist threw shoes at him. Even those missed. We were never told if the journalist had thrown any shoes at Saddam Hussein. He was probably not that big of a fool.

The events of the 2000 election were soon overshadowed by the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Bush rose to the occasion with vigorous response and firm rhetoric, winning astronomical approval numbers in the public opinion polls. At the same time, Bush has shown himself to be a typical New Deal, Eisenhower Republican, not as much of a Country Club Republican as his father, and more of a real Texan (Clint Eastwood squint and all), even pushing through a kind of (largely symbolic) tax cut (although treated by the Democrats as the equivalent of burning money), but still perfectly willing to promote the destructive and unconstitutional role of the federal government in education, signing on with Ted Kennedy ("my friend") on another absurd federal education pork barrel bill, placing protective tariffs on steel imports, vasting expanding the farm subsidies which had previously been scheduled for elimination by a Republican Congress, and even promoting Bill Clinton's Hitler Youth "Americorps" program. Along with these indistinguishable-from-Democrat actions, the Bush Administration has come down like a ton of bricks on cancer patients who have been using marijuana for medical reasons, raiding one after another the buyers' clubs that had been legalized by State laws like California's Proposition 215. The drug warriors recruited for Bush's DEA are fanatics to an extent that raises questions about their sanity -- although in general federal drug policy, whether under Clinton or Bush, has not been something to remind anyone of any kind of sanity.

[voice from crowd:   We can't hear you!]  But I hear you, and the people who did this [waves around site of World Trade Center] will hear from us, soon. -- George Bush, 2001, before attacks in Afghanistan

George W. Bush has grown a foot since September 11. His ears no longer stick out, and he's become a brilliant orator. I'm not kidding. -- P.J. O'Rourke

Thus the allegedly "far right" current Bush administration has merely slowed the growth of government rather than reversed it. It wrangles over the size of new middle-class entitlements, not whether there should be such new entitlements. It nods to the Supreme Court and accedes to the principle of affirmative action and thus to the priority of group over individual rights. -- Adam Garfinkle, "Peace Movements and the Adversary Culture," Understanding Anti-Americanism, Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad [Ivan R. Dee, 2004], p.305

He is a man who distrusts rhetoric and who is obviously not a great public speaker. As a friend of mine once said, watching Bush give a speech is like watching a drunk man cross an icy street. You really want him to get to the other side, but it's clear he won't be able to make it without a lot of stumbling. -- Tucker Carlson, Cato's Letter, Volume 4, Number 2, "The Decline and Fall of the Republican Party" [Cato Institute, 2006], p.4

...one should never permit a disorder to persist in order to avoid a war, for war is not avoided thereby but merely deferred to one's own disadvantage. [Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Daniel Donno translation, Bantam Books, 1981, p. 20]

The Bushes

Although the first Black President, Barack Obama's American background is Hawaiian. His African background is direct from Africa, in the form of his Kenyan father. He also spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, after his mother married an Indonesian second husband. After this intriguing upbringing and a Mainland education, Obama settled down in Chicago and began making the social and political connections that would lead to his eventual election as President. Most of these Chicago connections are now an embarrassment, since they involved association with radical anti-Americans and former domestic terrorists, not to mention an unclear degree of involvement with the familiar corruption of Illinois Democrat politics. Obama's defenders decry "guilt by association" when these people are mentioned, and the voters seemed willing to give the benefit of the doubt and take him at his word. Since Obama's appeal was deliberately vague -- "hope" and "change we can believe in" -- it remains to be seen how the Administration will go, though so far the Democrats are fast out of the gate, using the recession as an excuse, with massive spending and borrowing, if not taxing, plans (with Michael Moore even announcing the "end of capitalism"). Again, far too many Republicans, including George Bush in his last days, went along with the idea that Federal spending will provide an economic "stimulus" (still ignoring Say's Law). Perhaps they are still thinking that, since the Democrats won the election, the best Republican strategy is to be more like Democrats. They may not have noticed that John McCain was the perfect "more like a Democrat" candidate -- a Republican, indeed, with not much patience for the Religious Right or Social Conservatives, that Democrats seemed to be saying they could vote for. But then they didn't vote for him, not even the disgruntled Hillary Clinton voters. So the New Deal Republicans are hoist on their own petard again, if they cannot argue that massive Federal borrowing, taxing, and spending sucks all the air (i.e. capital) out of the economy and retards recovery.

Even a new Depression, however, pales besides the damage that could be done with the equivalent of another Jimmy Carter Presidency in foreign policy. The brainless "Bush lied, people died" level of analysis implied, or asserted, that (1) Iraq and the world would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power, (2) terrorists, who are not proteced by the Geneva Convention, actually are protected by the Geneva Convention (just "name, rank, and serial number," though terrorists don't have serial numbers, or much rank either, since they are not in a regular military establishment and, as terrorists, don't wear uniforms), and (3) terrorists, even when held abroad (e.g. Guantanamo Bay), can file habeas corpus in civilian American courts. This last remarkable assertion has even been upheld by the Supreme Court, although there are few things that the Bush Administration did that wartime Administrations, including those of Democrat icons Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, had not done, without Democrat objections, in their time. To hold an American citizen as an "enemy combatant" in the United States and try him before a "special military tribunal" under military law meant the End of the Constitution to Democrats and anti-war radicals:  Yet this is precisely something that was done by Franklin Roosevelt, without complaint. Most of the attacks on Bush's anti-terror policies were therefore naive to a dangerous degree, disingenuous, or just naked political opportunism. Since Obama has undertaken to increase American commitment in Afghanistan, and he began his Presidency by authorizing an attack on terrorists in Pakistan, the sincere anti-war radicals already have cause for complaint. As long as they keep complaining, we may be safe.

We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises.... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started.... And an enormous debt to boot! -- Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury, testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee, May 9, 1939 (17.2% unemployment)

The Age of Reagan, 1980-2008