Which election's outcome would have been best reversed?

[Genx87]

Hard to say. I went with Goldwater vs Johnson. Johnsons entitlements were vast and he further got us bogged down in Vietnam. But Smith vs Hoover is another interesting pick. If Smith won then FDR would not have come into play and his big govt brute force approach a lot of people embrace today. It most likely would have eventually come. But who knows in what form and when. And then Bush vs Gore. While Gore is imo a big govt douche. He would had a split congress and maybe a republican majority to deal with so he wouldnt have done as much damage expanding the govt as Bush imo.

 

[Balt]

Hard to say. I went with Goldwater vs Johnson. Johnsons entitlements were vast and he further got us bogged down in Vietnam. But Smith vs Hoover is another interesting pick. If Smith won then FDR would not have come into play and his big govt brute force approach a lot of people embrace today. It most likely would have eventually come. But who knows in what form and when. And then Bush vs Gore. While Gore is imo a big govt douche. He would had a split congress and maybe a republican majority to deal with so he wouldnt have done as much damage expanding the govt as Bush imo.

Gore was one of the people pushing for a balanced budget during Clinton's years.

Outside of environmental issues, I don't think he is (or was back then) a 'big govt' guy.

 

[shira]

Bush vs Kerry

I'm not convinced that Al Gore would have done much differently than Bush following 9/11

You think Gore would have invaded Iraq?!! Wow.

 

[Patranus]

and without all the good of the anti-poverty efforts that cut the poverty rate in the US to this day by a third

You mean the same programs that are bankrupting the country today?

 

[Possessed Freak]

Seriously the last good president we had is carter

I am not used to this term called sarcasm. I have been told this is used by certain people. Is this an example of it?

 

[irishScott]

Everyone's going to vote Bush v Gore because so few (including myself) know enough about the other options to make a valid comparison. Loaded poll is loaded.

 

[nageov3t]

You think Gore would have invaded Iraq?!! Wow.

Iraq? probably not.

but the patriot act, guantanamo bay, secret prisons, torture, and getting hopelessly bogged down in Afghanistan? yeah, I could see it.

 

[SammyJr]

Bush vs Kerry

I'm not convinced that Al Gore would have done much differently than Bush following 9/11

I'm not convinced 9/11 would have happened under Gore's watch since Gore wasn't so obsessed with Iraq that he ignored everything else.

 

[SammyJr]

You mean the same programs that are bankrupting the country today?

If not for trickle down economics and free trade religious beliefs like the belief that offshoring is good for all Americans, those social programs could be smaller and better funded due to a larger middle class.

 

[nageov3t]

I'm not convinced 9/11 would have happened under Gore's watch since Gore wasn't so obsessed with Iraq that he ignored everything else.

what specifically was Bush obsessing about with Iraq in the summer of 2001 that led him to allow 9/11 to happen?

 

[SammyJr]

what specifically was Bush obsessing about with Iraq in the summer of 2001 that led him to allow 9/11 to happen?

I doubt Gore would have ignored reports entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack the United States". He also wouldn't have been discussing Iraq regime change 8 months prior to 9/11.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml

 

[CallMeJoe]

You mean the same programs that are bankrupting the country today?

I think he means the finite anti-poverty programs Hubert Humphrey championed during the Johnson administration that were institutionalized as entitlement programs during President Nixon's tenure (with help from a Democratic Congress).

 

[Craig234]

Had McKinley not won the election, Theodore Roosevelt would never have become president.

Oh, I considered that. The thing is, we got an accident for a progressive President, instead of the electorate choosing a much more progressive President.

So how to weigh the accident versus the election?

I chose to give more weight to the election, to the country choosing the progressive direction. McKinley was a very right-wing politician.

 

[Craig234]

Gore was one of the people pushing for a balanced budget during Clinton's years.

Outside of environmental issues, I don't think he is (or was back then) a 'big govt' guy.

Gore was also the head of a commission to reduce government waste (something Democrats have regularly had, aside from Reagan's very partisan J. Peter Grace commission).

This resulted in the elimination of hundreds of thousands of government positions as I recall (many but not all in the military).

Right-wingers are often simpletons on the size of government; they don't ask anything about what the government resources are doing, so that the most useful and the most wasteful activities are the same to them, and they ignore the facts in front of their face about which side has the big 'waste'.

They can't accept that Democrats have often been the more frugal on getting things done with less; compare the size of administrative staffing between JFK and Reagan.

Sure, Social Security and Medicare are big operations - which *do critical and good things for citizens*. What did senior Americans face before those programs?

(Hint: 90% elder poverty rate and not able to afford medical care).

Too many on the right simply believe out of ideology, not fact, what 'the left' does, and argue it out of ideology, not fact. Point out that it was the Clinton administration that balanced the budget and not the Republicans before and after, and you get 'well the Republican congress gets the credit'. Point out the same Republican congress skyrocketed the deficit under a Republican president, and that the first two years of Clinton under a Democratic Congress reduced the deficit just as much as the later Republican Congress, and you get nothing, just a red face determined to keep their ideology about which party does what, finally leading to the incorrect concession that 'ok, both sides suck' when they can't address the facts.

 

[Craig234]

what specifically was Bush obsessing about with Iraq in the summer of 2001 that led him to allow 9/11 to happen?

He was obsessing about it - cabinet members have said so, within hours of 9/11 he was telling his officials 'look very, very hard for a link to Iraq', the PNAC doctrine - he had practically filled the top government positions with the PNAC people - had identified the need for 'attacking a Middle Eastern nation' where Iraq fit the bill best and they had written a letter to Clinton to invade Iraq, and not to mention all the 'Saddam tried to kill his daddy' and 'finish what his father didn't' stuff.

 

[soccerballtux]

haha, mccain vs obama, duh. Clever of you to leave that one out.