George Bush is the new Carter

[yesthattom]

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0405.todd.html

What did I say 6 months ago? That the rallying cry should be, "The jobless recovery!". Now people are agreeing!

Carter was marred by the fact that they had to re-write all the economic text books that said that it was impossible to have inflation AND high unemployment (I think those were the two issues... correct me if I'm wrong). Bush is forcing everyone to re-write the econ text books because everyone thought it was impossible to have a "jobless recovery". For that reason alone Bush is going to go down hard. Kerry will win in a landslide. Read this article... it's great!

Comments

[misteropinion.livejournal.com]

I think you very unfairly besmirch Jimmy Carter's good name here. He's a decent, honorable man.

[cos]

I have been contending for at least a year that the three possibilities for this election are: 1. a narrow Bush victory, 2. a narrow Democratic victory, 3. a strong Democratic victory (but not a landslide of 1936/1972/1984 proportions). I still think those are the three possibilities, and I still don't think we can predict which of them it will be, or even how relatively likely each one is.

I disagree with you that the "jobless recovery" is the best rallying cry, because I really don't know how long it's going to remain jobless. Although Bush has failed to enact policies that would have brought us out of recession long ago, and has pursued policies that I'm pretty sure made the recession longer, eventually it will end, and we don't know when. The housing bubble could burst next month and the economy with it, or we could get a million new jobs by October and Bush could claim his policies are working. Bush has done an awful job on the economy, but we can't count on merely pointing to lack of jobs as a political tactic, because it may not pan out that way.

Iraq is the certain quagmire. The mistakes Bush has made in Iraq make it impossible for this to end well, at least not this year. And unlike the economy, the Iraq situation is entirely the Bush administration's responsibility, and everyone knows it.

As for the economy, what we should have been doing all along, is explaining very clearly why Bush's policies have been bad, and how he could and should have helped the economy in the past few years but did not. That's something Kerry isn't going to do, because, as Dean once said (speaking about a different issue), "it requires that you treat voters as adults" and "politicians don't do that." Kerry will stick to the simplistic: look at all the jobs lost. If those jobs start coming back, which could very well happen, then Kerry will lose that argument, even though he's right and Bush is wrong.

[ctseawa.livejournal.com]

I have been contending for at least a year that the three possibilities for this election are: 1. a narrow Bush victory, 2. a narrow Democratic victory,

Actually, it is most likely going to be a narrow Democratic victory tunred into a narrow Bush victory via the same theft-of-election tactics they used in 2000. plus Diebold giving them all the electronic votes their untrustworthy systems can deliver.

verified voting

[cos]

The "corruption factor" skews the results but I was figuring on it all along. With the corruption factor taken into account, those are the three possibilities I see. So, this is a separate issue.

However, if you are concerned about those Diebold machines, as well you should be, please take some time during the day tomorrow to call your Senators and Representative, as well as the chairs of the House and Senate Rules committees. Ask them to co-sponsor S.2313 (Senate) or H.R.2239 (House) if they haven't already, and put some pressure on to get these bills out of committee ASAP.

H.R.2239 has 140 co-sponsors already and has been lingering in committee since last year. S.2313 is a recent replacement for Bob Graham's S.1980. Graham got together with Senators Clinton and Boxer, who had introduced other verified voting bills, and brought them on board for S.2313. It has 8 co-sponsors so far. We need to get both of these bills out to a vote within the next few weeks if there's gonna be any chance of them taking effect in time for the 2004 election.

Donate to Verified Voting, get on their mailing list, and check their web site occasionally for updates.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Carter is a decent man and has been a great ex-President. He was alos a lousy President, though not for the reason Tom claims.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Your conflating Ford and Carter. The new term of the previously thought impossible combination of inflation and recession was "stagflation", the "stag-" standing for "stagnation" or "stagnant". That, in combination with the residue of Watergate was what got Carter into office in the first place. It happened under Ford.

What he had under Carter was nearly runaway inflation, followed by 20% interest rates to stop the inflation.

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Should be "You're..."

Why do I write longhand (and even edit other people's work) like someone who can spell, but act like a phonetic ignoramus when typing fast? I don't even think of the words with the bad spelling consciously. But when I type, there must be some shortcut I'm not aware of directly from the remembered sound to the part of my brain that moves my fingers.

[misteropinion.livejournal.com]

Oh certainly, he wasn't a good president. I'm lead to believe that it was because he is a chronic micromanager and won't "play politics".
My pont was that while he was a bad president, he was totally ethical and doesn't deserve to be lumped in the same cesspit with Dubya.

[beowabbit]

Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent--and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins.

Stuff like this – which I read all the time – really bugs me. Presidential elections in this country happen every four years. And when journalists talk about “recent” elections, they usually mean something like ”within memory of the older of my readers”. Makes sense, because American politics changes fast enough (although slowly by some countries’ standards) that looking much further back than that doesn’t make any sense. So we’re talking about eight or ten or at the outside fifteen elections. That’s just not a large enough number to draw any sorts of conclusions from.

I found it an interesting article, but that’s one of my pet peeves.

Another peeve about taking 1980 as a parallel to 2004: John Anderson split from the Republican party to run against Carter and Reagan. He was a moderate Republican with broad appeal, so he probably took a lot of votes from Carter, but he probably also took some from Reagan. (Anybody got polling data on that?) In 2004, Nader has always been perceived as being on the left; he’s going to take very few otherwise Republican votes. (Polls suggest he will be taking some votes from Kerry.) So the third-party candidate in 2004 is not going to affect Bush the way the third-party candidate in 1980 affected Carter.

I do think Bush might be decisively (if not overwhelmingly) defeated, but I don’t think 1980 is a very good model for why or how.

(My wet dream is Powell or McCain publicly breaking ranks. If either of them publically said “this president is endangering the nation, not protecting it”, Bush wouldn’t have a prayer. But that’s only a fantasy.)