the most important election of your lifetime - identify it please (US postwar edition)

1976 may not have been earth-shattering had it gone the other way, but it's an interesting one to think about. It really shows how unpopular the Dems were at that time (post-Southern realignment) that they could barely pull off a victory so soon after Watergate. If there really had been an unbroken line of GOP presidents from 1969 to 1993 I wonder what would have happened to the party.

But if Ford had won the bad economy may have been blamed on the GOP, setting the Dems up for a 1980 victory, perhaps with Teddy as the nominee. Who knows if Ford would have run again, or if not whether Reagan or Veep Dole would have got the '80 nomination.

That's the way I figure it. I kinda wish Dole had won in '96. Even if he decided to run again he'd have been beaten, I suspect, and we might never have heard of George W. Bush.

Reagan-Bush in 1980 is the nightmare from which we're still trying to awaken.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 8 August 2016 18:31 (Yesterday) Permalink

^^^ I'm tempted to sign on to this one. First election I voted in. Hated Reagan then, hate him even more now.

what if Spartacus had a Piper Cub, amirite?

Gotta go with 1960 because agree that without LBJ you probably don't have 90% of the good things that happened during my lifetime. Everything else feels incremental.

Increasingly torn between 1960/1968, which for me both have the feeling of increasingly bizarre alternate-reality fiction if they'd gone differently ("...and, facing a truculent and vicious Nixon in office, the student protests grew still bolder, and then..."), and 1980/2000, where the differences are tied much more concretely to specific policies that did get enacted, where you can say with certainty "that really huge thing that happened would not have happened." I guess you can chain them together as "without Reagan, there is no George W, and without Nixon, there is no Reagan."

You can also duck '80 by imagining '76 going differently; at least to me it's not super clear how Ford might have done things dramatically differently than Carter, so having him and the Republicans saddled as the party of stagflation and malaise basically gives a free pass for the Democrat of your choice to beat Reagan or Dole or whoever handily in '80 (Ford not being eligible under the 22nd Amendment).

Ford could have run since he didn't have a full term
Same with Johnson in 68

Not so, I think -

No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

Ford served from August 9, 1974 to January 20, 1977 - more than two years. If he'd won in '76 it would have been a guaranteed one-termer.

JFK was shot in November '63, so Johnson served just over one year of that term and was in the clear.

Reminds me of those 2008 discussions initiated by books by Sean Wilentz et al trying to posit Reagan or Nixon as fathers of modern conservatism

My reading of that amendment is Living not Originalist

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I had no idea Doctor Casino was born before 1960!

And Alex in SF too!

I think for those of us who lived through Reagan it's impossible to pick 2000 over 1980. Maybe people older than me find it absurd I picked 1980 over 1960. But here's the thing. I feel like the 1960s, as we know them, were going to happen Kennedy or no Kennedy. The 1980s as we know them? We really might have avoided them. We might not STILL BE LIVING IN THEM, as we are.

i dunno, the neoliberal wave was not limited to the US. the backlash to decades of progressive victories (limited as they were) was mounting, reagan or no reagan (tho he was obviously head cheerleader).

Haha no, I was born in 1981 - - - I really should have chosen a different title for the thread, since it was really more "in the lifetime of most ILXors/recent national memory" - but the recurrence of this trope in recent elections sort of called out to me.

HAH I just sort of assumed it was the options on the POLL not actually my lifetime.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

'76 because Carter's tumultuous presidency paved the way for Reagan to win? Doesn't seem that momentous otherwise. '92 does, to me, even if you hate Clinton--beginning of hyper-partisanship, for one thing. 1968 seems really important a) just by virtue of being 1968, and b) if there's no Nixon presidency, a whole lot else changes.

(Being Canadian, I wasn't allowed to vote in this.)

Being a Cook County corpse I voted 1960

...eight times!

"And that ain't the record either"

thinking about the supreme court really boosts 1968 a bit i think. a lot of things might have played out very differently had humphrey, not nixon, filled four vacancies in that first term. blackmun turned out a surprise liberal but rehnquist, powell and burger shifted the court decidedly rightward off of where it was going under Warren - really where it had been going since FDR's raft of appointments - and they stuck around forever. even reagan's picks, much as i still loathe scalia, seem to have been less obstructive to the progress of justice and equality.

i said 1964 itt but yeah 68 is really pivotal to me. more likely the US' social democratic reforms would continue from there. what was humphrey's vietnam position?

I think by the time of the primaries, pretty much everyone's (public) position was 'pull out ASAP'.

(Which, for Nixon, naturally meant 'as soon as possible after the election'.)

humphrey's vietnam position might be described as "frustrated." my understanding is that he was one of those in the admin who'd started to think the war was indeed "quicksand" and that the rosy pictures they were getting from the brass were B.S. but it was pretty hard for him to stake out a different position while running as LBJ's veep. meanwhile the national mood was souring on the war at sort of the worst time for the admin trying to pass the torch; he probably would have won if the calendar were all shifted around and the election happened in '67.

he didn't run in the primaries (focused on caucus states IIRC) and of course he entered late because of LBJ's sudden decision to drop out, but all through this period and into the summer he was still stick carrying water for the admin's line on the war, months after Tet and with the momentum clearly shifting to mccarthy and RFK as outright anti-war candidates. a month before the election he finally said publicly that he'd end the bombing and seek a cease-fire as a gamble for the sake of peace talks (which he'd been pushing to LBJ privately for a while, per wiki). it went over well with the public, but it was sort of too-little-too-late. or maybe it would have been just enough had nixon not fiddled with the peace talks. it was a close race (despite the blowout electoral vote). nixon carried several EV-rich states by around 3% or less (CA, IL, NJ, OH) and the Wallace ticket was in striking distance of a couple more than it won (the Carolinas, Tennessee). it really could have gone differently.

this gets much more into his vietnam chronology and his frustrations: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/vietnam-hubert-humphrey.html

this is an auspiciously timed first post :/

yeah. :-/ it was a different time, for sure.

thinking about the supreme court really boosts 1968 a bit i think. a lot of things might have played out very differently had humphrey, not nixon, filled four vacancies in that first term. blackmun turned out a surprise liberal but rehnquist, powell and burger shifted the court decidedly rightward off of where it was going under Warren - really where it had been going since FDR's raft of appointments - and they stuck around forever. even reagan's picks, much as i still loathe scalia, seem to have been less obstructive to the progress of justice and equality.

― This is a total Jeff Porcaro. (Doctor Casino),

Wait till you read John Dean's The Rehnquist Vote, in which the tapes clarify how stupid and troll-y Nixon intended to be with his real picks for the Court. To be honest we're lucky that Powell and Blackmun turned out to be moderates fairly quickly (compared to Scalia, Thomas, and even early O'Connor), despite Powell's writing one of the most influential of modern conservative memos.