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

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.