Ann Althouse asks the Presidential hypothetical:
Assume JFK was not assassinated. Now, beginning with the 1964 election and continuing up to 2012, name the candidates for President and Vice President in both parties and who would have won. Fill in with reasons why this happened.
The thing to keep in mind with a question like this is that the Democratic and Republican Parties may have developed differently. Some politicians may never have come to national notice. Party affiliations cannot be taken for granted. Here is one such alternate United States of America:
1964 - Kennedy/Johnson (D) beat Goldwater/Miller (R) - that
matchup and result was already in motion. VP Johnson convinces President Kennedy
to put off civil rights legislation, keeping Strom Thurmond in the Democratic
Party.
1968 - Humphrey/Wallace (D) beat Nixon/Romney (R) -
Democratic Party factions unite behind Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace at
Chicago convention after JFK and Johnson accept blame for Tet Offensive setback
in Vietnam. Republicans Richard Nixon and George Romney embrace free market and
social liberalism.
1969 - Robert Kennedy drowns when his brother Ted drives a car
both are riding in off a Chappaquiddick bridge. Ted Kennedy drowns trying to
save him.
1972 - Humphrey/Wallace (D) beat Romney/Rockefeller (R) – President
Humphrey makes Yalta II deal with Soviet Union. Iron curtain is extended to
Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Leon Panetta decides to stay in the Republican
Party as he feels it is more centrist, Trent Lott remains a Democrat.
1973 - George Wallace becomes President when Hubert Humphrey
dies in office, as the stresses of the office take 5 years off his life
expectancy. Wallace appoints House Speaker Carl Albert of Oklahoma Vice
President.
1976 –Reagan/Romney (R) beat Wallace/Albert (D) – Ronald Reagan
picks Michigan Senator Lenore Romney as first woman VP nominee. Wallace blamed
for ’73-’74 recession and April 1975 fall of Singapore.
1980 - Reagan/Romney (R) beat Carter/Mondale (D) - Democrats
fail to reenergize the magical Minnesota-Dixie Coalition of ’68. President Reagan
credited for negotiating a new Panama Canal Treaty, joining with British PM Margaret
Thatcher to install Reza Pahlavi as Shah of Iran, and preventing a Soviet takeover
of Afghanistan.
1984 - Romney/Baker (R) beat Mondale/Hart (D). Lenore Romney
is first woman elected President of U.S. with Howard Baker as her VP. Lenore proposes a Constitutional amendment to grant abortion rights in the first trimester only.
1988 - Hart/Thurmond (D) beat Romney/Baker (R). Gary Hart rekindles nostalgia for the Coalition
of ’68 by choosing Strom Thurmond as his running mate on the platform “each
region to its own socialism.”
1992 - Hart/Thurmond (D) beat Baker/Forbes (R). Gary Hart credited
for “fall” of Berlin Wall as West Germany reunites with a triumphant East
Germany. France elects its first Communist President. The Soviet European Union
is formed. Howard Baker picks Steve Forbes as his running mate.
1996 –Weld/Panetta (R) beat Thurmond/Gore (D). Massachusetts
Governor William Weld and California Senator Leon Panetta take advantage of liberals
leaving the Democratic Party in the Northeastern realignment of 1994. Strom
Thurmond picks fellow southerner Al Gore as his running mate, leading to a
historic election night route.
2000 – Weld/Panetta (R) beat Gore/Duke (D). Weld narrowly wins reelection after Florida recount
as Tennessee Senator Al Gore teams with Democratic Louisiana Governor David
Duke.
2004 –Panetta/Snowe (R) beat Duke/Feingold (D). Democratic Louisiana
Governor David Duke teams with Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. VP Leon Panetta
credited for killing Osama Bin Laden in daring August 2001 Seal Team 6 raid
after Panetta read report of plan to launch terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
2008 – Panetta/Snowe (R) beat Feingold/Lott (D). Panetta credited
for collapse of Soviet European Union in worst financial crisis since the Great
Depression brought on by wars debts from proxy war in North Korea. Democrats Russ
Feingold and Trent Lott were hurt by previous presidential nominee and Louisiana
Governor David Duke’s refusal to accept timely federal help in response to
Hurricane Katrina.
2012 - Snowe/Obama (R) beat Clinton/Biden (D). Olympia Snowe is the second woman elected President. VP candidate
Barack Obama recounts how he knocked on doors in Hawaii as a 15-year-old to
help Ronald Reagan defeat the segrationalist President George Wallace and worked
in the 1990s as a Republican Party organizer on the South Side of Chicago.
1 comment:
Well, it's imaginative. But it also makes major assumptions about the viability of Rockefeller Republicanism "in a perfect world". There's a reason that Lindsay and Scranton and the rest of them cracked up, and it wasn't malignant Nixonian fascism on the march.
An America with David Duke on a two-party national ticket (assuming we're still talking about a segregationist racist Duke, and not one with some sort of secular Road to Damascus moment) would be one in which the South is a roiling cauldron of intermittent outbreaks of violence punctuated by federal occupation and guerrilla warfare.
And you seem to be positing a world in which the Soviet model is long-term capable of peaceful triumph. In my view, only detente, Brezhnevian reaction, and balance-of-power stasis kept the Soviets from collapse for as long as it did in the real world. The Soviets were on the glide path to oblivion even before the Reaganite/Thatcherite free-market revival competed them to death. Command economies are just not capable of anything beyond a cancerous mimicry of a phase-two industrialized society.
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