Silver lining of a Romney Presidency? THE DEATH OF REAGANISM

[craigmatic]

10. They really haven't had a great president to come from their coalition to speak of have they?

The bushes and reagan that's it. If reagan was their bizarro FDR that makes bush 41 their Truman and the parallels kind of hold up he won an election he shouldn't have and presided over a the end of a big war. Then he left office and was not held in high esteem by his contemporaries but looking back he was a pretty good foreign policy president and he didn't get as ideological as his predecessor. Plus his party split. Clinton in this instance would be our Ike with the good economy and peace. Then bush 43 would be a bizarro combination of theirJFK and LBJ. He was nearly the opposite of JFK in terms of articulation. JFK was trying to keep the US out of wars and bush got us into 2. He's like LBJ in that both were from TX and liked to spend money but at least LBJ had something other than war to show for his spending in the forms of social programs. And I think both LBJ and bush 43 hurt their parties in terms of long term political consequences for their actions. LBJ lost the south because of civil rights and bush ruined the economy and pissed away the republicans' lock on national security. That brings us to Obama who is either our Nixon i.e. a person with the opposite moderate ideology who comes along at a weak moment in the end of the dominant coaltion. Nixon was a moderate conservative who had to placete democratic liberals and Obama is a moderate liberal who has tried to placate conservative republicans. Or Obama could be our Reagan and the beginning of a new political regime. It's hard to tell at this point.