(01-18-2017, 02:34 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: So WTF happened in November?
Oh I know, November was like a drunken f___ ... everyone was supposed to forget about it the next morning. It was really nothing dear ....
...Until at least 2021 we are going to recognize that the last really-good President was Barack Obama. The Democrats can win big with another Obama-like nominee in 2020. This shadow will loom over Donald Trump, a vulgar and impetuous mediocrity.
All in all, I see President Obama as another Eisenhower (consider that in 2012 he won 331 electoral votes, and not one of them in a state that Eisenhower didn't win twice). But his temperament is that of a 60-something Reactive, the sort of person who typically reaches the apex of secular power after the Crisis is resolved or is all but resolved. The pattern includes Washington, John Adams, Truman, and Eisenhower, with your guess on who the better Gilded Presidents were. He is not the sort of leader to push Americans into a new direction.
Donald Trump has already betrayed many who voted for him, and for a President who got a slightly-larger share of the vote than Dukakis in 1988 and McCain in 2008 -- and both were considered clear losers -- there just isn't much wiggle room for error as President. This is especially true if the Republicans lose two of three gubernatorial races in Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2018.
Could Barack Obama have been the Gray Champion? He would have needed a Third Term. The American economy looks to have grown out of the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 as it did out of the 1929-1932 meltdown. Maybe Howe would need to adjust the Boom/X boundary to 1961/1962 instead of 1960/1961.
"General Motors is alive, and Osama bin Laden is dead" -- and we all know that a seven-year bull market is no accident, and that he had to be on at worst an arms-length relationship with the intelligence agencies and the Armed Services to whack Osama bin Laden.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.