03-19-2019, 05:43 PM
(03-19-2019, 11:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Obama is X. I don't know how to interpret him. Maybe he is a prime example of a mature Reactive resembling 60-something Reactive adults of the past even if he has yet to reach 60. Maybe he is the only sort of Reactive leader that we like. I think of the worst sort of Reactive possible, the fascists and Stalinist lackeys of the 4T and early 1T who acted with a cynical ruthlessness. Or could it be that Obama has tried to meld the masculinity of Idealist types (for Obama, that would be Boomers) and Civic types (GI or Millennial) into some mixture that he hopes might work, as did the Silent?
Obama looks like an above-average President, and I would not be surprised to see his style replayed in a 60-something X figure during the next 1T.
In any event I see Donald Trump as a failure as a President, and the only remaining question is how catastrophic he will be. If you thought Herbert Hoover ill-suited to meeting the economic meltdown of 1929-1932, then wait till you see Trump should the economy tank. Foreign policy? With a President who alternates between appeasement and warmongering, two of the most dangerous tendencies in foreign policy, we Americans need some luck.
The people most likely to be shut out of the succession to the Presidency look like late-wave Boomers. We are likely to see a full twenty years of Presidents born just after World War II, time in which someone born in the 1950s has had little real chance of becoming President. Maybe Boomers who have gotten the raw end of exploitation by the Boomer elite have a stronger idealism -- and more realism. I contrast the Missionaries, whose birth years among their Presidents were 1865, 1872, 1874, and 1882. Boomers holding the Presidency were born in 1946, 1946, and 1946. There is little room left for a President born in the early 1950s and the late 1950s. Should Trump get re-elected I am not even sure that we will have a Presidency, let alone an America, following him.
Hysteria? I see him as the worst possible leader we could have.
I see these possibilities differently. I do think cusps are valid, and that Obama is as much as cross between Boomer and Xer as you could find. I guess you could say he blends the ability to see from a wide idealistic perspective with the ability to get ruthless and pragmatic. Other cuspers on either side thus might well produce another above average president of a similar kind. Using my horoscope scores as a guide, which seem to correspond with candidate ability, the late boomers still seem likely to produce a president, while most of Generation X might be skipped.
Prophets tend to produce even more presidential failures than great leaders, historically, though they have produced both-- and yet it was the prophet-nomad cuspers and hybrids who were those great ones, so there could indeed be more. McAuliffe and Landrieu seem to fit the bill. What effect the failures W.Bush and Trump will have on the office and the nation in the long run, we don't know. But we have had failed presidents before; though perhaps not on the scale of Trump before.