Presidential election, 2016

[Warren Dew]

(11-15-2016, 05:38 AM)Galen Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 06:22 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 02:08 PM)taramarie Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 03:56 AM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(11-14-2016, 02:35 AM)Galen Wrote: The GIs on the other hand were generally very competent and so I have fewer problems with their condescension.  When they were wrong is was rare and very spectacular.  In the end GIs tended respond to reality.  I rather liked them in spite of these flaws because of their basic sanity.

I'm curious where you got that impression; that wasn't my experience.  My experience was that GIs understood some things, but failed to understand other things despite their being obvious.  On the whole, they were probably comparably competent on a relative scale as their presidents were.  Johnson, Nixon, and Carter were incompetent to varying degrees; Reagan was exceptionally competent and Kennedy might have been competent had he had more time.  The overall average is probably slightly subpar relative to other generations.

With respect to political leaders, I think the primary difference with boomers was that GI presidents generally tried to improve things for the nation as a whole, even where they failed, and with the possible exception of Johnson; Boomer presidents to date were more interested in improving things for their political party at the cost of political opponents.  But I don't know if you're talking about political leaders or personal acquaintances.

I am curious as to what common things you think GIs did not understand.

I think it was different things for different GIs.

For Nixon, it was that price controls would fail, either through shortages or some other way.

For some GIs I knew, it was that cigarette butts could start fires.  They seemed to believe spontaneous combustion was pretty common and could not have been started by the cigarette butts involved in the situations.

That is why I said generally because, like any generation, they had idiots.  Its just that Boomers have had much more trouble adjusting to reality.  I think that Adam Savage came up with a phrase that sums up the Baby Boom Generation: I reject your reality and substitute my own.

Actually, just about everything Nixon ever did with respect to economic policy was wrong.  Wage and price controls was a pretty spectacular thing to get wrong.  It was the price controls on oil, which hung around through most of seventies, that gave us the gas lines.  It was closing the gold window that gave us the petrodollar which, when it ends, it really going to bite us all in the ass really hard because we will no longer be able to export inflation.

GI mistakes tended to be the result of overconfidence because they often were so successful.  They were the ones that invented the phrase "Failure is not an option". While today people often have a rather mechanistic and deterministic view of the world, it was worse in the sixties and seventies.  One of the most irritating things I used to hear in the seventies was: If we can land a man on the moon then why can't we X.  Where X was some utopian bit of social engineering that had no chance of working.

Nixon's economic policy was generally bad, no doubt.  My examples were limited to cases where the errors were obvious to a child, which I was at the time.

Do you consider Obama boomer or X?  He certainly did the substitution of his own reality thing a lot.