The 1964 campaign was perhaps the most ideological campaign in U.S. history, with the conservative Bary Goldwater challenging the liberal Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won in a landslide, with Goldwater winning only his home state of Arizona, and the five deep South states. The deep South had been reliably Democratic since Reconstruction, but this election represented an end to this century-old tradition. After this election, only Arkansas remained as the only state voting Democratic in every election since the end of Reconstruction in 1876.
Unlike in many other elections, personality played no role in 1964. Few voters would have preferred the vulgar, brutish Johnson as someone they would want to go out and have a beer with, but they voted for him anyway, due to policy considerations.
Johnson had many important achievements in domestic policy, but his presidency self-destructed due to his disastrous Vietnam misadventure. After almost losing to Gene McCarthy in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, Johnson dropped out and the Democratic nomination went to his VP, Hubert Humphrey. The Republicans nominated Richard Nixon, who had been diligently cultivating his relationships with party leaders all around the country since his loss to JFK eight years earlier.
The race was an ulphill fight for Humphrey, as he was dealing with a hopelessly fractured party due to the Vietnam debacle. Nevertheless, he was closing the gap in the latter days of the campaign, and some analysts feel that he would have won had the campaign gone on for just a few days longer. Johnson had made some peace overtures to North Vietnam in the waning days of the campaign, and things were looking up for Humphrey. What Johnson did not reveal publicly, and which surely would have given Humphrey the election, was that in the closing days of the campaign Nixon had sent word to South Vietnam advising it to avoid particpating in the peace talks, because they would get a better deal after he was elected. South Vietnam did indeed boycott the talks, and Nixon was narrowly elected.
So why did Johnson not reveal what he had found out about Nixon's interference in the peace talks? The answer is that revealing the information would have revealed that he had the phone of the South Vietnamese ambassador tapped, as this was the source of the info. It is quite possible that, absent Nixon's meddling, peace would have been achieved, as the Soviet Union was also pressuring North Vietnam to settle the war, and our similar pressure on South Vietnam to settle could have accomplished a peace treaty. The upshot of this sorry episode is that the war continued for four more years, and 21,000 more Americans died, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
The electoral vote for Nixon in 1968 was 301-191, with third-party candidate George Wallace winning 46 electoral votes. Wallace won four of the five Deep South states, plus Arkansas. Humphrey won only states in the Northeast corridor from Maine down to West Viginia, plus the states of Washington, Minnesota, Michgan, and Texas.
Like Johnson before him, Nixon had some domestic accomplihsments, but his presidency was undone by his flawed war policy. After the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, Nixon formed a Special Investigation Unit, known as the Plumbers, to investigate and stop the leaks. Some speculate that part of Nixon's motivation was his fear that his actions to sabotage the peace process during the '68 campaign might come to light if the leaks didn't get plugged. The plumbers were caught breaking into the Democratic headquarters in June of 1972, and the Watergate saga began.
The Democrats made the same mistake in 1972 that the Republicans had made in 1964, when they nominated a candidate from the fringe of the party. Like Goldwater, George McGovern was a good man with an impeccable personal character, but he did even worse than Goldwater, winning only one state, Massachusetts, to Goldwater's six in 1964.
McGovern tried to make Nixon's corruption a campagin theme, but it never really caught fire. However, in the year and a half after the election, investigations by Congress and journalists brought to light the extent of Nixon's corruption, and he was forced to resign in August of 1974.
VP Gerald Ford took over, and a month into his presidency he issued a pardon for Richard Nixon. It was presented as if he had gone to church, and upon his return to the White House he experienced an epiphany and impulsively pardoned Nixon. In his 1999 book "Shadow", Bob Woodward explains what was so wrong with thsi:
"The problem with the pardon was in Ford's execution. To be successful, the pardon required elaborate orchestration. The public, Congress and the media needed to be prepared. Ford whould have mustered all of his sense of decency to explain his actions to the republic....He should have required Nixon to sign a statement admitting his guilt and released it with the pardon."
Ford ran for the GOP nomination in 1976, but he had stiff opposition from Ronald Reagan. He got the nomination, but came away from the convention seriously weakened. Even so, he came close to beating Jimmy Carter in the general election. Ford was hurt not only by the Nixon pardon, but also by the bruising primary campaign waged against him by Reagan, and by an inexplicable verbal gaffe during a debate with Carter in which he stated that Eastern Europe was not under the domination of the Soviet Union.
The electoral vote for Carter was 297-240. Ford won the entire West, except for Texas, and Carter won the entire South, except for Virginia. Carter's Southern strategy was a successful attempt to appeal to his fellow southerners, reminiscent of Nixon's such strategy in 1968. Carter downplayed his liberalism, and ran a campaign which avoided the issues and stressed that he would return integrity and honesty to the national government, an approach which resonated with voters who were tired of the corruption and turmoil following the twin debacles of Watergate and Vietnam.
The Carter presidency was a complete disaster. It reminds me a lot of the Polk presidency; what Roseboom said about Polk could equally apply to Carter: "He had serious defects as a party leader. He was drab, rather susp[icious, self-contained, self-righteous, always on his guard, trusting no one overmuch and inviting no confidences." It was also reminiscent of Benjamin Harrison, about whom it was said that "He was ungracious and frigid in his dealings with people. He had been elected with the help of party workers, but now he failed to reciprocate properly."
In "Shadow", Woodward ends his section on Carter by saying that "Carter regularly broke his most basic promise made when he campaigned for the presidency. He did not always tell the truth." To me the worst Carter lie was when he claimed that he let the Shah of Iran into the country for medical treatment because the Shah could not get the treatment he needed elsewhere. Carter did this despite intelligence reports warning him that our embassy in Tehran would be in jeopardy if he let the Shah into the U.S. He ignored the intelligence reports, and the hostage crisis resulted.
But here is "the rest of the story". Much later the U.S. doctors revealed that they were willing to go down to Mexico City to treat the Shah, and said that he could have had the same treatment there as in the U.S. So, Carter's excuse was exposed as an outright lie.
Examples of how bad Carter was can be illustrated by two incidents involving House Speaker Tip O'Neill, which bookended the Carter administration as one occurred at the start and the other at the end. On Inauguration Day, Tip could not get tickets to the Inaugural Ball, an inexplicable slight to the top Democrat in Congress. And on election day of 1980, Tip pleaded with Carter to not concede until the polls were closed in California. Carter ignored the plea and conceded early, and two incumbent California Democratic Congressmen lost as a result, as Democratic voters left the polls in droves after the concession became public. Tip O'Neill got along better with Ronald Reagan than he ever did with Carter, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about how bad Carter was.
One of Carter's many problems was his penchant for micro-managing. An example is that White House personnel had to make reservations to use the White House tennis court directly with Carter. Staffers even had to call Carter on Air Force One to make a reservation!
In the convention era, the party would have turned to a different candidate in 1980, just as the Democrats did in 1848 when rejecting Polk for a second term, and as the Republicans did in 1880 when rejecting Hayes for a second term. But since we were now in the primary era, the electorate was stuck with a hopelessly flawed candidate.
The Republicans chose Ronald Reagan as their 1980 nominee. Reagan had primary opposition, but prevailed over all of his opponents and by the time of the convention the party was united behind him. Carter, by contrast, had strenuous opposition from Senator Ted Kennedy, a battle which Kennedy took all the way to the convention. The party remained so fractured that over 700 of the Kennedy delegates walked out of the convention after Carter was re-nominated for a second term.
With the Democratic Party hopelessly fractured, Reagan won the general election in a landslide. Carter won only six states: the home states of him and his running mate, Georgia and Minnesota, plus West Virginia, Rhode Island, Hawaii, and Maryland. Raegan was re-elected in 1984 by an even greater landslide than in 1980, as the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, won only his home state of Minnesota.
The 1998 campaign was one of the most despicable in U.S. history. VP George H.W. Bush got the GOP nomination, running againt the Democrat Michael Dukakis. Bush ran a despicable campaign, totally out of character with his basic sense of decency; he repeatedly attacked Dukakis for being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU", for vetoing a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in Massachusetts schools, for overseeing a prison furlough program in Massachusetts which led to a murder, and for being against the death penalty.
The tragedy in this election was that Dukakis did not punch back. He simply ignored the attacks, and naturally he lost the election in a near-landslide. He won only ten states plus the District of Columbia, and lost the electoral vote 426-111. Columnist Jimmy Breslin famously chasstised the Democrats for giving us a "busted computer" as a candidate, a refernece to Dukakis's wooden and uninspiring campaigning style.
Bill Clinton learned from the Dukakis debacle, and in 1992 he set up a war room which was responsible for anticipating GOP attacks and having responses ready. This worked wonderfully, as the Clinton responses to attacks were so timely that they were reported out on the news at the same time as the attacks. Clinton was an unusually adept campaigner, with an ability to connect with voters which his opponent, Bush running for a second term, lacked. With third-party candidate Ross Perot muddying the waters, Clinton won 370-168 in the electoral college. Perot got an impressive 19% of the popular vote, but won no states, and finished second in only two states--Utah and Maine.
Clinton was re-elected easily in 1996, beating the GOP candidate Senator Bob Dole. While Dole had been an effective Senator, he did not measure up as a viable presidential candidate. Ross Perot was again in the picture as a third-party candidate, but his share of the vote dropped to 8%.
And now we come to the infamous 2000 election. The outcome came down to Florida, and when the Supreme Court refused to allow the recount to proceed in Florida, George W. Bush was declared elected, winning Florida by a paltry 537 votes.
This abysmal decision threw the Supreme Court into a state of disrepute, a state which has continued to this day. The Consitution says the electors of a state are to be determined in a manner chosen by the state legislature, so the federal government has no role in this process. And yet, the Supreme Court thrust itself into the middle of the Florida election recount. The Court's disapproval rainting, which stood at 24% in July of 2000, is now at 58% according to the latest Gallup Poll.
The Supreme Court has always been a poitical institution, but up until 2000 the American public clung to the notion that the Court was above poitics. But the 2000 election decision was so blatantly political, with the five conservatives, people who were always considerd to be strong supporters of states' rights, acting to deny Florida the right to run its own election.
Nothing that has happened since has acted to restore the Court's credibility, despite the heroic efforts of Chief Justice John Roberts, who has genuine and well-founded concerns about the Court's lack of crediibility. The Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, was a blatantly political decision, made possible by the justices placed on the Court by President Trump with the express purpose of overturning Roe. One of these justices was there only because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused for a year to take up Obama's nomination to fill a Court vacancy. Just so sickenly and blatantly political.
And now we have election cases coming before the Court, with the Court's lack of any ethical rules coming into the spotlight. Justice Thomas's wife was an active part of the effort to overturn the results of the 2000 election, and yet Thomas refuses to recuse himself on cases involving that election. Further problems for Thomas are the huge gifts which he has received from his billionaire friends, gifts which he has failed to disclose on required financial disclosure forms. And now it comes to light that Justice Alito had an upside-down American flag displayed at his residence, and also at his beach house, after the January 6th insurrection, this display of the flag being a symbol of support for the election denial movement. Congress has the power to impose a code of ethics and otherwise regulate Court activities, and it needs to act now, before the Supreme Court descends into complete irrelevancy.
But the 2000 election should never have gotten to the point where it was so close that the Supreme Court was able to step in and decide the outcome. It is demonstrably true that third-party candidate Ralph Nader's presence on the ballot cost Al Gore the election in Florida. And it is also demonstrably true that the infamous "butterfly ballot" used in Palm Beach County was so confusing that 2,000 voters voted for Pat Buchanan, when they intended to vote for Al Gore.
But the real villain in the 2000 election fiasco was not the Supreme Court, nor Ralph Nader, nor the butterfly ballot. The real villain is Al Gore himself, for turning his back on Bill Clinton. Instead of distancing himself from Clinton, he should have embraced Clinton, and allowed Clinton to campaign for him. Bill Clinton ended his presidency more popular than any presidnet since such ratings were begun in 1952. For the record, here are the final approval ratings for all presidents starting with Truman. Clinton-66%, Reasgan-63%, Obama & Ike-59%, JFK-58%, Bush Sr.-56%, Ford-53%, LBJ-49%, Carter & Bush Jr.-34%, Truman-32%, Nixon-24%.
But what was not simply wrongheaded, but was also totally despicable, was the issue on which Gore chose to break with the Clinton Administration. On March 30, 2000, Gore released a statementy saying that Elian Gonzalez should have his future decided by a Florida family court. Just think about what this would have meant? Elian's father would have had to come to the U.S., a country he'd never been to, speaking a language he did not speak, and litigate his right to his own son! This would have been unbearably cruel to Elian's father, and, thankfully, the Clinton Administastion realized how wrong this would have been and returned Elian to his father in Cuba. Basic famiy law in this country says that a parent has priority over third-party relatives when deciding custody, aslthough there would have been no guarantee that a Florida family court would have decided the case accordingly. It would have been a complete circus, and quite traumatizing to this six-year-old child and his father. After Gore's statement, I realized I could never vote for such an inhumane man.
What Gore was doing was pandering to the anti-Castro Cuban-American voters in Florida. This crowd was advancing a right-wing narrative that Elian's mother was fleeing to the U.S. seeking freedom for herself and her son. This was a totally false narrative. The truth is that as recently as the night before the trip, she was unsure she wanted to go. At the last-minute she decided to accompany her boyfried to avoid losing him. Kudos to the Clinton Administaton for doing the right thing, and thereby taking a positive step to reversing forty years of a foregin policy based on anti-Castro hysteria. And boos to Gore for showing hinmself to be a despicable human being.
Today Elian Gonzalez is an industrial engineer and a member of Cuba's Congress. He is married with a young child. His father protected him from undue media attention during his childhood, enabling him to have a normal chhildhood. There can be no doubt that his life has been better than it would have been growing up in the U.S. as a pawn for the radical right-wing.
In 2004 the Democrats nominated Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to run against the incumbent George W. Bush. Kerry was not a bad candidtae, but his thoughtfulness caused him to come across as wishy-washy, when, like Ed Muskie in 1972, it was just a matter that he could see multiple sides of an issue. His inartful statment that "I voted for it before I voted against it" led to him being called a "flip-flopper", even though it made sense to anyone who understands the arcane Senate rules.
Democrats hoped that Kerry's military service in Vietnam would be a plus running against Bush, who used family influence to get into the National Guard, thereby avoiding going to Vietnam. However, a group of veterans formed a group which ran $22 million worth of negative ads against Kerry, and the term "swift-boating" entered the lexicon, meaning an unfair political attack. Most of Kerry's fellow service members disputed the Swift Boat narrative, but the damage was done.
Despite all the GOP dirty tricks, the elction was quite close. The electoral vote was 286-251, with the result not decided until the day after the election when Ohio was declared for Bush. Bush won 50.7% of the pooular vote, the only time since 1988 that the GOP candidate has won the popular vote (both Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote though winning the electoral vote).
The most noteworthy thing about the 2008 election was John McCain's odd selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his GOP running mate. Palin had no accomplishments to brag about, and was virtually unknown outside her home state before she was thrust into the national limelight by McCain. McCain had wanted Joe Lieberman for his running mate, but party leaders vetoed the idea. This idea of "balancing the ticket" turned out horribly for the GOP, as the right-wing hated McCain and the moderates couldn't stomach Palin. With the GOP incumbent president (Bush) at an approval rating of a paltry 25% on election day, the GOP ticket was likely in big trouble anyway.
Obama won the male vote 49-48, the only time since 1992 that the Democratic candidate has done so. (Even Dole in 1996 won the male vote 44-43.) 2008 is also noteworthy as the only time that both major parties nominated sitting United States Senators for the presidency.
The 2012 general electon was a rather mundane vote for the incumbent Obama over his GOP challenger, Mitt Romney. The most interesting thing about this eletion was the battle for the GOP nomination, which was a case study in how our system of partisan primaries forces candidates to appeal to the extremes of their party. Between 5/5/11 and 2/22/12, the Republican Party had an incredible total of twenty debates! These debates featured combinations of the ten major GOP candidates; in alphabetical order, these were Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Gry Johnson, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Perry, Mktt Romney, an Rick Santorum.
Each of these GOP debates would have the top two candidtaes in the current polling in the middle; these two always consisted of Mitt Romney and whoever was closest to him in the polls at the time. What was so fascinating was to watch Romney pick them off and destroy them one by one, like a sniper picking off his victims. Romney's technique was to insist he was more "conservative" than his competitor; this demonstrates the problem with partisan primaries, as Romney pandered to the extreme right wing every time. At the end he was lambasting Newt Gingrich for not insisting that all people here illegally should be deported. Newt was advocating allowing grandmothers who've been here for decades and have been productive members of their communities to remain in this country.
On another occasion, Romney characterized himself as "severely conservative", an odd phraseology that was totally false. To the "charge" that the health care plan he signed into law as governor of Massachusetts was similar to Obamacare, he responded that the problem with the federal law was that it imposed a "one size fits all" system on the states. The natural follow-up to this would have been to ask Romney what was so different about Massachusetts that the same plan which worked so well there would not work in other states, but nobody ever pressed him on this.
The problems with partisan primaries came into full prominence in 2016 when the two major parties selected the two most unpopular candidates since Gallup polling in this regard began in 1956. The final Gallup favorability poll of the candidates before the election showed Trump with a 61% unfavorability rating, and Hillary Clinton with a 52% unfavorability rating. This travesty is being repeated now, in 2024, when the two candidates poised to get their party's nomination both are highly unpopular.
The evil of identity politics reared its ugly head in 2016 when liberals opposed to Hillary Clinton were labelled misogynistic. I experienced this personally when a prominant Mennonite feminist, someione who I had thought was a friend and a kindred spirt, called me a misogynist for daring to criticize Hillary's campaigning style. I was absolutley correct, as events have proven, and yet I was vilified. When Trump recently opined thst Biden hates Jews and added that “If Jewish people are going to vote for Joe Biden, they have to have their head examined”, his criticisms of Biden differed in degree, but not in kind, from my critic's castigation of me. The principle is the same: if you criticize a Jew, you must hate Jews; if you criticize a woman, you must hate women. This identity politics and poitical correctness nonsense is despicable and must stop! It's getting so that one cannot express an honest opinion anymore for fear of offending someone or being labelled as some sort of a hatemonger.
As one might expect, Hillary, whose wooden and passionless campaigning style turned off most voters, lost the election and we got stuck with Trump, who turned out to be easily the worst president in U.S. history. Boos and hisses to the Democrats for not rising to the occasion and giving us a viable candidate in 2016. And boos and hisses to Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, who was revealed through leaked emails to have had her thumb on the scales in favor of Hillary Clinton over her primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, in the battle for the 2016 Democratic nomination. She was forced to resign in disgrace on the eve of the 2016 Democratic convention, and has been living in relative obscurity ever since.
As one might expect, Trump lost his bid for re-election in 2020, and now in 2024 it looks like we are in store for a rematch of the 2020 race between Trump and Biden. The issue here is going to be whether Biden can mount a competent campaign which highlights his acheivements as president. To do this he will need to make generous use of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, two of the best surrogates a candidate could ever hope to have. If he does, the voters will love it and overlook the age issue. If not, Donald Trump will join Grover Cleveland as the only presidents to serve two non-consecutive terms.
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