What do Biden, Obama, Bill Clinton and Carter have in common...

[brush]

Besides being Democrats and winners?

[tblue37]

1. They've never been divorced.

[secondwind]

2. Down to earth, caring, approachable, honesty (except for Bill's affair),

I’ll think of more, but need to hit the sack.

[In It to Win It]

3. Popular vote winner?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

4. They're all male and they're all fathers. n/t

[Doreen]

5. Not evil.

[Dem4Life1102]

6. Carter lost to Reagan

[brush]

8. He won first. Reagan committed treason to win.

[denbot]

10. He sure as fuck did..

Persian Gulf 80/81

[Dem4Life1102]

18. Yes and then he lost.

[brush]

23. We all know he lost the second election. The point is he won...

the first election, as did the others, as a center left Democrat. Which is how our party wins—not too far left and not too far right.

[Dem4Life1102]

27. And Trump won in 16 and then lost in 20.

[brush]

28. And water is wet. What are you going on about?

[Dem4Life1102]

29. Honesty

[brush]

30. But no one is lying and you're not contributing to the point of the discussion...

which is how successful Democratic national candidates have positioned themselves to win.

[Dem4Life1102]

31. It's not honest to include Carter in the group

Like Trump, he won one election but lost when he ran for re-election. We need to hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to facts and reality or we can’t credibility criticize the other side when they don’t.

[brush]

32. Ridiculous. I included Carter's political positioning when he WON.

But of course you missed that point completely. It's about political positioning of Democrat candidates who won.

Now I'm done with miles away from the point silliness.

[Dem4Life1102]

36. You didn't make any distinction in the OP

Based on the OP alone it wasn’t honest to include Carter because he lost to Reagan.

[Polybius]

33. No one can predict 2024 though

Trump will leave this country a mess. Half of the population are morons, they might blame Biden.

[Dem4Life1102]

37. They will blame Biden

No matter what happens.

[Polybius]

39. I can only imagine what will happen in 2024 if a competent Republican gets the nomination

It won't be an easy win, unless we lose the House in 2022. Then it gets easier to blame Republicans.

[DeeNice]

46. I agree.

I agree about them blaming Biden no matter what.

[standingtall]

49. Yes but Trump never won the poplar vote

Carter did.

[Dem4Life1102]

50. Very true

[Celerity]

7. they all had dogs for pets

[brush]

9. All the above are correct. What I was really getting at is they...

all figured out that a Democratic candidate can't run too far left or right to win a national election. They were/are all left-of-center Democrats.

If we ever get the House and Senate and the WH like LBJ and FDR had, we can really install the progressive policies we all favor. We can't do that unless we position ourselves to win.

[LeftInTX]

11. Agree

Unfortunately, LBJ's success was short lived

Kennedy and Truman were moderates

[albacore]

17. LBJ could have been the turning point for this country...

Progressive (as President, at least) and powerful enough to bend the recalcitrant Repubs to his will.

IF he'd stayed out of that goddam war, and been elected for a second term, he could have cemented the Great Society in place.

But he just had to show the Repubs he was hard on "communism", and the war destroyed him.... and perhaps us as well.

“I knew from the start if I left a woman I really loved -- the Great Society -- in order to fight that bitch of a war in Vietnam then I would lose everything at home. My hopes, my dreams..."

[brush]

25. Good stuff. LBJ's admin had the two aspects to it that you mention...

war which destroys society and social programs which build it up—almost an oxymoron.

[JonLP24]

22. Truman would be a "radical" today

He advocated for universal health care & he called out the Republicans for being the party of wall street. Dewey ran on platitudes & unity.

Kennedy's first 100 days addressed poverty. One thing about Cold War liberals is they cared about poverty.

[betsuni]

12. I wish the myths that Democrats are Republican-lite or that the majority of Americans are

just waiting for a progressive enough candidate to vote for a Democrat would stop, and that people would get it through their heads that without majorities like FDR and LBJ had, there aren't the votes for "transformative" progressive polices, period.

[brush]

13. That's it exactly. Which is why the Georgia senate races are so important...

as we need to get the roadblock that is Moscow Mitch out of the way in the Senate so our policies can get passed.

Donate and Zoom phone bank everyone outside of Georgia, and Georgians pls help Stacey Abrams get out the vote for Ossoff and Warnock.

[JonLP24]

21. Jake Tapper is using Castro in the Georgia Senate Race

He was a youth pastor for a church that invited Castro to speak. Meanwhile Trump is the one tweeting "I won the election" and it is Leoffler that supports him.

[JonLP24]

20. What do LBJ, Truman, and FDR have in common?

I will continue to advocate for the policies I support. It all comes down to racism and I'm not interested in meeting them in the middle.

Focus on things like ending wars. That will gain more support in the future. One thing Clinton was known for was "peace & prosperity".

[dsc]

24. Not entirely sure you want to use FDR

in a post about how awful racism is. While he didn't compromise on economics he most assuredly did on racism.

[brush]

26. True. African Americans were largely left out of the New Deal programs.

Southern dixiecrats were powerful committee chairs who he had to placate.

Ironically it was up to LBJ, a southerner himself but also somewhat of a populist from his days as a teacher in the Texas hill country advocating for poor mexican students and their parents, who corrected that exclusion of blacks and POCs with his Great Society programs, many drafted specifically at African Americans (with the pressure and urgings of course of the civil rights movement and its leaders, MLK, Roy Wilkins, Farmer and others).

[PatSeg]

38. I believe all our recent Democratic presidents

were as liberal as the system allowed them to be. I think they all would have supported more progressive policies if they could have. Too often presidents get blamed for policies that many consider too moderate, when it is the House and Senate that is to blame. If people want more liberal programs, they should elect more liberal candidates to congress and on a state and local level.

People's expectations for a president are often unrealistic, like he/she is some kind of all powerful being. Change often works best from the bottom up. Marriage equality and marijuana legalization are two examples of progressive change that started on a local and state level.

[brush]

42. Spot on. Presidents can do only so much if they don't have the House...

and Senate majorities. Down ticket elections matter which why the Georgia senate races are so important.

[ffr]

14. Driving down deficits, economic recoveries, tens of millions of new jobs, protecting the nation

Building a smarter military war machine, without the pork barrel spending the GOP is known for.

· Total jobs created under Democratic Presidents: 68,312,000
· Total jobs created under Republican Presidents: 32,194,000

· Average yearly growth in jobs under Democratic Presidents: 1,952,000
· Average yearly growth in jobs under Republican Presidents: 825,500

· Average yearly percent growth in jobs under Democratic Presidents: 2.54%
· Average yearly percent growth in jobs under Republican Presidents: 1.17%

I could add more, but the historical National Records Archive (NARA) for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been either completely removed or moved somewhere else. I cannot find any of their accomplishments as was there years ago for decades. There's almost nothing left that even shows they were even presidents. WTH?

[brush]

15. Thanks for these figures. Dems always have had to clean up...

repug messes going all the way back to FDR.

[ffr]

16. Thank goodness for Google. Found it's new location.

This is just for Bill Clinton.

https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-01.html

[PatSeg]

40. That was pretty impressive

Bill Clinton was a much better president than he gets credit for, from both the right and the left.

[brush]

43. He was. What I remember is everyone was working back then if...

they wanted a job. And he passed on a budget surplus to W Bush, who promptly blew it.

On a side note: W Bush has to be glad that trump has supplanted him as the worse president in our lifetimes.

[ffr]

44. And surplusses through 2009 if tax structure wasn't changed.

The entire U.S. debt would have been $0.00 by then, if the GOP had not changed the tax code.

IMAGINE WHAT YOUR TAX BURDEN WOULD BE IF WE DIDN'T HAVE A NATIONAL DEBT! Yeah, hard to fathom. We were almost there. Gore was going to continue Clinton policies and eventually won Florida, but the SCOTUS ruled 5 to 4 to install Bush.

So now we have $27,000,000,000,000 in debt, $7T of it added in the last 3.75 years.

[brush]

45. Mind boggling when you put it that way.

If one were to compare the last two Democratic presidents v the last two republican presidents—Obama and Clinton v trump and W Bush—a sentient person would conclude that republicans should never be allowed within miles of the White House.

Talk about two supreme fucks versus two rational and accomplished presidents who cleaned up repug messes.

[PatSeg]

47. And republicans should

never be allowed near the purse strings. All they do is blow money and blame Democrats.

[PatSeg]

48. Yes

Everyone I know did so much better during the Clinton years, and that was after a lot of struggle during the Reagan and Bush I administrations. When GW became president, things started to go sour again. I agree, Trump did take the Worst President title away from Bush.

[JHB]

19. All were targets of conservative campaigns to delegitimize and hobble their presidencies

The one against Carter, the earliest, was the one that came closest to traditional politics, but they did view his peacemaking as capitulationist, and constantly evoked "appeasement." Among a laundry list of other grudges they held in the wake of the "coup" (as they thought of it) against Nixon.

Clinton, the pro-business, ok-with-death-penalty governor of a Southern "right to work" state, defied the standard smears against Democrats, so they cut out reality entirely and rallied against draft-dodgin' dope-smokin' counter-cultural McGovernist Hippy Bill and non-cookie-bakin' Feminist Harpy From Hell Hillary. When he still won, they said he was only "technically president" because he hadn't won a majority of the vote, merely a plurality. And then proceeded to throw turdball after turdball at him, hoping some fleck of it would stick. When they didn't get that, they Pointed With Alarm at the great fogbank of steam rising off the mountain of sloughed-off turdballs and in their best Concerned voice intoned "Where there's smoke...."

By Obama's time, they started off with the playbook they'd built up during the Clinton years, and slathered racist icing on top.

And we're experiencing the smears against Joe in real-time.

[PatSeg]

41. Republicans never got over the fact

that Democrats tend to choose really popular, attractive, charismatic presidents. They kept trying to find their version of JFK, but ended up with Nixon. So they hired an actor to play a popular people's president and then rewrote his presidency to make it something it wasn't.

The way republicans have treated Democratic presidents the last forty years is an indication of what poor losers they are. If they can't win, they'll just try to destroy the winner. There is no limit to how nasty and low they'll go. Meanwhile, when they are in power, they actually don't know how to govern.

[tavernier]

34. They are the same species as us.

[brush]

35. And there is that.