Was Clinton’s resume better than Bush 41? I don’t think so, yet that didn’t stop Clinton from being one of the most respected President of modern time.
he resided over a technological breakthrough that would have given anybody a surplus… other than that, what did he do?
Not doing anything is better than doing something just for the sake of doing something. When things go right, butt out. He could have done what the typical politician does when they have too much money to play with.
In hindsight you have to say what were they thinking?
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He was mormon. Not a great thing, not an inssurmountable thing either.
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He did not have the ability to deliver a swing state. Not michigan, not NH, not Mass. This was pretty clear from the beginning.
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His running mate similiarly was not able to bring Wisconsin. I’m unsure how clear that was when he picked him, but it mattered.
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In hindsight Romney should have picked Marco Rubio, who would have delivered florida, and assuaged the whole minoriity gap.
In hindisght the Republicans should only take a candidate capable of delivering them an otherwise questionable state. Think Reagen or Nixon in California.
Also…curiously enough Romney was least liked by the people who knew him best
Of course he is, he’s your boss. Every good boss is basically a selfish jerk. This is exactly what the US needs right now. Unfortunately, we voted the boss that lets you leave work early and “work from home” whenever you’re hungover or there is an inch of snow on the ground. This is the easy boss.
Not every selfish jerk is a good boss and not every good boss is a selfish jerk…Mitt has the political backbone of a jellyfish, flip flopping from issue to issue (remember the phrase ‘same day different Mitt’?..lol). His exceptional resume and experiences may make him desirable for a senior role in the financial sector where he can rule as a benign dictator, but they do not make up for his lack of political vision/tact, his natural apathy towards the portion of the population that can least take care of itself,his clear bias towards helping those who can help themselves, and other divisive factors that makes running for office difficult in todays’ 95% vs 5% world. If he had managed to combine old schoold republican pragmatism with a natural ‘noblesse oblige’ of the Rockefellar school of republicans, I think he would have had a better chance to win this election.
In many ways,Mitt is unlucky rather than incompetent. He is clearly a competent man who, against the backdrop of an incredible career in the private sector, has reached the age where politics represents the next logical step of life,power,control or some weighted combination of the above. He is clearly an unlucky man who happens to live in an era where the republican party is stumbling for its own fractured and misguided identity, where both domestic and international transmission mechanisms are broken to the degree of rendering pure market liberalism and trickle down economics as unlikely candidates for recapturing lost ground. Obama’s success and Mitt’s failure are products of their time as they should be. Hard to imagine someone else embodying the American dream more than Obama.
When you marry a person you marry the entire family.When you vote for Mitt you vote for modern day republicans. Even if you like the candidate, are you sure you like the party whose members will do the real heavy lifting behind the curtains?
Reducing choice between Obama and Mitt to an exercise of ‘resume-box-checking’ is like a physicist reducing the universe to its observable mechanics…no need for einstein to discover the photoelectric effect or brownian motion as long as we can explain why a pendulum swings the way it does…it is just silly.
I didn’t get the physics analogy, but I’m with you on the other stuff.
is it the republican party who has a problem and needs to change, or is it the 51% of the country that voted for obama that needs to change and has a fractured identity?
Ha. Ha. Ha. This is good.
I’ve been saying this for ages. Mitt Romney has no natural base within the Republican party. Evangelicals? No. Neocons? No. Paleocons? No. Working class whites? Hell No. Socially moderate Republicans? Not anymore!
Obama has a deep base of support on the other hand among anybody who has socially liberal views and is college educated, in addition to that an obvious base in blacks and Hispanics.
Romney had a chance by appealing to poor, young whites. He didn’t get anywhere. I’m surprised that anybody is surprised he lost.
^ The Obama team also did a great job in negative campain ads against Mitt throughout the last 8 months. You can’t say it wasn’t effective. They learned a lot from Bush 43 vs Kerry.
Clinton had a very impressive resume: Rhodes Scholar, Yale Law, Law professor (not lecturer), state attorney general, 3 term governor (or was it 4?), and chairman of the national governor’s association. What’s not to like about the resume? GHWB’s resume was nothing to sneeze at, but he said he wouldn’t raise taxes and then he did.
Clinton also bashed Obama’s credentials incessantly during the 2008 Democrat primary, when Obama was running against Hillary Clinton. “A year ago, he would have been carrying our bags”. A bit weird that they are bff now in 2012. That’s politics, I guess.
They are bff’s because Hillary will likely run for office in 16.
^ Exactly.
Bill wants Obama’s endorsement. Obama will be torn between Biden and Hilary.
Let’s hope they’re the front runners, that will give republicans a chance (unless of course they roll out a bunch of even older, even whiter candidates, or worse, Michele Bachmann).
Clinton was a God.
A natural born leader (that’s what matters) and stupid-smart, so smart he knew to play dumb sometimes. He also seemed to be more evolved than others, not just intelligent, but like he had evolved his own moral compass and tried to stay on course with it. A honorable man.
Let’s not even jokingly compare Bush and Clinton, that’s crazy talk.
Many say Bush 41 was one of the most underrated Presidents of modern time. Even Clinton credits him for the strong economy of the 90’s by putting the country’s interest above his own. He raised taxes knowing fully well he would lose the election. And he didn’t waste time on Irak (after Kuwait) although it was the popular thing to do at the time.
I preferred Clinton, and voted for him, but I didn’t think Bush 41 was too bad. And Ross Perot made that election a lot of fun.
The VP debate was really good that year. Admiral Stockdale was completely blindsided by a question about abortion (which simply asked for his opinion). The response was something close to: “I don’t like abortions, but I don’t think they should be illegal.” That plain and commonsense approach that was clearly an honest opinion delivered off the cuff was so refreshing, but it also betrayed political unpreparedness.