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I think you can take it as read what the board's general opinion on this is, given the nigh-on universal assumption that John 'Rogue State Rollback, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran' McCain would be both the nominee and president in 2004. IMO, though, you want an analogue, look to '68. The very real...

I mean... what the hell does Poppa John take from 2000 ITTL? That's a psychological question - and a pivotal one for a mercurialist like McCain - not necessarily a political one. IOTL, you got McCain determined to destroy Dubya's presidency, going outright pro-Democratic oppositionist, to the...

I'm interested in why on this board, similar to Carroll Campbell, nobody ever addresses the huge amount of racial baggage Allen had. I've only seen @SlideAway really address this properly. He's not being a nominee, he's certainly not being a running mate. But I guess if McCain is operating on a...

It's almost universally cited at the most significant arms agreement of the Cold War, indeed as the beginning of the end of the Cold War. I'm sure your many, many sources say as much. Ah, but Reagan should have agreed to the total abolition of nukes at Rekjavik, which no other US president...

As I'm sure you would be able to see from as much as a Wikipedia article on the subject, negotiating START was a Reagan-era process. It and INF grew out of an about-turn on Reagan's part from about 1983 onwards, when he re-started the negotiation process, and then things sped pretty quickly once...

I'm lolling hard at the idea that Bush, a hardbitten member of the foreign policy establishment, who put an immediate freeze on Reagan's radical arms reduction strategy as soon as he became president because he felt it was miles too radical, would immediately go deep on arms reduction from day...

The notion that 'No Watergate = No Carter' is a lot more dubious than this board is aware. Carter's bedrock wasn't that vague, it was that he had a campaign which had a mastery, and clear understanding of the centrality of, the primary/caucus system like no-one else in the field, when that...

Search for Magniac's posts on this if you're seriously interested. Most informed person we've had on this subject. He wrote a superb essay on it at one stage.

Oh yeah, there's no room for error there. But if the opponent is not a Lugar, or doesn't have the finance backing of what I assume Quayle had, and they emerge out of a fraught primary, run a bad campaign... just about possible to see a tie favouring the incumbent, as Frank Church in deepestred...

Bayh was born in 1928, y'know. If he inches that race over Quayle, there's no reason he can't at least be a potential running mate or candidate for the whole of the eighties at least. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Bayh, fresh off destroying Robert Bork, and with an '86 re-election behind...

It's a stock phrase in American politics which is meant to convey the only circumstances in which an unbeatable candidate could be beaten. I'm surprised so many people on here are apparently unaware of it. The OP is asking 'What if Hoover has a candidacy-ruining last minute scandal, and Al Smith...

I reckon Wisconsin is partly because Jackson had labor backing there. Factory closures were a big issue there at the time, Jackson got involved early and labor was grateful for that. The same sort of dynamic happened in Maine, where there was a big strike in Jay, which Jackson injected himself...

You're doing that unappealing thing you do where you get a fixed but wholly inaccurate notion of the points being made. I've already said twice that your point about Jackson's performance in the GE is correct - he would obviously do very, very badly with white GE voters and certainly would not...

Yeah, but remember, Simon was a downstate, not a Cook County pol. (His former congressional district was actually at the absolute bottom of the state) For both many white voters downstate and many downstate white liberals - a Jackson core group once Simon's candidacy faded - he would have been...

DT is right, though in fairness to Jackson, he did win around about a third of the white vote in certain specific primaries/caucuses. He did well in Wisconsin in this respect, though I can't remember the exact numbers. Michigan wasn't bad either, though the bedrock of that was huge black turnout...

The notion that Bork would have been confirmed in 1986, which let's remember was an election year for the senate, is rather questionable, given the slim Republican majority. The Bork 'No' vote in 1987 attracted the moderate/liberal Republican senators as well as almost all Democrats, and they'd...

Milller was a big cheerleader and surrogate for Bubba in 1992, (Think they knew each other through Carville?) that's why he got the keynote, his slow drift to sheer DINOness hadn't begun at that point. It's definitely true though that Bentsen was very much outside the mainstream when he was...

Oh no, I just think the discussion as a whole was in danger of elevating its treatment of him to the level of a public intellectual, or even on the polemicist level of his brother. He's not on either of those levels. He's much more Ann Coulter-on-the-new-York-Times-bestseller-list. To provide...

No, he isn't using that as a metaphor. He's genuinely stuck in a fifties culturewar against everything that's happened since, well, I was going to say since Glenn Miller's plane went down, but he wouldn't approve of big band music either. He actually thinks that the decline of trilbies and...

I can maybe, just maybe, see Dead Hitchens somehow ending up as a truculent Labour forever-locked-in-as-a-backbencher-polemicist-eventually-transitioning-away-from-politics-into-being-a-public-intellectual for a short time - just about. Sort of like a more intense Foot pre-70 with a quick...