2008 Without Hillary Or Obama?

mspence

mspence

Banned
The idea here is that, for whatever reason, neither Obama or Hillary Clinton are players in the 2008 Presidential election; who could conceivably run in their place and beaten John McCain? The only person with the kind of gravitas I could think of is Colin Powell, perhaps if he decides to switch parties and run as a Democrat.
 
V-J

V-J

Like 2016, no Clinton means a bigger field. No Obama and no Clinton means a much bigger field.

Mark Warner and Evan Bayh would likely run as the Clinton-shaped-space candidates, John Kerry might follow through with his toe-dipping about a second run, and Russ Feingold might run, though 2008 was a difficult time for him personally. Biden would probably do a lot better. Nobody is just going to sit about and hand John Edwards the nomination.
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'
On the theme that only Nixon can go to China and only Bill Clinton can do welfare reform, I’d love to see a pro-business Democrat win.

Congress already voted the first bank bailout in Oct. ‘08, with some credit to the Bush administration. We’re likely to see a second bailout early ‘09 just as we had in OTL.

But then, something really confident on the topic of business might successfully lead a move to break up the big boy banks. We end up with a more stable, less top heavy economy, and as an important side benefit, there’s much less anger in the body politic.
 
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Deleted member 109224

The folks on John Edwards's staff will never allow him to win the nomination. They were going to leak the affair if he came close to the nomination.

If he got the nomination, McCain may have a shot at winning.
 

Montgomerie Ward

For a better prepared Mark Warner, you could have him run for and win the Virginia Gubernatorial Election of 1997, instead of the US Senate Election in Virginia of 1996. Then have him run for and win the US Senate Election in Virginia of 2002. Mark Warner does not run for re-election in the US Senate Election in Virginia of 2008, and instead runs for the Democratic Party Presidential Primaries of 2008.
 
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CountDVB

Russ Feingold would be very notable given how he could get attention by calling out the financial problems that led to the Great Recession.
 

thekingsguard

Agra said:
John Edwards beats McCain after the housing market collapses.
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Do you remember how bad Edwards was?

This is the ambulance chaser who build a mansion on land he seized from a trailer park via eminent domain. Who then seized more land so he could build an indoor tennis court.

This was the dumbass who famously paid $500 for a haircut.

Most importantly, this is the stupid sonofabitch who stole from his campaign war chest to pay off his mistress, who was a paid campaign staffer, with whom he had sired a bastard child, all while his wife was publicly dying of cancer.

That's the kind of scumbag resume that usually only exists inside of bad television and strawman elections in polemics, and yet, he was actually polling in ahead of Pantsuit Dukakis in 2008, at least til word about the bastard child broke.

If Edwards wins the nomination, you could literally have McCain masturbating to the stock market crashing and he'll still lose 45 states.

Even if Edwards wins, he is likely impeached over stealing campaign funds.
 

FlyingSquirrel

mspence said:
The idea here is that, for whatever reason, neither Obama or Hillary Clinton are players in the 2008 Presidential election; who could conceivably run in their place and beaten John McCain? The only person with the kind of gravitas I could think of is Colin Powell, perhaps if he decides to switch parties and run as a Democrat.
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I think most Dems would have still been favored after eight years of Bush and the economy taking a downturn.

Edwards might have still managed to blow it if the affair were exposed after securing the nomination but before the general. Though really, there are plenty of butterflies that could have led to the affair not happening - if Hillary and Obama aren't in the race, does Edwards happen to run into Rielle Hunter in the first place?

Biden, Warner, and Bayh probably would benefit most from Hillary's absence, in that the centrist/establishment lane is wide open without her. Feingold, if he runs, might have been in a position to pick up a lot of the people who voted for Obama and had been Deaniacs in 2004, especially since Iraq was still a big issue and he had voted against the war. Otherwise, his vote probably fragments unless somebody else managed to make a particularly strong appeal to his coalition (Richardson, maybe? Or Clark if he'd run again?).
 

Puzzle

Donor
Jackson Lennock said:
The folks on John Edwards's staff will never allow him to win the nomination. They were going to leak the affair if he came close to the nomination.

If he got the nomination, McCain may have a shot at winning.
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It’s easy to say that now when it didn’t matter, but they were only human. Call me a cynic but if their candidate looked like a winner I feel a lot of people who’d normally turn up their noses would decide that someone less than entirely moral was better than the other team winning.
 
V-J

V-J

It's interesting that the most evocative part of John Edwards' downfall is him cheating on his wife while she had cancer, but Newt Gingrich cheated on his first wife while she was stricken with cancer, and landed her with a divorce request while she was still in a hospital bed, and John McCain cheated on his first wife repeatedly while she was recovering from life-changing injuries. And yet I bet a lot of people reading this didn't know about either of the other two episodes.

I guess the moral of the tale is be awful early enough in your career before you become a presidential candidate.
 
V-J

V-J

ZachMettenbergerFan said:
Maybe it's a bit crackpot-y, but maybe efforts to draft Gore would really grow (from where they were OTL), thanks to the fact there are no other big name candidates (besides Edwards, if you count him)?
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I don't think it's crackpot-y, but I genuinely think Gore was done with electoral politics after 2000. (Mark Warner, the other major subject of a draft effort in 2008, OTOH, is almost bound to run with no Hillary, and could quite quickly become the frontrunner.)

I think a lot of people in the thread are reading history backwards: Obama had fame from the 2004 keynote, but he certainly wasn't what you would call a 'big name' candidate before he ran. You can apply the same about Bill Clinton or Dukakis. Nominees often aren't a 'big name' candidate until they become the nominee.
 

Montgomerie Ward

Without Hillary Clinton, Tom Vilsack probably stays in the race and wins only in Iowa. Maybe if Tom Daschle retired in 2004, rather than losing re-election, he could run as an establishment candidate. If Vilsack withdraws before the Iowa Caucuses, Iowa could come down to a Daschle Vs. Feingold contest, unless Al Gore or John Kerry are running again. Wesley Clark and Al Sharpton could run again if they wanted, but are very unlikely to win the nomination.
 
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Kermode

V-J said:
I think a lot of people in the thread are reading history backwards: Obama had fame from the 2004 keynote, but he certainly wasn't what you would call a 'big name' candidate before he ran. You can apply the same about Bill Clinton or Dukakis. Nominees often aren't a 'big name' candidate until they become the nominee.
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Obama was polling in second place as far back as October 27-29, 2006— the very first poll to even include him. I wouldn't say that that alone qualifies him as a "big name" (especially given the gap between him and Clinton), but it's not as if he came out of nowhere. Obama was a rising star in the party.
 
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