Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
My interpenetration of a County Map for 1980, spent the past few days working on this and I hope you all enjoy! Thank you @KingSweden24 for making such a great althist!
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Wow, this is really impressive work! I’m really flattered you took the time to develop this!
Yeah man no problem, once 84’ is released I’ll be happy to do a county map of that as well.
Also, just a couple questions that I forgot to ask about the Space Shuttle. I’m extremely curious if Carey will announce “Teacher in Space” initiative? (which I’m assuming he will). There were also plans after STS-51L to launch Shuttles from California and possibly launch Walter Cronkite at the end of 86’ all of which obviously didn’t happen. So will Carey appoint folks who manage Shuttle better? Or will a Challenger disaster still happen?
Good question - I don’t really know. I’m not very familiar with how the Shuttle project advanced, or what issues led to the Challenger disaster. I’m open to ideas/suggestions here, much like with computers haha
The Shuttle as designed in OTL (and assuming a similar budget profile I would expect it to be similar) is fundamentally flawed and it is a question of when not if a disaster will occur. That said the Challenger disaster was actually one of the less likely scenarios, requiring unusually cold weather for Florida or southern California and there was an upgrade in the works (filament wound casings) that would have unwittingly solved that failure mode. I think the odds that NASA could get through the 1980's operating as they were pre Challenger without losing an orbiter (and it's entire crew) is extremely low.
Unfortunate but true, it’s just nice to think of the hypotheticals
I'd say an incident with the heatshield, like what brought down Columbia in 03, or which nearly brought down STS-27 in 86, is more likely than the very particular Challenger accident.
An interesting thing to think about would be Carey's response. Reagan essentially responded by doubling down on the Shuttle, and Bush announced the doomed but ambitious Space Exploration Initiative likely as a result of Challenger. But irl, with the notable exception of Nixon, Republican presidents have tended to be more supportive of the Space Program than Democrats, at least post-LBJ, seeing it as a way to show American greatness.
An interesting thing to think about would be Carey's response. Reagan essentially responded by doubling down on the Shuttle, and Bush announced the doomed but ambitious Space Exploration Initiative likely as a result of Challenger. But irl, with the notable exception of Nixon, Republican presidents have tended to be more supportive of the Space Program than Democrats, at least post-LBJ, seeing it as a way to show American greatness.
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Some sort of heat shield failure, probably caused by a chunk of ice hitting it was inevitable, another example was Challenger on STS-41-B where a frozen lump of piss very nearly caused an orbiter loss. It was a fundamentally dangerous design.
One theory is that NASA didn’t delay it as they usually would’ve because of the whole “Teacher in Space” thing going on and that either Reagan was supposed to call Christa McAuliffe during his State of the Union (which was on the same day) and/or she was supposed to teach a lesson from space on that week’s Friday.
So maybe no “Teacher in Space”, no Challenger disaster tbh and just a normal shuttle takeoff.
There is a clip online of Selleck doing a screen test and it's not as bad as one may think
This is the same thing I was thinking bro now I don't have to type it lol
I’d hope so, these photos look like a porn parody.
I could think of so many bad porn parody names, but I don’t think it’s that desired by the mods
The Bachelor
The Bachelor
Particularly in the age of television, the idea of an unmarried President without a First Lady at his side was a strange one alien to the American public, and yet it was one other way in which Hugh Carey set himself apart from his predecessors, though in his case it was that he was a widower, having lost his beloved Helen in 1974, a major factor in his decision not to run for President two years later, already overwhelmed as it was by the death of two of his fourteen children in a car accident in 1969. [1] While well supported by a large brood of children and with daughters like Alexandria, Marianne and Nancy who often helped him fill in at White House functions in his first years, Carey's widower status and his quiet grief were a major piece of his public image, and contrasted him with his Vice President Askew, the apocryphal Baptist "Mr. Nice" whose idea of a good time was getting soda pops with his wife.
The roots of Carey's political Achilles heel thus lay in this otherwise strength, of the admiration average Americans had for the "Bachelor President" who in some ways seemed to have unofficially dedicated his Presidency to his late wife. One would never have known in the spring of 1982 the trouble that was looming for Carey in just a few years, what with the successes of his first year rolling into the second, but trouble was lurking just beneath the surface, all thanks to a dinner party in December of 1981 back in New York that was crucial for two reasons.
The first piece of the famed "Plaza Hotel Summit," as it came to be known, was that at a who's-who of major New York donors and power-brokers, Carey secured the agreement of Felix G. Rohatyn, an investment banker of Polish-Austrian origin who had fled the Nazis in 1940, to serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve as an "outsider" candidate. Rohatyn was, of course, not much of an "outsider" by most understandings of the term - he had been one of the key figures who had helped avoid New York City's municipal bankruptcy in 1975, which was how Carey knew and trusted him so well - but he was not a "DC pick," as the term in the news quickly became over the course of February and March 1982, with Carey basking in the warm glow of passing health care reform and FAP over considerable Republican opposition. Rather, many movers and shakers in Washington supported instead the more conservative and orthodox economist Paul Volcker, the chair of the New York Fed since 1975.
Volcker was a fiscal hawk viewed as being of the same cut as Arthur Miller, a fierce advocate for high interest rates to crush still-lingering rates of inflation that by late 1981 had fallen considerably from their 1978-79 heights but were still well over 5%, and did not seem to be concerned about short-term unemployment. Carey, having passed an expansionary and stimulatory neo-Keynesian industrial policy designed specifically to bring down unemployment first and inflation second, disagreed, but "the usual suspects" in Washington, as he called them were starting to coalesce around pushing Volcker to replace Miller, who after twelve hideously unpopular years at the Federal Reserve - with many of them seeing Volcker as a key aide - was retiring.
Carey's strategy to defeat the campaign for Volcker was clever, relying on young liberals in the Senate like Elizabeth Holtzman or Ted Kulongoski to lobby against him and pledge to defeat him on the floor. By early March, the chorus against Volcker had grown to include even relative moderates like Tom Foley, who expressed concerns about what a "continuation of the Miller regime would mean for the burgeoning crisis in farm finance." Volcker announced on March 10th that he would withdraw his name from consideration as Chairman and urged the Senate to quickly pass a different candidate; after Gardner Ackley signaled to Carey via mutual friends that he was uninterested, Carey was able to nominate the unsurprising choice he had favored from the beginning in Felix Rohatyn, who in the end served as one of Carey's great legacies in chairing the Federal Reserve until 1998, with his tenure in the 80s generally praised for managing inflation and unemployment lower but in later years being dismissed as uncreative in the face of the enormous global economic turmoil of 1994 and 1997 which badly sullied his long-term reputation.
That same dinner at the Plaza, however, saw Carey introduced to a Chicago real-estate mogul named Evangeline Gouletas, who knew his friend and fundraiser Fred Trump (himself a titanic figure in New York real estate) for years. Carey and Evangeline hit it off immediately, writing and phoning each other often, and the press got wind of her relationship with the President in late March as the Carey White House began winding down its legislative efforts for the year with small-bore bills important to individual Senators or Congressmen. "The President's Girlfriend," she was called, triggering a media sensation that descended upon Chicago; Carey's demurrals about the nature of their relationship only further added to the frenzy. Gouletas was Greek Orthodox and herself widowed, and there was something charming to much of the media about their chaste, avuncular middle-aged romance, to the point that by June reporters following Carey in New York fueled speculation about a "White House Wedding" [2] when the President was seen entering Tiffany and Co.
Much seemed to be going Carey's way, then. He had passed the most ambitious legislative package since the New Deal in the first fourteen months of his Presidency, cementing his promise to follow in FDR's footsteps, and he had seen through both the crisis of October 1981 in the Baltic and the eruption of hostilities in the middle east of spring 1982. Oil was cheaper, pernicious inflation was coming down, and unemployment was well below its 1980 heights. And through it all, he had met a new, exciting love, even as the relationship began to veer out of charm and into tabloid fodder and potential political liabilities as conservative pastors insinuated "sinful premarital relations" between the President and Gouletas. It was hard to think of a better program to head into the thick of midterm season on than the one Carey had at his back.
[1] Carey was a stud horse, IOW. Irish Catholics do it different!
[2] IOTL, Carey married Gouletas three months after meeting her; she's going to be a massive problem for him ITTL, too, but the timeline will stretch out a bit longer.
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Spiro sends his regards
But, Oh God… I had hoped Carey would avoid this disastrous match ttl… I’m afraid for what it’ll do to his presidency…
D’oh typo!Spiro sends his regards
But, Oh God… I had hoped Carey would avoid this disastrous match ttl… I’m afraid for what it’ll do to his presidency…
But, yes, I couldn’t resist bringing that chaos energy into the Carey Presidency.