Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I was gonna say the same. But yeah, looks like Askew gets to be VP in more than one time, just under different presidenciesSpiro 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…
.Great minds think alike, eh @KingSweden24 ?
But damn, this woman sounds like trouble.
Democrats at least have a LOT of slack in 1982 with the size of their majorities
Carey explicitly referred to her as his “biggest mistake”I was gonna say the same. But yeah, looks like Askew gets to be VP in more than one time, just under different presidencies
Great minds think alike, eh @KingSweden24 ?
But damn, this woman sounds like trouble.
Meanwhile JPK Sr. had nine kids and RFK Sr. had 11 (and intended to try for more before he was assassinated).
Plus the factors that lead to Democratic congressional domination during the Cold War are kind of still in place; I'd wager that the Democrats will hold both Houses through at least 1986, but those majorities will probably be gone soon enough. The Senate will definitely be dicey in 1986 due to sheer overexposure, unless the Democrats hold relatively well in both 1982 and 1984 (which, we've noted how overexposed they will in 1986, but they're arguably overexposed in all three Senate classes save, ironically enough, the Class I that they are most usually overexposed in IOTL, although that may be more because of how much more exposed they're in Class II (23 seats) and especially Class III (29!!! seats, although vulnerable to be cut down by one before 1986 if Frank Church dies on schedule and the special doesn't go Democrats' way) than any lack of overexposure in Class I, where they definitely still hold a clear majority of the seats at 20). The Democrats could go into 1986 with a majority in the low 60's (hell, I calculated off-hand their likely losses and came out thinking they'd lose at least 9 seats out the gate, which means a low 60's majority after 1984 may well be necessary to have a prayer of holding the Senate in 1986, though if Carey's reelection margin is even just half-decent it is not unrealistic at all) and still be at a realistic risk of losing the chamber, although barring a truly toxic environment (perhaps involving a controversial First Lady Gouletas?) they probably, at worst, narrowly hold the Senate (they also, interestingly enough, have a somewhat realistic takeover chance in Maryland if Charles Mathias still retires, which could lead into the hilarious yet plausible result of the Democrats losing something like fifteen Senate seats yet still gaining one as their silver lining). The House, meanwhile, almost certainly holds in 1982, and probably sees narrow losses in 1984 just because of how big the majority is; 1986 would, again, need a gigantic wave to overcome the incumbency advantage Dems would have. I would posit 1990, as both a ten-year-itch election and sufficient time after the Republican disasters of 1978 and 1980 (and a really mediocre year at best in 1976 where they still lost most of the races, even accounting for holding the Ohio seat they lost IOTL), as the likely loss of both chambers for the Democrats, possibly in preparation for the GOP's recapture of the White House come 1992, and which could easily be timed to coincide with both scandal and a bad economy.
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Probably would be a factor then as to when Carey marries her then...
Maybe he seals the deal in '85 after securing re-election? With the scandals trickling in thru in the year after to contribute against favorability towards the President perhaps?
Do wonder how much Carey's ratings could drag down incumbents for '86 ITTL, esp. those in narrower races... tho then again elections were nowhere near as polarized as in more recent times OTL, I suppose
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Your thoughts here largely mirror my own, for what it's worth, and I'll leave it at that.
One wonders what effect a "White House Wedding" would have. That would be absolute crack for the Beltway media and the more "lifestyle" oriented press back in New York, too, though it may not play the same in Peoria.
Oooooh good point. Lots one could do with there being an FBI "file" on her, potentially...
Both branches having strong leadership with Tip O’Neill’s iron grip on the house and more cooperation between liberal democrats and southern democrats i think helps dems overachieve expectations a bit on midterm results in 86 and beyond. Even in real life when there’s high minority turnout in an election Dems tend to have a higher floor in states that dont tend to vote democrat but have high minority populations. With a much better relationship with “lunch pale democrats” and Southern Democrats gives them a particularly very high floor in state and local elections. There’s so many places that oddly despite being conservative didn’t seem to realize that they could vote for republicans until like 1984 with the exception of 1972 lol. With the POD’s of the the late 1970s that only continues this but at a bit lesser extent to say the late 40s.
I imagine the republican party will get a huge boost of corporate funding which will help them but it’s a double edged sword in this different political environment where a good amount of populist conservatives will have inconsistent and basically incoherent voting patterns and decisions (which even applies to our much more “conservative” real life timeline post Carter’s 1976 victory).
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Yeah. Because I reckon it wouldn’t take long for them to find the discrepancies before an actual wedding.
So it looks like the 90s won’t be known as an economically great decade but more recessions. With previous mentions of a GOP president starting in 1993, this could screw up their first term quickly.
Exit the ARENA
Exit the ARENA
Like many Latin American countries in the 1960s and early 1970s, Brazil had been no stranger to a populist, ostensibly left-wing government coming to power and then being ousted in a coup by a conservative military, a common story whose Lusophone chapter was written in 1964 when Joao Goulart was overthrown in a putsch organized in part with quiet American acquiescence. The Brazilian military junta had operated somewhat differently from many of its peers, however, in forming its "National Renewal Alliance," or ARENA, as a governing body, legalizing a mainstream (albeit conservative) opposition, and by the standards of thugs like Pinochet, Videla and Stroessner it was fairly moderate, even as ARENA exiled and arbitrarily tortured dissidents and killed somewhere in the vicinity of four hundred opposition members extrajudicially. Part of the reason it was able to operate this way was the remarkable "Brazilian Miracle" of the 1970s in which Brazil enjoyed Latin America's highest growth rates and strongest economy, and despite strict censorship and coziness of media outfits such as TV Globo with the state, a thriving civil society based in the expanding middle class emerged by the late 1970s to allow the outwardly moderate Joao Figuerido to become President of Brazil in 1979 and continue the slow re-democratization process begun under his immediate predecessor and mentor Ernesto Geisel over the previous six years, including a moderate response to massive labor strikes.
The oil shocks of 1978 and 1979 badly damaged Brazil's economy, however, much more so than the 1973 oil crisis that had shaken confidence in Latin America. The Decada Perdida may not have been as severe or long-lasting in Brazil, but it struck nonetheless, and even as Figuerido attempted to transition the country gradually under the new umbrella party "PDS" - Democratic Social Party, effectively a rebranded ARENA - the steady economic growth and rising standards of living on which the Brazilian dictatorship had made the backbone of its credibility with the public ended. By late 1981, Brazil's economy was not just sagging but collapsing, and it was overshadowed only by true basket cases like neighboring Argentina and Chile or Mexico, which had entered sovereign default in the summer of 1980 and seemed to be tripling down on its disastrous economic policies [1]. As of the spring of 1982, Brazil was the world's largest debtor, with soaring inflation that the government was forced to combat with extremely harsh austerity measures that drove many of the millions lifted out of poverty during the Brazilian Miracle back into destitution.
The timing for this economic conflagration was poor, as it coincided nearly exactly with the 1982 Congressional and state elections that the newly-legalized opposition intended to directly contest. While labor strikes were still led by the fiery young leftist Lula da Silva, more institutional opposition had consolidated around the figure of Leonel Brizola, who had returned from exile to take back control of the Labor Party of Brazil, or PTB, [2] and presenting an updated and democratized version of Getulio Vargas' program of trabalhismo, a democratic socialist but non-communist left-wing agenda centered in a Brazilian, Christian and populist context - exactly the kind of thinking popular with devoutly Catholic Brazil, in which Vargas' Estado Novo and its remarkable progress still was hugely popular. The other component of the opposition was the more traditionally liberal "big tent" progressive democratic outfit Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB, headed up by Tancredo Neves and Ulysses Guimaraes. These men were more intellectual, lawyerly, establishmentarian figures nonetheless firmly opposed to the furtherance of the PDS-led regime, which was widely expected to transition to civilian rule once Figuerido's term ended in 1985.
The stakes in 1982 were thus very high. It remained to be seen who, exactly, would lead the opposition into this bold new era for Brazil as democratization loomed on the horizon by largely peaceful means (in contrast to Argentina, where civil war between the opposition and junta had been narrowly avoided in 1979). An opposition victory could lead to direct elections for the Presidency, and perhaps a new constitution; an opposition victory was also likely necessary to correct some of the economic malaise that was rapidly compounding. Neves and Guimaraes thus cut a deal that the former would be the formal party leader but the latter would head up the bloc in Congress should it be successful; they were given a huge boost when Brizola announced he would not run candidates in constituencies in which PMDB was likely to carry, in order to prevent splitting the vote.
PDS made a bevy of mistakes as well; first and foremost, they anointed as their standard-bearer the cartoonishly corrupt Paulo Maluf, a Lebanese-Brazilian apparatchik from Sao Paulo who had served as both mayor and governor and ran on a brasher, more populist brand of conservatism meant to appeal to middle class appetites and show what PDS was capable of without being an explicitly military party. Maluf's candidature, despite remarkably favorable media coverage from the military-aligned news stations, became a lightning rod for the opposition.
The elections of 1982 thus ended with the PMDB on 245 seats, enough to form a majority on their own, and PDS under 200; Brizola's PTB took 34 seats in the Congress, thus making it a plainly junior partner to Guimaraes, who was made Speaker, but a partner nonetheless that could lock PDS out. What really effected the vote results, though, were the mass defeats of PDS governors in several states, thus ensuring the opposition a coalition of 13 Senators to the government's 11. Brazilians, by the millions, rejoiced in the streets; the democratic transition had seemingly arrived years earlier than thought possible, and Figuerido pointedly resisted calls to send tanks into the streets to contest the results, in part thanks to crucial pressure and support from Washington for the continued transition.
Democracy, eighteen years later, was returning to Brazil - and the elections of 1985, when Congress would theoretically elect a new President unless the law was changed, loomed large...
[1] More on this later
[2] The butterfly here is he actually gets the old party back rather than seeing Ivete Vargas in charge
True
We definitely will not have an "End of History" Long Nineties ITTL, no.
So it might still be an embarassment to Carey once word gets out that she’s a liar, but he won’t marry her and ruin his career and the Democrats’ tenure with the relationship? At worst, they might be embarassed and lose some more seats than they might have otherwise
At least Brazil seems to be on the track to recovery. That’s one fire extinguished in South America
Not sure if they’d lose some seats. It’s a personal matter sure, but not sure if it’d warrant any seat losses from it. Do see some cultural influences though coming from all this.
American swing voters: “Well, the Democratic president can’t even figure out his dating life and who he can trust there. Can he and the Democrats really be trusted with America then?”
Yeah, there's a lot of ways that Gouletas could (and in the end will) backfire on Carey, even if it doesn't cost the Dems the White House in 1988
Relationship drama aside, what I find interesting is that we see the next big global period of economic instability won't occur until there's a Republican back in the White House. While the Democrats are going to attrition pretty hard in the back half of their 12 years of Presidential control (I think 1982 will go well for them and let Carey finish out his first term strong), they may be back in the majorty before the new millenium. Republican control of Congress, especially the House will probably end at the 6 year itch in 98' for Mr. GOP 1992.
My father-in-law is Irish Catholic and one of sixteen! My wife has something like sixty five first cousins lol. So yeah, can confirm.