Children of POTUS who could have become POTUS: An attempt at a comprehensive list

CaliGuy

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For what it's worth, the idea that Jeb was a low-energy bore of a person wasn't really a thing until 2015, and even if he is less charismatic (or however you want to put if) than his brother I doubt that would really be an issue in 2000. If anything, given that Jeb would likely be far less gaffe prone than his brother, I imagine he'd win an easier victory.
So, would Jeb have not imploded in 2016 in our TL had Donald Trump not called him out on being low-energy?
 
So, would Jeb have not imploded in 2016 in our TL had Donald Trump not called him out on being low-energy?
No, I'm just saying Jeb imploded for far different reasons than just being "low energy." He ran a terrible campaign, didn't effectively spend his money, couldn't answer questions about the Iraq War, didn't initially treat Trump as a threat, etc. It wasn't his energy that was the issue. He had already lost the campaign long before Trump added "low energy Jeb" to the political dialogue.
 
Let's say [Robert Todd Lincoln]'s feeling bold and brings youth onto the ticket by putting red-blooded Progressive and war hero Teddy Roosevelt in as his Vice President...

In 1904? The problem is, what has Teddy been doing in the interim four years? He would be up for re-election as governor in 1900; he wasn't sure he wanted to run again. If he did, he would be up again in 1902. Six years in Albany seems a long time for Teddy to stick with anything. He's not going to challenge Boss Platt for the Senate seat that is up in 1903. Then again, he might break with Platt in his second term - and he might lead an anti-Platt crusade in 1902 - and win?? But then he would be marked as too much of a maverick for Lincoln to put on the national ticket. Besides which, by that time TR would be looking to run for President himself.
 
No, I'm just saying Jeb imploded for far different reasons than just being "low energy." He ran a terrible campaign, didn't effectively spend his money, couldn't answer questions about the Iraq War, didn't initially treat Trump as a threat, etc. It wasn't his energy that was the issue. He had already lost the campaign long before Trump added "low energy Jeb" to the political dialogue.

All entirely true. And the larger, far larger, problem for Jeb was that, for a man who desired the presidency (and whose father desired the presidency for him far more than he desired it for his wastrel eldest -- there's a speech that Poppy gave when Jeb was nearly done being Florida's governor where the favoritism was so blunt he might as well have kissed Dubya on the cheek and said "You broke my heart, Fredo. You broke my heart.") his whole political career was out of joint with time. Because Lawton Chiles was not forced out of politics by his heart condition Jeb didn't win the FL governorship in 1994, which would have allowed him to take a bit of his second term to run as a GOP favorite in 2000, or eighteen months' prep time after two full terms to turf out a Democratic incumbent in 2004 if, say, Dubya had never beaten Ann Richards in the first place and you had a different cast of characters in the 2000 GOP primaries. In either of those cases Jeb would've been running in his prime, with those boyish cheeks and that big frat-boy smile of his, as governor of one of the four most populated states in the country (since 1994 in this scenario) and a key swing state that could bring a lot of electoral votes in the GOP's direction. Now, in 2000 that might actually have convinced the Democratic nominee (likely Gore but we're moving a lot of pieces on this board) to either put Bob Graham on the ticket to counter or picked someone like, say, pulling John Glenn or Dick Celeste out of cold storage for Ohio (I would say Ted Strickland or Sherrod Brown but they were both just in the House then), or perhaps a two-term Ann Richards if she existed, either with the hope in hell she might bring Texas with her or more likely to sway women swing voters nationwide -- all of which are better ideas than Joe effing Lieberman. (You want the first Jewish American on a major American party ticket? I've got five words for you: Barbara Boxer or Russ Feingold.) But Dubya truly, truly pissed on his brother's cornflakes in terms of presidential ambition. He came in during one of the two cycles most suited to Jeb entering the race -- 2000 or 2004 (and 2000 really works best if you'd gotten Walkin' Lawton out of the way back when) -- and then made such a hash of it that no one wanted the Bush name near the ticket in '08. Anything after that and Jeb's too old and too far from holding office to be an effective candidate. I don't think an early Aughts Jeb gets the "low energy" crap, from a professional bully like Trump or anyone else. He's an effective (if you agree with his policies) governor of a huge state, one of the most important governors, and one of the most acceptable faces of the American right. Ten to fifteen years and let's remember it's really that much between 2016 and his "prime" cycles, makes a big difference.
 
I'd say Theodore Roosevelt's family is the best positioned here. If either Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (only general to land with the first wave of troops at Normandy) or Quentin Roosevelt (pilot shot down in World War I) manage to survive , I could very easily imagine either of them going on to have notable political careers.
 

No, on the premise I set out in 1901 (or ish) when McKinley succumbs to the wounds that Leon Czogolsz or another of his political stripe has inflicted on him (McKinley.) The whole Gilded Age had a remarkably strong ambient level of politicized violence, and after McKinley's reelection as the political big cheese of said Guilded Age and now of the early years of the American imperial enterprise, he has a great big flipping target on his back wrt radical dissidents given to violence. In history there are butterflies, but there are also trends, and just because you dodge some of the former doesn't mean you can't end up swamped by the latter. But more specifically the scenario I laid out depended on Robert Todd Lincoln ascending to the presidency in roughly the manner TR did OTL, and then in this case looking to TR the recent war hero, the sop to Republican imperialists while Lincoln tries to tone that down, a full-throated tenor Progressive to complement the liberal Lincoln pulling the party in a non-McKinley direction, and freed now by Lincoln's offer from chafing against the confines of Albany. Wait until 1904 and you're right, it doesn't make much sense. But a Robert Todd Lincoln who succeeds a McKinley cut down in the whirlwind of anarchist terror abroad in the US and elsewhere (vile as some of it was it was also in response, it must be said, to the equal will to violence on the part of Gilded Age capital) could turn to Roosevelt for just the sort of optics he wanted in the "bucket of warm spit" job, while at the same time putting TR just close enough to where the real game is played to chomp at the bit for his shot at the nomination whenever Lincoln chose to be done.
 

CalBear

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In a more reasonable world TR's younger girl, Ethel, would have been a formidable player.

TR's son Archie was an interesting case. Only officer in the history of the U.S. army to be 100% invalided TWICE for a wound to the same body part. Silver Star in WW I, two Oak Leaf Clusters for it in WW II. Unfortunately he went FAR Right (John Birch Society Right) into the 1950s/60s.

Quentin would have been a great politician, he apparently had all the tools. It would also be a gas to have a POTUS with a name starting with Q.
 
In a more reasonable world TR's younger girl, Ethel, would have been a formidable player.

TR's son Archie was an interesting case. Only officer in the history of the U.S. army to be 100% invalided TWICE for a wound to the same body part. Silver Star in WW I, two Oak Leaf Clusters for it in WW II. Unfortunately he went FAR Right (John Birch Society Right) into the 1950s/60s.

Quentin would have been a great politician, he apparently had all the tools. It would also be a gas to have a POTUS with a name starting with Q.

I'd forgotten all about Archie; interesting as all Teddy's kids were -- and you're right, Ethel even more than Alice deserved a world where she could grow up and follow in her father's footsteps -- and as the Brits say went a bit doolally in his later years. And there is always "The Boy" -- Quentin really is one of the great what ifs based on everything anyone said about him (colored as that was of course by being his father's darling and dying so bitterly young), like Joe Jr. and John Jr. among the Kennedys, and all of them done for by aircraft crashes which is quite the karmic daisy chain. @CalBear, since this is just the kind of thing that's up your alley, are Teddy and Teddy Jr. the only father/son Medal of Honor winners on record? (That is, after Bubba actually did the right thing in the Nineties and unearthed TR's original recommendation which had been buried at the time it was made for political reasons.)
 

CalBear

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I'd forgotten all about Archie; interesting as all Teddy's kids were -- and you're right, Ethel even more than Alice deserved a world where she could grow up and follow in her father's footsteps -- and as the Brits say went a bit doolally in his later years. And there is always "The Boy" -- Quentin really is one of the great what ifs based on everything anyone said about him (colored as that was of course by being his father's darling and dying so bitterly young), like Joe Jr. and John Jr. among the Kennedys, and all of them done for by aircraft crashes which is quite the karmic daisy chain. @CalBear, since this is just the kind of thing that's up your alley, are Teddy and Teddy Jr. the only father/son Medal of Honor winners on record? (That is, after Bubba actually did the right thing in the Nineties and unearthed TR's original recommendation which had been buried at the time it was made for political reasons.)
There is one other Father/Son pair. Arthur MacArthur Jr. (for actions at Missionary Ridge TN November 25, 1863) and Douglas MacArthur (for his leadership in the Philippines).
 
There is one other Father/Son pair. Arthur MacArthur Jr. (for actions at Missionary Ridge TN November 25, 1863) and Douglas MacArthur (for his leadership in the Philippines).

*Smacks forehead*. Of course. Hence the hard-on the size of Florida Douglas had on the way out of the archipelago when he heard the recommendation had been rushed through. He had, now, measured up to Dad in full.
 
There is one other Father/Son pair. Arthur MacArthur Jr. (for actions at Missionary Ridge TN November 25, 1863) and Douglas MacArthur (for his leadership in the Philippines).

Someone needs to write a TL where the other Arthur MacArthur, Jr. (son and only child of Douglas MacArthur) joins the US Army after graduating from Columbia University in 1961 and earns the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, instead of, in OTL, choosing to live out his life in utter anonymity (*) under an assumed name.

(*) His last known public photographs dates to 1964 when he attended his father's state funeral. Ten years after the fact (in 2014), it was publicly revealed that Arthur had lived for thirty years (1974-2004) under an assumed name in a New York City hotel. His whereabouts are currently unknown, although he's believed to reside in New York City until this day. Quite the little mystery there as to why Arthur chose this path in life.
 
I find it interesting that we often play these "what if " games with the children of popular presidents. Just because someone is good at their job, or even decent at it, doesn't mean that their children will be too. Often in sports players make their way on to teams due to who their father was. If their father was a good ball player, then hey, they should be too right?
 
This. Jeb may not run on "restoring honor and dignity to the White House" the way Dubya did, and that could lead to Gore not distancing himself from Clinton and thus picking a better running mate than Lieberman.

Board colleague, there was a reason why Dubya ran on that issue, and that was because it was the obvious issue for a GOP nominee to run on. And it worked, albeit in a roundabout fashion. I realise that Slick Willy was all purely good stuff by 2000 was a strong Dem narrative for the fifteen years after that election but one would assume it would have started to wear off post-2016 with thoughtful partisans.

But anyway I digress. People in this thread are reading far too much into Jeb's 2016 run, when he was a political fossil, he would have been a solid GOP nominee in the 2000 cycle.
 
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Board colleague, there was a reason why Dubya ran on that issue, and that was because it was the obvious issue for a GOP nominee to run on. And it worked, albeit in a roundabout fashion. I realise that Slick Willy was all purely good stuff by 2000 was a strong Dem narrative for the fifteen years after that election but one would assume it would have started to wear off post-2016 with thoughtful partisans.

But anyway I digress. People in this thread are reading far too much into Jeb's 2016 run, when he was a political fossil, he would have been a solid GOP nominee in the 2000 cycle.
Never said he wouldn't do it and never said there wasn't a reason for him to run on it, but there's no guarantee that he would either. If he did go the route of his brother and run in "honor and dignity" and does it as effectively, he beats Gore and has an easier time doing it than Dubya did, because as you said Jeb would've been a solid candidate, but it IMHO would still be close. The country was better off in 2000 than it was in 1992, that's a fact. If however, Jeb runs on "the issues" you have two bland candidates running on the issues and I think in that case, Gote would eek it out due to being the most incumbent of the two candidates.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Low energy but no last minute DUI revelations...
Wasn't Bush hurt more by his Social Security gaffe than by his DUI revelation, though?

However, I do agree that Florida would have been in the bag for Jeb. Indeed, it is New Hampshire that I am less sure about.
 
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