DBWI: Truman Wins in 1948?

Hey folks. Today happens to be the 40th anniversary of Harry Truman's death so I thought I might bring this up. Truman, today, is regarded as one of the most underrated presidents in history.

As you know, Dewey won in '48....and got us into a lot of trouble. Could we have avoided a Korean quagmire? Would we still have gotten into Vietnam?
Would the Cold War have ended in '91? Would there have been a Chinese collapse after the fall of Mao, the assassination of Deng Xiaoping and the dictatorship of the gang of seven? And would we still have a woman in office, namely Elizabeth Warren?

BTW, folks, here's a quick history refresher for you:

Thomas Dewey 1948-1952
Harold Stassen** 1952-1959
John F. Kennedy* 1960-1963
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1964
Barry Goldwater*** 1964-1971
Richard Nixon 1971-1974
Robert F. Kennedy 1974-1976
Ronald Reagan 1976-1980
Terry Sanford* 1980-1983
James Earl 'Jimmy' Carter 1983-1988
Ronald E. 'Ron' Paul 1988-1992
Bill Clinton 1992-2000
W. Mitt Romney 2000-2008
Elizabeth Warren 2008-??
 
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BTW, folks, here's a quick history refresher for you:

Thomas Dewey 1948-1952
Harold Stassen** 1952-1959
John F. Kennedy* 1960-1963
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1964
Barry Goldwater*** 1964-1971
Richard Nixon 1971-1974
Robert F. Kennedy 1974-1976
Ronald Reagan 1976-1980
Terry Sanford* 1980-1983
James Earl 'Jimmy' Carter 1983-1988
Ronald E. 'Ron' Paul 1988-1992
Bill Clinton 1992-2000
W. Mitt Romney 2000-2008
Elizabeth Warren 2008-??

OOC: These dates don't make any sense. :confused:
 
OOC: These dates don't make any sense. :confused:
OOC: Unless Congress had to pick the President in 72 and the House picked Nixon while the Senate picked RFK.

Though the dates should look like this:

Thomas Dewey 1949-1953
Harold Stassen** 1953-1961
John F. Kennedy* 1961-1963
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1965
Barry Goldwater*** 1965-1971
Richard Nixon 1971-1974
Robert F. Kennedy 1974-1977
Ronald Reagan 1977-1981
Terry Sanford* 1981-1983
James Earl 'Jimmy' Carter 1983-1989
Ronald E. 'Ron' Paul 1989-1993
Bill Clinton 1993-2001
W. Mitt Romney 2001-2009
Elizabeth Warren 2009-??

Unless an amendment to the constitution was passed bumping up inauguration day...
 
Well, given how Wallace attacked Truman on the left on foreign policy, much of Truman's foreign policy decisions would have done the same as Dewey. In addition, while Truman's desegregation of the armed forces would have kept some African-Americans in the Democrats, I think the Republicans (with a few rare exceptions) wouldn't have appealed to racism like some of the old-style Southern Democrats. Finally, I don't think Truman would have had the guts to fire Hoover over his lack of support for the Mafia crackdown. Hoover became a laughingstock after Apalachin.
 
OOC: Unless Congress had to pick the President in 72 and the House picked Nixon while the Senate picked RFK.

Though the dates should look like this:

Thomas Dewey 1949-1953
Harold Stassen** 1953-1961
John F. Kennedy* 1961-1963
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1965
Barry Goldwater*** 1965-1971
Richard Nixon 1971-1974
Robert F. Kennedy 1974-1977
Ronald Reagan 1977-1981
Terry Sanford* 1981-1983
James Earl 'Jimmy' Carter 1983-1989
Ronald E. 'Ron' Paul 1989-1993
Bill Clinton 1993-2001
W. Mitt Romney 2001-2009
Elizabeth Warren 2009-??

Unless an amendment to the constitution was passed bumping up inauguration day...

OOC This seems like a really weird list. And do we assume all parties are the same as in RL?
 
OOC: The Butterfly That Didn't Flap is my main subject of inquiry about John F. Kennedy not only becoming president with the 1960 election, but apparently shot or otherwise removed early from the White House in 1963.


IC: Do you think Truman would have used several nukes on China? To what extent does MacArthur get what he wants?

(OOC: Yes, I'm leaving that intentionally vague in case no one else "likes" the idea of Dewey unleashing or not restraining MacArthur.)
 
OOC: Stassen did apparently support civil rights, and, I wonder if he would have appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice? (Even if Ike might have been allegedly less than full-speed-ahead in private about integration, Chief Justice Warren was a lovely large rock in the scum-covered pond of segregation.)




(OOC: I've attached the PDF to which the above integration-link leads to. See second paragraph. It's not easy to read, especially for folks like me who overall want to like Ike.)

(Edit, OOC: I still think Ike can be judged by his actions when it came to enforcing the Supreme Court rulings on the matter. Not everyone would do that.)
 

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Hey folks. Today happens to be the 40th anniversary of Harry Truman's death so I thought I might bring this up. Truman, today, is regarded as one of the most underrated presidents in history.

As you know, Dewey won in '48....and got us into a lot of trouble. Could we have avoided a Korean quagmire? Would we still have gotten into Vietnam?
Would the Cold War have ended in '91? Would there have been a Chinese collapse after the fall of Mao, the assassination of Deng Xiaoping and the dictatorship of the gang of seven? And would we still have a woman in office, namely Elizabeth Warren?

BTW, folks, here's a quick history refresher for you:

Thomas Dewey 1948-1952
Harold Stassen** 1952-1959
Dwight Eisenhower 1959-1960
John F. Kennedy* 1960-1963
Lyndon B. Johnson 1963-1964
Barry Goldwater** 1964-1971
Richard Nixon 1971-1974
Robert F. Kennedy 1974-1976
Ronald Reagan 1976-1980
Terry Sanford* 1980-1983
James Earl 'Jimmy' Carter 1983-1988
Ronald E. 'Ron' Paul 1988-1992
Bill Clinton 1992-2000
W. Mitt Romney 2000-2008
Elizabeth Warren 2008-??

OOC: Hey there. I realize a lot of you have questions so I'd like to clarify a few things:

1.)Harold Stassen resigned in 1959 due to a series of major screw-ups that almost led to WWIII in 1957. His vice President, Dwight Eisenhower, succeeded him.
2.)Kennedy was assassinated in Austin, TX, in September 1963.
3.)Barry Goldwater resigned after a slightly worse Vietnam conflict and his poor handling of civil rights issues at home. His former VP, Richard Nixon, was impeached for bugging the Watergate apartment complex in June of 1972, and since Nixon's staff had largely resigned at that point,
Robert F. Kennedy, the popular Mass. Democrat who had survived a 1967 assassination attempt in San Diego, had, amazingly, been elected as the President of the Senate pro tempore in 1971, following the removal & impeachment of James O. Eastland.
4.) Terry Sanford,the popular N.C. Democrat, was assassinated by Samuel Todd Francis in September, 1983.

@modelcitizen: Actually, we never did drop any nukes on China. We might have come kinda close to blows in '85, though, after the Red Dragon incident.
 
How did Elizabeth Warren ever get elected?

I remember the '08 election like it was yesterday. Mitt Romney, perhaps the most unpopular Republican president ever since Nixon was kicked out in '74, was on his way out. The GOP, desperate for just one last term in the driver's seat, decided to pick the shady Indiana neo-populist, Mike Stearns as their candidate in '08. Stearns, though not well known before the decade started, was highly regarded by the GOP establishment, though he wasn't exactly popular with centrists, or with the hard right, so in an attempt to court the support of the latter, Stearns decided to go a little out of left field, and he picked former Texas Congressman Edwin Ragnall to be his VP.

Liz Warren had always had a bit of a radical streak, and had been a member of the Peace & Justice Party back in the '70s. Her parents were both labor activists in Oklahoma in the '50s and may have inspired part of this. She had long been an anti-corruption and anti-crime activist and played a key role in exposing Idaho governor Mike Troutman's cover-up of white supremacist & militia scam rackets in '92, as well as the impeachment of Georgia governor Lester Maddox a decade earlier, for his involvement in the financing of an attempted white nationalist coup in Trinidad in 1980.
Warren served a term as a senator for her home state between '90 and '96, and was well-liked even by some Republicans, during her tenure.
She originally planned to run in 2000, but was slightly upstaged by the Gore/Babbitt ticket.....which, btw, lost the election despite winning the popular vote. Due to some worrisome discrepancies in the 2000 results, she helped head an investigation into the matter, and again in 2004, and further cemented her status as a watchdog for the people.

Warren, when she ran, didn't have a lot going for her at first: though well-liked by many, she was still an outsider, and her radical past didn't help matters either; the popular hard-right Tyler, Texas based radio host James Edward Turner, went so far as to label her as a "Flaming socialist", something that would stick for quite a while.
However, though, hiring Florida moderate Alan Grayson as her VP did help things a little and was only the first gamble of hers to pay off, but she still had a long way to go, and continually lagged in the polls right thru the summer of '08, and it seemed like even Pa., and Michigan might go for Stearns; many began to wonder if the Democratic Party had made it's biggest blunder since selecting Eugene McCarthy for their ticket in '72.

That all began to change in August, however; early the previous month, a mysterious source leaked some very, very, tantalizing information to the Warren campaign; it included the answers to questions about the extent of Stearns's shady business dealings in the middle and late '80s, Ragnall's whereabouts on the night an ex-business partner of his was murdered in Plano, TX, in September 1982, and other things such as Stearns's past involvement with the Texas KKK, Ragnall's involvement in the stonewalling of a Carter administration corruption investigation which could have prevented the stock market crash in Sept. '88, and the possibility that Stearns may have been involved with the Taliban arms scandal in the early '90s.

After all of this information was carefully scrutinized, Warren began to slowly release some of the information she and her team had been given. To say that this information rescued her campaign, may be a bit of an understatement; rather, it may very well have been the tipping point for both of them.

Stearns struggled to deal with the controversy that began to erupt from both sides of the political aisle, and floundered constantly; his facade of the calm and collected business executive, had been forever shattered. The 55-60% lead he once had in most of the swing states, began to fall apart, and quickly.

By the time November rolled around, Stearns was done; despite record amounts of conservative turn-out, and over $2 billion dollars worth of funding thrown his way, Warren still won 51.7% of the popular vote, and therefore, the election. Shortly afterwards, the GOP, already beginning to fall apart at the seams, splintered between the radical-right "Tea Party" factions, and the more moderate Reaganite people.

Since then, she's done a fantastic job while in office and I haven't at all regretted volunteering to help the '08 campaign, and if she gets selected at the convention in Denver this year, I'll be happy to do it all over again. :D
 
Grayson a moderate ?? how far left is this AU ?

IC: LMAO. Might wanna stop sipping that tea, buddy, it's all been doctored. :D

OOC: Let's just say that Grayson isn't quite the same guy he was IOTL. (P.S. no offense with that last comment, I was just playing the part. :))
 
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