List of Alternate Presidents and PMs II

[Octosteel]

I mean he can but if he wins he can't take office (probably, the constitution is actually somewhat ambiguous though general consensus and the decision of the courts would probably hold that he can't).

Yeah there is some vagueness since I remember people going "Hillary should pick Bill to be her VP!"

 

[shiftygiant]

Ford Wins '76
1981-1989: Ted Kennedy/Jerry Brown
def. 1980: Ronald Reagan/George H. W. Bush

I'd of thought Ronnie would go with someone else, but sure.

I'm also not sure how Ted is a two-termer, given how Ted's motivation for running in '80 was fuck nothing, nor why Brown is his running mate (beyond 'muh parallelism'), but okay.

def. 1984: Bob Dole/Henry Kissinger

As AWW rightly notes, no, and even factoring in Cev's point, the Republicans simply wouldn't choose Kissinger.

1989-1993: Jerry Brown/Al Gore
def. 1988: Dan Quayle/Lamar Alexander
1993-2001: Jack Kemp/Donald Rumsfeld
def. 1992: Jerry Brown/Al Gore
def. 1996: Ann Richards/Bill Bradley
2001-2009: Bill Clinton/Joe Biden
def. 2000: Donald Rumsfeld/Elizabeth Dole
def. 2004: Dick Cheney/Condoleezza Rice
2009-2017: John McCain/George W. Bush
def. 2008: Joe Biden/Barack Obama
def. 2012: John Edwards/Howard Dean
2017-present: Bernie Sanders/Tulsi Gabbard
def. 2016: Mitt Romney/John Kasich

For a bunch of what amounts to parallels, these aren't good parallels. They're actually kinda bad ones.

 

[Cevolian]

I'd of thought Ronnie would go with someone else, but sure.

I'm also not sure how Ted is a two-termer, given how Ted's motivation for running in '80 was fuck nothing, nor why Brown is his running mate (beyond 'muh parallelism'), but okay.

As AWW rightly notes, no, and even factoring in Cev's point, the Republicans simply wouldn't choose Kissinger.

For a bunch of what amounts to parallels, these aren't good parallels. They're actually kinda bad ones.

To add to this I don't think Kissinger would even want to be VP, he was only really interested in Foreign Affairs and diplomacy, something which the VP can end up having no involvement with whatsoever...

 

[Octosteel]

I'd of thought Ronnie would go with someone else, but sure.

I'm also not sure how Ted is a two-termer, given how Ted's motivation for running in '80 was fuck nothing, nor why Brown is his running mate (beyond 'muh parallelism'), but okay.

As AWW rightly notes, no, and even factoring in Cev's point, the Republicans simply wouldn't choose Kissinger.

For a bunch of what amounts to parallels, these aren't good parallels. They're actually kinda bad ones.

Are these even parallels? I don't see what it's supposed to parallel.

 

[shiftygiant]

Are these even parallels? I don't see what it's supposed to parallel.

Sorry for the late response, but yes they're parallels, with a 'party flipped' thing going on.

So Kennedy is Reagan, Brown is Bush Sr., Kemp is Clinton, Clinton is Bush Jr., McCain is Obama, and Sanders is Trump.

 

[Rosa Luxemburg]

The 27th

Richard Nixon | Nelson Rockefeller
(1969-1977)
Frank Church | John Glenn
(1977-1981)
Ronald Reagan | Donald Rumsfeld
(1981-1991)
Donald Rumsfeld | Jack Kemp
(1991-1997)
Jerry Brown | Jay Rockefeller
(1997-2009)
Mike Huckabee | Jon Huntsman
(2009-2017)
Jon Huntsman | Marco Rubio
(2017-Present)

 

[Asami]

t h r e e t e r m s

 

[shiftygiant]

n a t u r a l r u l i n g p a r t y

 

[Cevolian]

2000-2008: Ken Livingstone (Labour)
2000: (Ran as Independent) def - Steven Norris (Conservative), Michael Oliver, Lord Mayor of London (The City), Susan Kramer (Liberal Democrat)
2004: (Alliance: Green/Workers of London) def - Steven Norris (Conservative/The City/Civic Concern), Paddy Ashdown (Liberal Democrat), Gerard Batten (UKIP/Anti-Assembly)
2008-2012: Karen Brady (Conservative)
2008: (Alliance: The City/Civic Concern) def - Ken Livingstone (Labour/Workers of London), Brian Paddick (Liberal Democrat), Gerard Batten (Independent/Anti-Assembly), Nigel Farage (UKIP)
2012-2016: Karen Brady (Independent)
2012: (Alliance: Conservative/The City/Civic Concern) def - Alan Sugar (Labour), Ken Livingstone (Left.UK), Sian Berry (Green), Simon Hughes (Liberal Democrat), Bob Crow (Workers of London), [Boris Johnson withdrew to endorse Brady]
2016-0000: Jeremy Corbyn (Labour)
2016: (Alliance: Left.UK/Left Green/Women's Equality) def - Zac Goldsmith (Conservative/The City/UKIP/Civic Concern/Right Green), Tom Brake (Liberal Democrat)

Based on that list @shiftygiant posted the other day, I wanted to create a scenario where London uses "Fusion" voting for its elections like New York. May add notes later.

 

[Yes]

@Cevolian,

Interesting idea -- the way New York's ostensibly multi-party system is manipulated is quite interesting and would seem to be an even more likely result in a basically parliamentary model like London government (which has that -- gasp! -- nearly French strong-executive-parliamentary feel, at least to an outside observer like me.) Like the new sig line

ETA: I wonder if it would've done Corbyn some good to be something like Mayor of London for a spell, I'm not his biggest fan (though it's nice to have someone from the Labour wing of the Labour Party he's not in my mind the best candidate for that role) but it would've given him some seasoning with the practical affairs of an executive office-holder.

 

[Cevolian]

@Cevolian,

Interesting idea -- the way New York's ostensibly multi-party system is manipulated is quite interesting and would seem to be an even more likely result in a basically parliamentary model like London government (which has that -- gasp! -- nearly French strong-executive-parliamentary feel, at least to an outside observer like me.) Like the new sig line

ETA: I wonder if it would've done Corbyn some good to be something like Mayor of London for a spell, I'm not his biggest fan (though it's nice to have someone from the Labour wing of the Labour Party he's not in my mind the best candidate for that role) but it would've given him some seasoning with the practical affairs of an executive office-holder.

Yeah I thought the New York model was actually even more apt in London than in New York and it's semi surprising to me that the Labour government did not implement it when it created the system (although as with electoral reform it was probably done to ensure Labour dominance).

With regards to Corbyn I definitely think some form of administrative or executive experience (be that in cabinet or as a regional mayor) would have been preferable to diving head first into the LotO's seat...

 

[sehidnamirin]

What if Tony Benn invented the Internet (Part 1)?

1974: Conservative (Edward Heath) – 39.3% (-5.1%), 326 Seats (-4) [1]
Labour (Harold Wilson) – 36.7% (-6.7%), 276 Seats (-12), Liberal (Jeremy Thorpe) – 18.3% (10.8%), 11 Seats (+5)

1979: Labour (Tony Benn) – 40.6% (+3.9%), 342 Seats (+66) [2]
Conservative (Edward Heath) – 34.1% (-1.9%), 259 Seats (-67) Liberal (Steel) – 16.1% (-2.1%), 12 Seats (+1) Independent Conservative (Enoch Powell) – 3.1% (+3.1%) - 12 Seats (+12)

1983: Labour (Tony Benn) – 26.9% (-13.7%), 324 Seats (-18) [3]
Conservative (Jim Prior) – 21.2% (-12.8%), 157 Seats (-90) People’s (Enoch Powell) – 29.1% (+26.0%) 115 Seats (+103) Liberal (Steel) – 18.9% (+2.8%), 21 Seats (+9)

1987: Labour (Tony Benn) – 36.0% (+9.1%), 335 Seats (+11) [4]
Conservative-Liberal (Electoral Pact) – 31.2% (-8.9%), 143 Conservative, 34 Liberal Seats (-1) People’s (Enoch Powell) – 28.2% (-0.9%) 103 Seats (-12)

1992: Labour (John Prescott) – 39.1% (+3.1%), 319 Seats (-16) [5]
Conservative-Liberal (Electoral Pact) – 36.4% (+5.2%), 162 Conservative, 56 Liberal Seats (-1) People’s (John Biffen) – 19.9% (-8.3%) 78 Seats (-25)

[1] A speech in his support from dear old Enoch sees Heath drinking deep from a poisoned chalice.

[2] Fearmongering about ‘Bolshevist Benn’, and attempting to blame the strikes which had paralysed the country on Trade Union attempts to ‘bring down the country and invite in the Soviets’ failed in the face of deepening economic crisis, and Heath’s obstinate refusal to hold a referendum on membership of the EEC.

[3] Benn moved instantly to implement his economic agenda, recreating his former post of Minister of Technology that was abolished by Heath and appointing the newly honoured Lord Stafford Beer. He was tasked with recreating the Cybersyn system he had created for the Chilean Socialist Government, with the finest computer technology Britain had to offer. A System of Computers in State Owned enterprises and State Supported Cooperatives (Such as Triumph Motorcycles), supplied information to a central system which then shared this information back to the factories. This gave British Factories a cutting edge on the world market (As the information was only supplied to State Enterprises and State approved Cooperatives) and allowed for greater autonomy in operation for the workers. To save money this system would soon be integrated on a joint network with the NPL Network and thus ARPANET, and while the scientists and the workers had little to share with each other, it was the start of something…

Unfortunately for Benn while his system fascinated the proto-Nerds of the world, it was not a major issue in the 1983 General election, what would be was the 1982 EEC referendum.

While Benn was obviously against the Capitalist Conglomerate that the EEC was his anti-racist views were deeply unpopular, and he and Jim Prior would find themselves severely out maneuvered by Powell, who took centre stage. Especially after Britain voted to leave.

[4] Benn’s second administration was a deeply delicate and unstable thing. While holding a sliver of a majority he utterly lacked any democratic legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the population. Any major decisions were made in collaboration with other Parliamentary groups; the decommissioning of Polaris with no replacement was a joint project between Powell and Benn. The 1985 Northern Ireland Crisis nearly brought early elections, but in the end the Liberals and Tories acceded to a watered down form of joint administration and a border poll in 2000. There was also some minor controversy about the handing over of some minor windswept islands in the South Atlantic to Argentina, but no one really cared outside of the hysteric right wing press.

Benn’s economic program was slowed down, and the focus moved from nationalisation to the less controversial business of transforming failing businesses into state backed cooperatives. The Informational Network became increasingly sophisticated, and in collaboration with the British Library the Encyclopædia Britannica and various other informational books were uploaded and made accessible in order to give creative workers in the factories a greater access to information. Britain’s economic success was the jealously of the world, and many attempts were made to copy the system, especially in Japan. But Britain had the advantage of time, and in 1986 after the delivery of a sufficient modern computers and the correct wiring, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia would open a joint informational network with Britain called the Industrial Informational Network or INFORNET, greatly helping them with their economic crisis.

The 1987 election was a great success for Benn. The Liberal-Tory pact was an attempt to compound their numbers, but instead just saw people fail to see the difference between the two of them, and people were getting tired of Powell’s proclamations about the clearly non-existent rivers of blood that were just around the corner, especially after Britain’s negotiated exit from the EEC.

[5] ‘’The People of Poland did not rise up so that their water system could be privatised!’’ came the resounding cry from the Government benches in the face of the heckles Benn received in the face of his ‘friends’ in the Eastern bloc losing their grip on power. Britain would intervene energetically in the collapse of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, forming alliances with reform inclined members of the ruling parties, who along with many young student radicals saw Cybersocialism as the way forward.

It wouldn’t work everywhere, but over the next decade the Polish People's Republic, the Czecho-Slovak Socialist Republic, the Hungarian People’s Republic and eventually the only partially dismembered Soviet Union would join INFORNET.

With the increase spread of Personal Computers there was an increasing demand for INFORNET access outside of the workplace, and a much reduced version, primarily filled with uploaded books that were in the public realm would be made available to the British Public in 1988.

But Benn would dig too deep into the crisis. His attempts to deploy British troops to Slovenia, (regardless of if they were nothing but ‘neutral peacekeepers’ or not) would see the party forcing him to resign in 1991, to be succeeded by the solidly working class Prescott.

 

[Yes]

What if Tony Benn invented the Internet (Part 1)?

Now that is some alternate history. I think Benn's survival of electoral fatigue strains credulity (even though the deal-with-the-devil with Powell is fascinating) but damn, if you put Tony in the same room with Berners-Lee in the Eighties and the Tories have gone down and Foot has shocked the world first by staying leader through the fall and then by drubbing those fascist Argies, and Benn is trying to save Ferranti and the rest of the British electronics industry and looking just as you say for a leg up on Japanese Total Quality Management, it is very much a thing that makes you go "hmmmm"... the strain between Berners-Lee's universalizing vision (Berners-Lee is that curious creature, a devout Unitarian Universalist) and Benn's vigorous, instrumentalist socialism would be a fun thing to see too. I think you have a TL to go write...

 

[sehidnamirin]

Now that is some alternate history. I think Benn's survival of electoral fatigue strains credulity (even though the deal-with-the-devil with Powell is fascinating) but damn, if you put Tony in the same room with Berners-Lee in the Eighties and the Tories have gone down and Foot has shocked the world first by staying leader through the fall and then by drubbing those fascist Argies, and Benn is trying to save Ferranti and the rest of the British electronics industry and looking just as you say for a leg up on Japanese Total Quality Management, it is very much a thing that makes you go "hmmmm"... the strain between Berners-Lee's universalizing vision (Berners-Lee is that curious creature, a devout Unitarian Universalist) and Benn's vigorous, instrumentalist socialism would be a fun thing to see too.

So as I'm attempting a direct mirror of OTL I strained things when otherwise I could have switched Benn out earlier. (The list continues until 2020 as an exact mirror of OTL, I just haven't uploaded the notes yet).

 

[Yes]

So as I'm attempting a direct mirror of OTL I strained things when otherwise I could have switched Benn out earlier. (The list continues until 2020 as an exact mirror of OTL, I just haven't uploaded the notes yet).

Well, rather like his mirror image IOTL I don't think Benn would've gone quietly if pushed at once he had the top job, so you're on the right track there, anyway in a full TL (nudge, nudge) you can put more meat on those bones and press ahead

 

[Major Crimson]

SNIPPED E-BENN-TOPIA

.

This is quite literally my dream timeline, its just so beautiful.

 

[big-click]

I noticed we'd had some good lists below the national level lately, so I decided to try some parochial stuff of my own. Here's a more turbulent thirty years of Oregon politics.

Everything is Undone, Nothing is Finished: Governors of Oregon, 1987-2017

1987-1992: Neil Goldschmidt (Democratic)
1986 def. Norma Paulus (Republican)
1990 def. Dave Frohnmayer (Republican), Al Mobley (Independent)
1992-1993: Barbara Roberts (Democratic) [1]
1993-1995: Bill Sizemore (Republican, then Reform) [2]
1992 (special) def. Barbara Roberts (Democratic)
1995-1999: Kevin Mannix (Democratic, then Republican) [3]
1994 def. Denny Smith (Republican), Bill Sizemore (Reform), Walt Brown (Independent)
1999-2007: John Kitzhaber (Democratic) [4]
1998 def. Kevin Mannix (Republican), Bill Sizemore (Reform)
2002 def. John Lim (Republican / Reform)
2007-2011: Cylvia Johnson (Democratic / Working People’s) [5]
2006 def. Gordon Smith (Republican / Reform)
2011-2015: John Kroger (Democratic) [6]
2010 def. Allen Alley (Republican)
2015-0000: Ted Ferrioli (Republican) [7]
2014 def. Ted Wheeler (Democratic), Nick Caleb (Working People’s / Pacific Green / Socialist Alternative)

[1] If Neil Goldschmidt had not remained in public office, it’s possible his gruesome secret would never have been uncovered. But the governor couldn’t resist the siren call of re-election. [This is the POD.] Months into his second term, there was already clamor for him to throw his hat into the Democratic primary for president. A popular, technocratic, environmentally minded New Democrat with municipal, state, and federal experience? He’d clean up! Goldschmidt demurred, but the presidential flap prompted deeper investigation into his background – and that’s when the skeleton came tumbling out of the closet. In the summer of 1992, the Free Agent, a Portland alternative newspaper, revealed that during his tenure as mayor in the 1970s he’d had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl. Goldschmidt resigned in disgrace. Secretary of State Barbara Roberts was sworn in, and immediately gave her support to a law establishing a statewide sex offender registry.

[2] While Barbara Roberts tried to dissociate the Democrats from Goldschmidt, she couldn’t do much about the party’s presidential nominee Bill Clinton, who was now facing serious questioning about his own sexual history. Meanwhile, the narrow defeat of Measure 5 – the property-tax reduction amendment – in 1990 had only emboldened Oregon’s anti-tax conservatives. The persistent economic depression in Oregon’s logging communities and the “spotted owl crisis” in which lumber workers clashed with environmentalists depressed turnout among these traditionally Democratic constituencies, both of whom saw the state government as indecisive, weak, and too sympathetic to the other side. It was the perfect storm. The Republican nominee, an obscure “Bible history” instructor and anti-tax campaigner named Bill Sizemore, was swept into office.

Sizemore was initially successful in passing some of the property tax restrictions that had been included in Measure 5. But his hard-headed hard-right agenda, drawn up in partnership with out-of-state conservative campaigners like Grover Norquist, soon met resistance from the legislature. Sizemore’s intransigence also delayed President Bush’s Forest Communities Summit, a forum created to solve the “spotted owl crisis” riling Oregon and Washington. In the absence of a policy solution, the sweeping injunctions against timber harvest on most federal land in the Northwest stayed in place. While lumber workers initially celebrated Sizemore’s advocacy for more logging, their support turned to disappointment, then anger, as it became clear that he was holding up a settlement.

Soon, too, Sizemore’s out-of-state ties began to cause him legal trouble. It became clear that Oregon Taxpayers United, the organization Sizemore had founded in part to help his gubernatorial campaign, had been involved in a complex web of money laundering and fraud connected with Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Once Sizemore was personally implicated, his loss in the Republican primary was assured. Despite hastily switching to Ross Perot’s nascent Reform Party, he went down to defeat in November 1994.

[3] The tough-on-crime Democratic legislator Kevin Mannix, who’d campaigned on “cleaning up” the party’s reputation after the Goldschmidt affair, won – but only by a modest plurality, despite a divided right-wing vote. The Oregon Democrats were still tainted, and Walt Brown’s independent candidacy drew some support from those wary of Mannix’s conservatism.

Those fears proved justified once in office. While Mannix’s “victims’ rights” laws were popular and his mandatory minimum sentences became law (with mostly Republican votes), his attempts to expand the Sizemore tax cuts put him even more seriously at odds with his party. When State Senator John Kitzhaber mounted a primary challenge against him, Mannnix became the second Oregon governor in a row to switch parties. And for the second time, it didn’t work.

[4] Kitzhaber restored the Democratic Party’s credibility in the state as Oregon (urban Oregon, at least) began its slow rise out of the economic malaise of the 80s and 90s. A tech boom brought in cash, obviating the need for a repeal of the 1990s tax cuts, and a series of socially progressive laws and ballot measures (including ballot fusion, physician-assisted suicide, and medical marijuana) made headlines nationwide. At a time when many Democrats lined up behind the invasion of Iraq over sanctions violations, Kitzhaber’s criticism of both the Gephardt and Dole administrations’ conduct of the Second Gulf War made him a hero to many. When he retired, he was able to hand the office off smoothly to his chosen successor and fiancée.

[5] State representative Cylvia Johnson was the first governor elected from Eastern Oregon since Earl Snell in the 1940s. She had been dating Kitzhaber for several years, but Republican jibes about Evita Peron were easily brushed away by the fact that Johnson had an impressive career in her own right. A renewable energy consultant, she promised to be the “greenest governor in the country,” and most Oregonians believed she’d succeed. (Those from lumber communities, which had never recovered from the collapse of the 80s and the Great Injunction of the 90s, believed it too, although they weren’t necessarily happy about it.) Her first few years did indeed see huge state investment in clean energy. Oregon became one of the nation’s leaders in the sector and earned praise from President Gore, who quipped during a visit to Portland that he felt right at home with his green politics and hipster beard. Yet the economic collapse of 2009 stalled her agenda just as it did the President’s. Republican majorities in the statehouse put paid to any further greening, and fiscal austerity was on the table instead.

Johnson’s personal popularity remained high despite her setbacks. At least, until it emerged that she may have allowed her new husband to use the governor’s office to promote their shared business interests, including an investment in a medical marijuana grow-op. While an investigation stopped short of accusing Johnson and Kitzhaber of criminal behavior, the scandal made her so politically impotent that she announced soon afterwards that she would not be a candidate for re-election.

[6] Just as in 1994, the Democrats recruited a “tough-on-crime” moderate to brush away scandal. John Kroger, a Lewis & Clark College law professor and former Mafia prosecutor in New York, won an upset victory in the primary and a deceptively easy one in the general. Kroger’s prosecutorial background and endorsements from Republicans helped him carry rural areas that were trending red in the long term, granting him victory despite around six percent of the vote going to various left-wing third party candidates.

While popular with voters, Kroger was very much an outsider in Salem. His distant and vaguely authoritarian management style rapidly began to make him enemies and contributed to his public image as an out-of-touch East Coaster. When a huge graffito reading JOHN KROGER IS LIZARD PERSON appeared on the steps of the Capitol, it became an instant meme. His old-fashioned war-on-drugs opposition to Measure 68, legalizing recreational marijuana, did nothing to assuage that reputation.

Throughout his term, Kroger was faced with persistent economic malaise and a mounting state budget deficit. The tax cuts of the 90s had come home to roost, and the post-crash austerity measures brought in by the Republicans on the federal and state level had only stalled economic growth. Kroger’s proposed solutions – including tax hikes and privatization of state lands – managed to offend the entire political spectrum. Oregonians sick of the Romney administration’s technocratic neoliberalism expected better from their state government. After his 2014 budget failed in a Democratic revolt, Kroger became the second governor in a row not to run for re-election. While he claimed that he was stepping down for “health reasons,” he seemed perfectly healthy when he returned to his teaching position at L&C a few months after his term ended.

The Democratic candidate, liberal Multnomah County commissioner Ted Wheeler, ran as much against Kroger as against his Republican opponent, but it wasn’t enough to save his base from being siphoned away by the left candidate and voters handing a historic defeat to the Democrats.

[7] Years of scandal-ridden Democratic leadership culminated in the victory of State Senator Ted Ferrioli in the face of a nationwide blue wave. Despite his conservative record, Ferrioli had made his name as a pragmatic moderate after drafting legislation to organize and regulate recreational marijuana, which he had opposed before the passage of Measure 68. Even as Oregon’s junior senator geared up for a presidential run, his home state was moving right as Ferrioli rammed through Kroger’s old budget proposals…

 

[Yes]

I noticed we'd had some good lists below the national level lately, so I decided to try some parochial stuff of my own. Here's a more turbulent thirty years of Oregon politics.

Everything is Undone, Nothing is Finished: Governors of Oregon, 1987-2017

1987-1992: Neil Goldschmidt (Democratic)
1986 def. Norma Paulus (Republican)
1990 def. Dave Frohnmayer (Republican), Al Mobley (Independent)
1992-1993: Barbara Roberts (Democratic) [1]
1993-1995: Bill Sizemore (Republican, then Reform) [2]
1992 (special) def. Barbara Roberts (Democratic)
1995-1999: Kevin Mannix (Democratic, then Republican) [3]
1994 def. Denny Smith (Republican), Bill Sizemore (Reform), Walt Brown (Independent)
1999-2007: John Kitzhaber (Democratic) [4]
1998 def. Kevin Mannix (Republican), Bill Sizemore (Reform)
2002 def. John Lim (Republican / Reform)
2007-2011: Cylvia Johnson (Democratic / Working People’s) [5]
2006 def. Gordon Smith (Republican / Reform)
2011-2015: John Kroger (Democratic) [6]
2010 def. Allen Alley (Republican)
2015-0000: Ted Ferrioli (Republican) [7]
2014 def. Ted Wheeler (Democratic), Nick Caleb (Working People’s / Pacific Green / Socialist Alternative)

[1] If Neil Goldschmidt had not remained in public office, it’s possible his gruesome secret would never have been uncovered. But the governor couldn’t resist the siren call of re-election. [This is the POD.] Months into his second term, there was already clamor for him to throw his hat into the Democratic primary for president. A popular, technocratic, environmentally minded New Democrat with municipal, state, and federal experience? He’d clean up! Goldschmidt demurred, but the presidential flap prompted deeper investigation into his background – and that’s when the skeleton came tumbling out of the closet. In the summer of 1992, the Free Agent, a Portland alternative newspaper, revealed that during his tenure as mayor in the 1970s he’d had a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl. Goldschmidt resigned in disgrace. Secretary of State Barbara Roberts was sworn in, and immediately gave her support to a law establishing a statewide sex offender registry.

[2] While Barbara Roberts tried to dissociate the Democrats from Goldschmidt, she couldn’t do much about the party’s presidential nominee Bill Clinton, who was now facing serious questioning about his own sexual history. Meanwhile, the narrow defeat of Measure 5 – the property-tax reduction amendment – in 1990 had only emboldened Oregon’s anti-tax conservatives. The persistent economic depression in Oregon’s logging communities and the “spotted owl crisis” in which lumber workers clashed with environmentalists depressed turnout among these traditionally Democratic constituencies, both of whom saw the state government as indecisive, weak, and too sympathetic to the other side. It was the perfect storm. The Republican nominee, an obscure “Bible history” instructor and anti-tax campaigner named Bill Sizemore, was swept into office.

Sizemore was initially successful in passing some of the property tax restrictions that had been included in Measure 5. But his hard-headed hard-right agenda, drawn up in partnership with out-of-state conservative campaigners like Grover Norquist, soon met resistance from the legislature. Sizemore’s intransigence also delayed President Bush’s Forest Communities Summit, a forum created to solve the “spotted owl crisis” riling Oregon and Washington. In the absence of a policy solution, the sweeping injunctions against timber harvest on most federal land in the Northwest stayed in place. While lumber workers initially celebrated Sizemore’s advocacy for more logging, their support turned to disappointment, then anger, as it became clear that he was holding up a settlement.

Soon, too, Sizemore’s out-of-state ties began to cause him legal trouble. It became clear that Oregon Taxpayers United, the organization Sizemore had founded in part to help his gubernatorial campaign, had been involved in a complex web of money laundering and fraud connected with Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Once Sizemore was personally implicated, his loss in the Republican primary was assured. Despite hastily switching to Ross Perot’s nascent Reform Party, he went down to defeat in November 1994.

[3] The tough-on-crime Democratic legislator Kevin Mannix, who’d campaigned on “cleaning up” the party’s reputation after the Goldschmidt affair, won – but only by a modest plurality, despite a divided right-wing vote. The Oregon Democrats were still tainted, and Walt Brown’s independent candidacy drew some support from those wary of Mannix’s conservatism.

Those fears proved justified once in office. While Mannix’s “victims’ rights” laws were popular and his mandatory minimum sentences became law (with mostly Republican votes), his attempts to expand the Sizemore tax cuts put him even more seriously at odds with his party. When State Senator John Kitzhaber mounted a primary challenge against him, Mannnix became the second Oregon governor in a row to switch parties. And for the second time, it didn’t work.

[4] Kitzhaber restored the Democratic Party’s credibility in the state as Oregon (urban Oregon, at least) began its slow rise out of the economic malaise of the 80s and 90s. A tech boom brought in cash, obviating the need for a repeal of the 1990s tax cuts, and a series of socially progressive laws and ballot measures (including ballot fusion, physician-assisted suicide, and medical marijuana) made headlines nationwide. At a time when many Democrats lined up behind the invasion of Iraq over sanctions violations, Kitzhaber’s criticism of both the Gephardt and Dole administrations’ conduct of the Second Gulf War made him a hero to many. When he retired, he was able to hand the office off smoothly to his chosen successor and fiancée.

[5] State representative Cylvia Johnson was the first governor elected from Eastern Oregon since Earl Snell in the 1940s. She had been dating Kitzhaber for several years, but Republican jibes about Evita Peron were easily brushed away by the fact that Johnson had an impressive career in her own right. A renewable energy consultant, she promised to be the “greenest governor in the country,” and most Oregonians believed she’d succeed. (Those from lumber communities, which had never recovered from the collapse of the 80s and the Great Injunction of the 90s, believed it too, although they weren’t necessarily happy about it.) Her first few years did indeed see huge state investment in clean energy. Oregon became one of the nation’s leaders in the sector and earned praise from President Gore, who quipped during a visit to Portland that he felt right at home with his green politics and hipster beard. Yet the economic collapse of 2009 stalled her agenda just as it did the President’s. Republican majorities in the statehouse put paid to any further greening, and fiscal austerity was on the table instead.

Johnson’s personal popularity remained high despite her setbacks. At least, until it emerged that she may have allowed her new husband to use the governor’s office to promote their shared business interests, including an investment in a medical marijuana grow-op. While an investigation stopped short of accusing Johnson and Kitzhaber of criminal behavior, the scandal made her so politically impotent that she announced soon afterwards that she would not be a candidate for re-election.

[6] Just as in 1994, the Democrats recruited a “tough-on-crime” moderate to brush away scandal. John Kroger, a Lewis & Clark College law professor and former Mafia prosecutor in New York, won an upset victory in the primary and a deceptively easy one in the general. Kroger’s prosecutorial background and endorsements from Republicans helped him carry rural areas that were trending red in the long term, granting him victory despite around six percent of the vote going to various left-wing third party candidates.

While popular with voters, Kroger was very much an outsider in Salem. His distant and vaguely authoritarian management style rapidly began to make him enemies and contributed to his public image as an out-of-touch East Coaster. When a huge graffito reading JOHN KROGER IS LIZARD PERSON appeared on the steps of the Capitol, it became an instant meme. His old-fashioned war-on-drugs opposition to Measure 68, legalizing recreational marijuana, did nothing to assuage that reputation.

Throughout his term, Kroger was faced with persistent economic malaise and a mounting state budget deficit. The tax cuts of the 90s had come home to roost, and the post-crash austerity measures brought in by the Republicans on the federal and state level had only stalled economic growth. Kroger’s proposed solutions – including tax hikes and privatization of state lands – managed to offend the entire political spectrum. Oregonians sick of the Romney administration’s technocratic neoliberalism expected better from their state government. After his 2014 budget failed in a Democratic revolt, Kroger became the second governor in a row not to run for re-election. While he claimed that he was stepping down for “health reasons,” he seemed perfectly healthy when he returned to his teaching position at L&C a few months after his term ended.

The Democratic candidate, liberal Multnomah County commissioner Ted Wheeler, ran as much against Kroger as against his Republican opponent, but it wasn’t enough to save his base from being siphoned away by the left candidate and voters handing a historic defeat to the Democrats.

[7] Years of scandal-ridden Democratic leadership culminated in the victory of State Senator Ted Ferrioli in the face of a nationwide blue wave. Despite his conservative record, Ferrioli had made his name as a pragmatic moderate after drafting legislation to organize and regulate recreational marijuana, which he had opposed before the passage of Measure 68. Even as Oregon’s junior senator geared up for a presidential run, his home state was moving right as Ferrioli rammed through Kroger’s old budget proposals…

I'm down the road from you in the Willamette Valley. I do not have enough likes TAKE ALL MY MONEY TAKE IT I HAVE MORE AT HOME. Really

ETA: Not that I'm happy about the outcome (I'm a Bill Bradbury/Kate Brown kinda guy) but you built some lovely chaos. And honestly your POD was a narrow escape IRL. We could easily have ended up there.

 

[Yes]

This might be a preview of coming attractions, if I could ever make time between work, family, and another big project coming on line to put flesh on its Scrivener-outlined bones. In the meanwhile (or at all), any bigger TL of this can live here in short form. It throws a stone at two fecking big birds: the eternal Ford Wins question and the interrelated posit of a “Democratic Eighties (or more).” On the way I’d like to acknowledge the excellent (and pithy!) “Careycare and Nicklesnomics” recently – we share an opinion about who’d succeed a re-elected Ford but otherwise our paths are our own. (For those not fans of American college football, yes it is a play on words: “The Victors” is the title of the University of Michigan’s famous fight song, which Ford much preferred to “Hail to the Chief.”)

The Victors? : The Second Term of Gerald Ford and its consequences

Pres. Gerald R. Ford (R-MI)/Sen. Robert “Bob” Dole (R-KS) 1977-81

Def. Fmr. Gov. James Earl “Jimmy” Carter (D-GA)/Sen. Walter Mondale (D-MN) Eugene McCarthy (I-MN)

James Baker, Ford’s campaign manager, deploys a master plan. Lean hard on Carter’s falling numbers, manipulate McCarthy’s vanity run to cost Carter close states, throw Reagan at Mississippi, and everything else at Ohio. It works. But the game was probably not worth the candle. Ford presides over a “jobless recovery” as his incessant budget fights with a Democratic Congress (more Democratic after ’78) hobble growth but help steady inflation. He gets a Panama Canal Treaty despite the New Right but fails to deliver them Robert Bork on the Supreme Court in a bruising battle (Amalya Kearse goes instead.) SALT talks stall out. A petulant Henry Kissinger shoots his bolt trying to push the administration into a confrontation with Cuba over its African interventions. By 1978 “the Texans” – George Bush, James Baker, and Bill Clements – have pushed Kissinger into retirement, Dick Cheney into politics, and Don Rumsfeld to Coventry (by way of Langley, where he only has Team B to console him.) Ford tries to refloat “Nixoncare” as a sweetener before the midterms but Dems are holding their powder for 1980. An intervention to replace a toppling Somoza in Nicaragua with new right-wingers is deeply unpopular, brief, and only leaves a civil war behind it. Bush gains plaudits for months of multipolar diplomacy that brings an Israeli-Egyptian peace in 1979. But the Soviets still end up in Afghanistan and aggressive efforts to prop up the dying Shah and his teenage heir go south. Iran blows by 1980, inflation and unemployment spiral, Americans are attacked leaving the country, the Embassy falls on Valentine’s Day (because Ford wanted “no more Saigons”), the US mines Iran’s harbors and the world holds its breath. Politics goes on: Reagan drubs Dole for being weak on the economy and “losing Iran.” On the Democratic side, in a three-way race the leader Hugh Carey and Southern champion Reubin Askew make friends and freeze out Ed Muskie. Bush’s efforts to settle the Iran issue (offering the mullahs Tudeh Party heads on a platter and billions in Japanese cash) fail to take. The Democrats soar for a while. But Reagan has a good debate, Ed Rollins floods the TV with negative ads, and Ford pulls off a bloody but successful rescue in Tehran. It’s still not enough. Massive Democratic mobilization, an ever-worsening economy, and twelve years of Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation, gas lines, etc. is too much even for Saint Ronnie. Carey and Askew win with a Democratic Congress behind them.

Gov. Hugh L. Carey (D-NY)/Gov. Reubin O’D. Askew (D-FL) 1981-89

1980 def. Fmr. Gov. Ronald W. Reagan (R-CA)/Gov. John Connally Jr. (R-TX)

1984 def. Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-NV)/Sen. Charles Percy (R-IL)

Hugh Carey, the governor who saved New York’s sinking ship, knows the whole country now expects the same. He attacks on three fronts. One is punitive interest hikes against inflation. Another is major tax reform, cutting rates but also slashing deductions in the upper brackets, while he raises various ancillary taxes. The other is Keynesian jobs programs in three areas: a conventional military buildup, energy (creation and conservation), and infrastructure. The last helps ease unemployment during the hardest years of ’81-’82 so the midterms are not too brutal to the Dems. By the end of 1983 things are turning around properly and by the election they are starting to boom again, as a grateful Middle America re-elects Carey over New-Righteous but soft spoken Paul Laxalt and his Establishment running mate (a truce in the ongoing New Right takeover of the GOP.) Overseas Carey polices the Persian Gulf with an international task force (and briefly blockades tiny Grenada over a Cuban-built airstrip; Secretary of Defense Jackson’s heart attack was tragic but cut down on that sort of thing.) He also pours aid to the mujahedin, insists on greater autonomy in Eastern Europe especially Poland which is already making waves, and comes down hard in favor of anti-apartheid sanctions. At home, he takes a more treatment-based approach to drugs, with federal seed money for experimental programs, but also creates harsh mandatory sentences for violent crime. Vice President Askew follows through with his pet project, comprehensive ethics reform in Congress and the civil service. With his second-term boom Carey backs his old friend Ted Kennedy’s plans for health care and by 1986 the National Comprehensive Health Plan is law, a complex unity of public and private health insurance that absorbs Medicare and Medicaid. He appoints two Supreme Court justices, including the surprise of Constance Baker Motley, a black woman of outstanding credentials, as Chief Justice after Warren Burger. Carey leans on Britain hard over multi-party talks in Northern Ireland for years but does back London’s defense of the Falklands. Vigorous support of Israel founders on Israeli adventurism in Lebanon. Through most of Latin America the Catholic Carey becomes a hero of democratization, easing out juntas wherever he can and helping the Vatican negotiate peace in El Salvador and Peru by the end of his term, but when Sandanista forces move into parts of Honduras he mounts a major American intervention, leaving a multi-party settlement in Managua but costing him with the Democratic left. A mid-decade thaw with Moscow leads to a treaty that cuts both sides’ tactical NBC weapons by three-quarters. Carey’s legacy project is an Urban Communities Renaissance Act to try and revive the core of the great older cities; with the economy ticking along he seems mostly to have left things better than he found them.

Sen. Gary Hart (D-CO)/Gov. Jim Guy Tucker (D-AR) 1989-97

1988 def. Gov. Barry Goldwater Jr. (R-CA)/Sen. Jeremiah Denton (R-AL) Sen. Lowell Weicker (I-CT)/Fmr. Gov. Richard “Dick” Lamm (I-CO)

1992 def. Sen. George H.W. Bush (R-TX)/Gov. Terry Branstad (R-IA)

Despite his decades in public life, Gary Hart was a hard man to get to know. Somehow eight years in the White House does surprisingly little to change that. What does remain constant however is Hart’s sheer drive and devotion to thinking things through. He sells himself as a new era in Democratic politics against a primary field that includes the aging but powerful Vice President Askew, firebrand Detroit mayor Coleman Young, a surprisingly tepid John Glenn, and other strivers. He wins half the vote and racks up the Electoral College against a rock-ribbed New Right purity ticket on the other side, which ends up bleeding votes to a third-party force that really represents the last gasp of the liberal-to-moderate Republicans. In office, he has to face a nasty market correction and ensuing recession that runs into 1990, and also deal with the Republican Senate the midterms produce for two years. Along the way he grumpily cooperates with an aging Tip O’Neill to bolster the unions (Hart’s least favorite constituency) in return for support on other aims. With a process of “strategic investment,” infrastructure programs in high tech and industrial modernization, and major incentives for the venture capital and financial-instruments markets in return for “pay to play” fees, out of recession Hart’s administration sets the ground for the Long Boom, the Nineties’ run of continued growth of a duration unprecedented in decades. As Hart tacks on policy the GOP tries to attack his character but mostly just highlight his standoffish side (Hart was furiously busy on Senate committees in the mid-Eighties, as though auditioning to himself for the White House, so career-long rumors of infidelities remain just rumors.) After an almost decorous reelection campaign compared to ’88 (thanks in part to a brief renaissance of the Republican Establishment after two New Right failures) Hart’s second term gives him the chance to branch out. He is a thorough environmentalist, revitalizing and expanding regulations, forming new National Parks, and kickstarting renewable energy and weatherization programs. He backs some first tentative steps towards LGBT rights – personal liberties are a rock on which he’ll stand. He pursues a revitalization of the nation’s rail system, and infrastructure investments in the emerging Global Web that fascinates him. He is in large measure a foreign policy president in these times, too. He steers the US through the folding of the Warsaw Pact, Chinese liberalization, opening relations with Cuba, orchestrates and leads an international intervention in dual Iraqi genocides that ends up partitioning the country (a new Kurdistan built from the north and bits of chaotic Iran becomes a US ally in the region), and wins a share of the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for his key role in the managed dissolution of what had been Yugoslavia. And all the way he keeps himself to himself, always beavering at policy, using the bully pulpit to lecture more about a clean environment and the high-tech future than about needs and goods. His legacy projects are intertwined: two major new funding lines from the federal budget for land-grant and community colleges across the nation to develop and sustain broad-based technical education, and his dream of modulating the Organization for American States (building on Carey’s good-neighbor record) into a vast bi-continental free trade zone, a move inked with all his eight years of leverage in late 1996. It comes just as he leaves the long Democratic summer to his successor, who he head-hunted as the stellar young governor of Arkansas (ironically the successor to one of Hart’s primary challengers in ’88, who flamed out in a sex scandal) who’s now trained, as Hart puts it on the campaign trail, to be “the future of the future.”

Vice Pres. Jim Guy Tucker (D-AR)/Sen. William “Bill” Bradley (D-NJ) 1997-2001

1996 def. Gov. Carroll A. Campbell (R-SC)/Gov. George Voinovich (R-OH)

Kennedy-handsome, articulate, adventurous, and with a lust for the job he’s apprenticed for eight years, in 1996 Jim Guy Tucker rides his own political skills and the Long Boom past a strong campaign from another charismatic Southerner, Carroll Campbell (both men also pick running mates known as rocks of integrity within their respective parties.) Looking back, he’d have been better off losing. Tucker, a “New Democrat” darling, pushes a comprehensive plan for modernizing elementary education and another major free trade agreement, this time with liberalizing China. But the trade agreement – good at first for business in his native South, among other things – leads to union protests and depressed turnout that brings in a Republican Congress in 1998, already angry that their best shot at the presidency since 1980 had fallen short and determined to short-circuit Tucker’s agenda. Tucker ends up having to help lead a NATO war to save fragile Bosnia from Serbian invasion, which is successful but leads to a long, unpopular, messy cleanup after. Republicans, never able to nail President Hart with investigations, focus like a laser on Tucker and hit paydirt in his youth. A series of real-estate deals made while he was governor of Arkansas prove to have been legally and ethically improper, and the GOP raises a furore that the charming, dynamic president is just another corrupt pol. As Bosnia winds down Tucker finds himself under investigation by the new Republican Congress; they want him impeached on corruption charges, but vagueries in the legal language of the deals lead only to his censure, and more talk he may have improperly accepted gifts as Vice President. At first Tucker is able to mobilize Democratic partisan support, but as it becomes more clear he did play fast and loose the party’s left and unions, still angered over the China deal, are less enthusiastic in their support and privately push for Tucker to step aside for the Lincolnesque Bill Bradley in 2000. Tucker does no such thing and throws himself into the campaign. But the Long Boom ends as well starting with the deflation of the Global Web 1.0 assets bubble, and economic trouble slowly returns to the suburbs that tipped the scales for Tucker in ’96, just in time for the election cycle. Never a quitter Tucker goes down fighting against an agile Republican opponent and clear heir both to Carroll Campbell’s political nous and ideological place in the GOP (Campbell had planned to run again himself, prior to his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.) The long Democratic summer is truly over.

Gov. John E. “Jeb” Bush (R-FL)/Sen. Helen Chenoweth (R-ID) 2001-09

2000 def. Pres. Jim Guy Tucker (D-AR)/Vice Pres. William “Bill” Bradley (D-NJ)

2004 def. Fmr. Gov. John Kitzhaber (D-OR)/Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT)

Short of Carroll Campbell himself, the resurgent Republican Party could not ask for a better President in their moment of triumph than two-time Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush is to the political right of his father but able to sell a corporatist and socially conservative agenda as thoughtful and all-American. He has a meticulous plan to undo twenty years of Democratic policies and drive a stake through the unions and social-justice lobbies. He’s able to throw the really hard right a bone now and then (like his choice of running mate) but also skilled enough to steer their goals with regard to religion in public life, erosion of federal authority, and ideas about the place of women and LGBT Americans to work by increments rather than rashly. For all this and his boyish smile too “Jeb” was the man of the hour. Faced with a mild but nagging recession his first two years, Bush turns loose the energy, financial-services, and real estate sectors in a fury of regulation-slashing. He cuts taxes across the board, encourages tax credits for people who borrow against their house equity in a rising market, champions charter schools, and discreetly guts collective bargaining and the National Labor Relations Board. Bush coordinates closely with Sun Belt governors to bring in foreign investment, and cosies up to the Saudis to put pressure for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement in return for keeping oil prices soft as the US economy recovers, raising them only once it’s advantageous to the Gulf Coast. Then foreign policy intervenes: the collapse of Pakistan brings a global crisis, desperate scrambling to prevent nuclear war with India, a rash of deadly terrorist attacks in the West and the US, loose nukes (one of which explodes early at sea on a container ship bound for Mumbai) and massive American-led intervention. Hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and marines are in a multi-sided war in Pakistan, also raiding into Afghanistan to root out radicals’ hideouts, and occupying the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The rump central state of Iraq is taken over by related radicals, who are beaten down by Kurdish and Shia forces and American air power, but flee into Syria helping to trigger civil war there. At the same time Bush looks like a leader with an economy rising again and GIs hunting terrorists; Democrats vent their spleen when he runs for reelection (actually settling on a candidate angry enough for the left but neoliberal enough for the Democratic right), but Americans who want economic and physical security back Bush’s careful efforts to contain Pakistan’s nightmare scenario of tribal radicals with battlefield nukes. Other than a months-long market correction in 2007 after several Pacific Rim currencies melt down, Bush’s second term is dominated on one hand by foreign policy, as he works to stabilize the three states of old Iraq (with some success), remains stuck in Pakistan and the Khyber, and tries to outmaneuver resurgent Russian influence in a broken Syria and contain Israeli adventurism. At the same time he is able to pass a raft of “culture of life” legislation restricting abortion access, retake the Supreme Court with the last appointment of his term, and clear the field of regulations on the speculative financial markets. His last two legislative achievements, an untypical infrastructure investment in states upgrading their public schools and a state-managed voucher system replacing federal block grants for NCHP coverage for those at poverty level, manage to pass. More importantly, Bush has made good political use of the wars that have come his way, to ride herd on the various factions in the GOP and maintain a reasonable level of cohesion in the Republican majority. That success, which seems to mark him as the party’s most effective president since Eisenhower (though to very different ends) does not outlast him. His designated heir, Senate Majority Whip Dan Quayle, falters in the primaries and along with other candidates with establishment ties or long CVs, are swept aside by an aggressive, well-oiled, grassroots campaign driven by one of the most loyal and relentlessly dedicated constituencies in the party. That campaign’s champion, the handsome governor of Oklahoma, a former sports star whose starry-eyed radicalism gives even some conservative Christians paus, takes the nomination on a wave of good feeling about the GOP’s new era of success. Against him the Democrats, still effectively in a state of civil war, nominate a bland, chiseled, neoliberal champion who intones about the “decent middle” and incrementalism and not acting rashly; depressed turnout from one party’s base and fired-up excitement from the other’s determine the outcome and the GOP keeps its grip on power.

Gov. Steven “Steve” Largent (R-OK)/Sen. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) 2009-13

2008 def. Gov. Evan Bayh (D-IN)/House Minority Leader Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-CO)

Largent’s victory is, after decades organizing, fighting, and striving, the triumphal victory of America’s Religious Right! It’s … also the triumphal victory of America’s Religious Right. Where to begin: the “parental rights” bills so authoritarian other fundamentalists saw them as bad press? The comprehensive legislation to bust federal employees’ unions seen through by a friendly Supreme Court? The bills to gut the Voting Rights Act? The unleashing of unrestricted campaign financing? The Supreme Court decisions on abortion and evidence in rape convictions that sounded like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale? The aggressive and potentially illegal nexus of intelligence, campaign contributions, and mutual support given to hard-line religious parties in Israel to encourage the building of a Third Temple? The open mic that caught repression of both liberal Israeli and Palestinian resistance to West Bank annexation as “going against the Lord’s plans for our future”? The scare over using battlefield nuclear weapons as part of a “surge” to suppress both the war in Pakistan and radical Islamists gaining the upper hand in Syria? The shady telecommunications deals and ethics violations that came out of a fractious West Wing that leaked like a sieve (suspicious of Catholics, Largent had an icy marriage of political convenience with his Vice President, who many thought encouraged the press back-channels)? The revolt in his own party when, after pressing ahead post-midterms with a bare majority thanks to the economic boom, Largent submitted his plan to voucherize Social Security, or the fact he used so much political capital to get a ten year phase-in model of his plan passed? The fact that, after the financial house of cards built in the derivatives and real estate sectors collapsed taking much of the merchant banking and insurance industries with it, Largent pressed ahead with a balanced-budget amendment to “return money to the market” by slashing benefits in a collapsing economy? The fact he vetoed (it was overridden) the bipartisan financial package to rescue traditional banking institutions from their own stupidity? As the campaign season heats up, Largent actually shows the political skill to stop what amounts to a coup by his own vice president, backed by Republican elected officials who fear Largent is becoming a disastrous liability to their hard-won control of all three branches of government; Largent keeps Diaz-Balart on partly to scotch rumors of the events, partly as a form of punishment, citing Biblical penance as his logic. Largent charges into the election calling for measures to “free the market to recover,” promising infrastructure investment in the telecommunications industry (in which he owns substantial assets, as a restive House Ethics Committee points out), a “Culture of Life” amendment, and another run at Constitutionally balanced budgets. On the trail he never loses the smiling energy that propelled him past all obstacles four years earlier. And in retrospect, faced with the oncoming freight train of the 2012 vote, he seems in his memoirs and in person never to have known what hit him.


Sen. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL)/Gov. Robert “Bobby” Shriver III (D-CA) 2013-21

2012 def. Pres. Steven “Steve” Largent (R-OK)/Vice Pres. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL)

2016 def. Gov. David Dewhurst (R-TX)/Sen. Richard Mourdock (R-IN)

An ordained minister and lawyer, son of one of America’s most famous social-action crusaders, a congressman since his twenties (who cut his teeth working for Coleman Young’s 1988 campaign), freshman Senator Jesse Jackson Jr. storms into the race with his father’s iron will and his own vision of a United States unified from the bottom up, made whole with common citizenship and common worth, what he calls on the stump “The American Rainbow.” He powers past two leading governors – Ohio’s formidable Kathleen Sebelius, and Mississippi’s charming reformer John Grisham – in the primaries, builds a Global Web campaign machine that swamps even the networks of Christian Right portals and fundraising engines, and encourages a challenge to the Republican Congress in every seat in the country. (Largent’s attacks on Jackson’s “radical connections” are lost in the scream of the economic collapse and raising questions about Jackson’s bipolar disorder, successfully treated for years, come across as petty, while the ordained Jackson can cite a liberal chapter and verse for every one of Largent’s reactionary ones.) He allies with another favored son, Sargent Shriver’s eldest Bobby who has worked his way to the top of California politics; the ultra-liberal Catholic Shriver has street cred with two key parts of Jackson’s “rainbow,” the LGBT community and, crucially, Latino Americans. And Jackson, coming from his daddy’s economic-and-social-justice background, is a man with whom the fading trade unions can very much do business. As a result of all this Jackson rides an electoral wave for the Democrats not seen on this scale since 1984, straight into the White House. Reviving Truman’s concept of the “Fair Deal” Jackson moves ahead on several fronts with a cooperative Congress (with many new members who owe their seats to his wave of support.) Jackson first scotches Social Security privatization at a stroke. Then he launces a massive relief plan for Americans who have suffered foreclosure and underwater mortgages, carved against Senate filibusters from Republicans out of legal penalties exacted from “shadow banking” and real estate speculation. There are howls of protest about assets seizure from the right and it takes Jackson’s vigorous personal campaigning to prevent losses in the midterms. But he presses ahead. Along with this major transfer of wealth, Jackson returns to the Carey-era solution of jobs programs, particularly in alternative energy as he also grapples with ways to disengage from the Middle East. And he haggles, fights for, and inks the 2015 Americas Fair Trade Act, honoring his debt to the unions and backing liberation theologists south of the border who want this structural framework to encourage unionization and redistribution of profits in the transcontinental free trade zone. Overseas Jackson has more issues: the Four Power Talks (bringing in India and China) on Pakistan finally produce a workable settlement near the end of his first term, but (through the airspace of a liberalizing Iran) American raids into Afghanistan at terrorist targets carry on. What used to be Syria and Lebanon remain an intractable mess especially as the revanchist Zyuganov regime in Russia tries to flex its muscles there and in the Baltics, leading to renewed Cold War conditions in Europe during Jackson’s second term, just with the border further east (GIs find they prefer Poland to Pakistan.) Jackson is a thunderous voice against ethnic nationalism, but with tens of millions displaced in the Middle East it is a rising force in European and indeed American politics. Jackson’s reclaims the Supreme Court 5-4 with a 2016 appointment and powers by corporate-backed “polite Republican” David Dewhurst (whose choice of running mate from the hard right proves disastrous; Senator Mourdock’s grotesquely offensive comments about women caught on mic are costly.) His last significant achievement, as the economy seems to find its footing again on deficit spending to try and support a manufacturing revival, is a “mostly single-payer” rationalization of the NHCP, reached in cooperation between corporations and unions; the backlash from the right, however, brings in a Republican Senate majority in 2018 that spends the next two years blocking initiatives and investigating questions about possible improper payments to the First Lady from Jackson’s term in the Senate. As Jackson prepares to retire, worn down by troubles abroad and hard work at home, a succession fight brews between his Vice President and the neoliberals’ champion, New York governor Helen Carey, daughter of the late president. At the same time the Democrats ready for another civil war, the wounded Religious Right has quietly made peace with more secular ethnic nationalists and prepared a primary campaign to try and swamp the corporatist “Bush” wing of the GOP and bring in an agenda as sweeping as Jackson’s, only through the looking glass….



ENDNOTES

· It is hard, now, to remember and difficult historically to overestimate just how crucial the period 1981-83 was to the union movement in the United States. After a wave of democratization and revival in the early Seventies, by Reagan’s elections the movement was stumbling forward with steel collapsing and bad upper-level leadership (Lane Kirkland? Really?) but the deep Rust Belt recession and Reagan’s union busting were a mortal blow. Without that, we can I think displace a number of developments in Democratic Party politics five to ten years down the line, and posit deeper wars within the party after, simply by having some viable union presence survive against the monies of the New Democratic bagmen. Who are their champions? That’s harder to say because all the kewl campaign operatives will work for the “Atari Democrats,” but the old guard will ITTL soldier on longer.

· Steve Largent is some magnificent crazysauce. Exactly what the GOP doesn’t need after Jeb!s successes but an ideal candidate for one of the most loyal constituencies from their wilderness years. Especially because he comes across twinkly-eyed, sincere, and man-pretty. Talk about Dead Zone “the missiles are flying! Hallelujiah!” indeed. Either I, or maybe someone else, should rewrite this a bit and have Campbell win in ’96 with Largent as his Quayle-like running mate, then when Campbell’s Alzheimer’s sets in during his second term Largent moves forward and when he runs he picks out of the standard grab-bag of scary old authoritarian Veeps (your Cheneys, your Rumsfelds, even an ATL Al Haig who was remarkably cogent and well-preserved even into his eighties), and have a dynamic between Largent’s ultra-righteous Handmaid’s Tale cuckoo and the Vice President Palpatine who just wants to be the American Pinochet he’s always dreamed of being.

· ITTL, simply put, Jesse Junior gets his shit together. Whether it’s because ITTL his dad never ran for president (instead pressuring Carey and backing Coleman Young), or more influence from Jesse Jr’s wife, or just something that settles a little differently inside him because butterflies, he follows through on the ordination and bar exam he blew off IOTL and gets his bipolar treated young. I do still firmly believe B-Rock The Islamic Shock Superallah Hussein Obama is out there being fabulous, whether as an activist professor who becomes mayor of Chicago and maybe shoots for more in his sixties, or the ATL default of the Supreme Court (like zeppelins, or Baseball Commissioner George W. Bush). But here we get two sons of Sixties aristocracy who never quite made it, making it. An interesting cultural twist to the reaction against a POTUS pressing the crazy buttons eight years earlier than IOTL, and from the ultra-religious rather than white-nationalist end of things.

 

[big-click]

I'm down the road from you in the Willamette Valley. I do not have enough likes TAKE ALL MY MONEY TAKE IT I HAVE MORE AT HOME. Really

ETA: Not that I'm happy about the outcome (I'm a Bill Bradbury/Kate Brown kinda guy) but you built some lovely chaos. And honestly your POD was a narrow escape IRL. We could easily have ended up there.

Thanks! I wouldn't be very pleased ITTL either, of course; it was just an exercise in stirring things up a little. The Kroger section is based on my interactions with him as president of Reed College and from what lawyers I know have said about his tenure as Attorney General - the guy's got a sharp legal mind but is no leader.