Bulldoggus
Banned
I have tried to give Wiggy the benefit of the doubt, as nobody likes a narc, but he just seems like such a ghastly little creature. He totally poisoned Wilson's once-savvy political instincts.
Underused Political PODs
- Thread starter Hubert Humphrey Fan 1968
- Start date
Or a different '88, one where -- here's your underused POD -- someone who's not Howard Baker (perhaps an old Nixon hand who didn't in fact work for Reagan too, up to that point) becomes White House Chief of Staff to clean up the Iran-Contra mess. A combined Californian-New Right faction takes ascendancy vis-à-vis the doddering Saint Ronnie, decides that since they don't trust Poppy as far as they can throw him Vice President George Bush (plus his fixer Carlucci and various other people in Bush's awl-bidness-plus-career-CIA nexus) get thrown under the bus. Jack Kemp remains a walking gaffe machine on the national trail, Haig has no constituency, Reagan's BFF Paul Laxalt is getting long in the tooth, and Dole steps up as the safe pair of hands with a VP for the right like Carroll Campbell or even, yep, Dan Quayle and beats either a Hart whose private life blows up disastrously late in the game or a second-stringer like Dukakis. One big butterfly of that could be the DLC; Dole's more Nixonian and instrumentalist approach to self-defeating acts like "Read My Lips" gives him the wiggle room to deal with the economy in more practical terms, and his past skills as a hatchet man serve him well against the, well, Bubba-ness of Bubba (or Chuck Robb for that matter), or the flakiness of Middle Period Moonbeam, or the nebbishness of Tsongas. Someone who's either more of an "Atari" (all about entrepreneurialism but significantly more liberal on foreign policy and law-and-order than the DLCers, also on financial regulations) or one of the last classic paleoliberals gets the chance in '96 when all the GOP's capital is spent, and potentially Gingrich and one or two others like him go down too as they get eyes too big for their... other parts and try to run for the big chair against Dole's VP only to find skeletons that stay in the Congressional closet tend to come out to play in Iowa and New Hampshire, not to mention South Carolina.
Bulldoggus
Banned
Your guilty conscience may move you to vote Democratic, but deep down you long for a cold-hearted Republican to lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king.
Bulldoggus
Banned
You have to assume that in the event of McGovern '72, there would be an appetite in some of the more depraved quarters of our politics for Haig '74.
That's one of the places where the whole "American Pinochet" angle comes in because I suspect he'd be far less feckless about it than, say, Westmoreland....
Bulldoggus
Banned
Oh, yes, he's the only one who'd even consider going ahead with it (although, on the other hand, Pinochet was appointed because he was known for being scrupulously apolitical). He likely wouldn't actually do such a thing, but if he had the desire, RFK Stadium, Soldier Field, the Rose Bowl, Fenway, and a dozen others would be at capacity crowd within an hour.
If by "apolitical" you mean "so deep in the irredentist, sedevacantist, anti-mestizo racist, crypto-fascist Southern Cone right that you'd get the bends half the way down to him and he has no discernable perspective to see there are other political points of view," that'd be Augusto. He puts the right-wing tankie in Tanquetazo. Haig didn't have to look far for examples: in the official history of the Joint Chiefs, IIRC, there is mention of a meeting for which Tom Moorer (CJCS) untypically kept no notes (doesn't mean he didn't take them, means he thought they were better (1) hidden and (2) destroyed at a little remove) and there seem to be no White House tapes, where Abe Abrams walked out after a Nixon rant saying "I don't even want to remember what was said in there." This about the vintage of the Saturday Night Massacre. There are multiple fascinating PODs (*cough* TL plug *cough*) around Watergate that don't get used nearly often enough, from executive funny business either side of the Massacre to where Vernon Walters lands on the whole thing, to appointing not-Elliot Richardson as AG, to torching the damn tapes, to L. Patrick Gray soiling himself under the stress and confessing all to his pet New York Times contact (which he mutely sort of did in July '72 by not denying a series of very interesting questions in a DC restaurant, how about if that gets "two legitimate sources" for publication and gets out....) That's one of those time/subject frames where we (even me *TLplug*) are so caught up with the notable PODs that we tend to ignore how remarkably many second-order PODs could have very big ripples.
Bulldoggus
Banned
The operative term here is "known for being." He was quiet about his political insanity, unlike many of his contemporaries, which led to the Allende government giving him actual power instead of sticking him on top of an Ande somewhere.
So much this. Could have been the Mephistopheles of the Democratic Party far more effectively (and almost by accident) than the likes of George Wallace. And he had his up side on some things which makes it even more complex.
Paul Tsongas edition:
--Wins the nomination and gets attacked in the general about covering up his lymphoma treatment in 1987 and Bush wins
or
--Tsongas wins the general election and another diagnosis of lymphoma occurs as it did in OTL, December 1992, and he becomes increasingly ill as his term goes on.
--Wins the nomination and gets attacked in the general about covering up his lymphoma treatment in 1987 and Bush wins
or
--Tsongas wins the general election and another diagnosis of lymphoma occurs as it did in OTL, December 1992, and he becomes increasingly ill as his term goes on.
Hillary Clinton was famously a Republican before 1968, but afterwards she interned the radical left Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein law firm, and she and Bill supported George McGovern. What if they stayed on the left of the Democratic Party rather than becoming champions of the third way?
It's always the quiet ones. Or at least, often the quiet ones. And Allende's failures of judgment were biblical. For the expensively educated son of an aristocratic family he had the political nous of a teenage street punk and all the pugnacity. The Socialists would have been much better off with someone like Letelier in charge: all the ideology but much more horse sense.
But back to the thread: how about some random factor delays or diverts FDR's speech at the 1924 Convention?
Probably not, although it's within reason for Hillary to stick with Rocky, spend more time in the Northeast and D.C., and win Bill over (without too much effort) to the Rockefeller Republicanism that has characterized their ideological views since the mid-Seventies while the goalposts of the Great Realignment moved around them and made them the establishment right of the Democrats. Both of them have to get elected somewhere that's not New Haven or the District, and if Bubba wants to be a big man back home (or from back home, in Congress) there's just no way he can tack New Left and survive. They were McGovernites because it was cool and because in that shoestring campaign staff there was more room to rise than with the patronage systems under HHH and Muskie. Ambition drove it, as ambition has ever driven the two of them, and that involved the calculation that there was no electoral path that relied on white people outside college towns that full throated New Left views made open to them.
Likewise I wouldn't call Treuhaft et al. "radical left" (well *maybe* Burnstein on the right day) any more than I'd call Bob Dole a card carrying Goldwaterite. They were pretty firmly on the left hand side of postwar liberalism, it's a reflection of how far the Overton window has shifted. (Example: Medicare for all was and remains a liberal-Republican idea, first introduced as a bill by Jack Javits in 1970, not some kind of idealistic socialism. It still relies on supplemental insurance unlike the Canadian, French, and some Scandinavian models, and does nothing to nationalize health care provision like Britain's NHS does, Harley Steeet or no. It's like our entire national political conversation is out to prove Gramsci right and one of the most open proponents of just that was Leroy N. Gingrich.) Likewise McGovern was when it came to it really the last Progressive standing, rather than either a standard New Deal Democrat or a starry eyed hippie lover. (It was convenient for Dick Nixon and other Democraic candidates who relied on union votes to paint him that way though. And he was just terrible at shedding the image, and dumb enough to give up on his redistributive economic message which was actually quite popular with blue collar voters.) What McGovern shared with the New Left was a belief that politics at its best was a kind of propaganda of the deed for idealism (not much ideology in either left- or right-wing materialist terms, but instead philosophical ideals.) Beyond that which things they saw as ideal sometimes diverged. The Methodist minister's son did want amnesty for much the same reasons Carter did, as a recognition of principle and a form of Christian pardon, but old George had no real taste for either acid or abortion. It was the idealism that made the link with the longhairs, especially since the New Left shared many of the same demographics as Progressivism (regionally and by economic and educational status.) They'd just tacked harder to the left but the old instincts, and tin ear about economic issues (that McGovern didn't share anymore than his frequent dinner guest and partner in ideological crime John Kenneth Galbraith did) remained.
tl;dr you can very well by several PODs move the Clintons gently but steadily to the right but their McGovern moment was about the resume opportunities, not the ideology. Keep 'em around folks like John Lindsay and John Doar however and they could also be involved in some kind of Liberal Independent dissent movement from New Right Republicanism for a while.
The planned 1997 House Republican coup doesn’t fail.
This is one I’ve never seen anybody do, and it’s quite a doozy: it was the summer of ‘97, and Newt Gingrich was starting to become an image problem. Political correctness was the hot new thing in America, and Gingrich had begun to destroy any goodwill the GOP had to the public after Bob Dole failed to take the White House the year prior. So, John Boehner, then Chair of the House Republican Conference and Bill Paxon, who was a major player among the party elites began plotting to oust him. Meeting in the offices of one Steve Largent with twenty other rebels with other Republican Leaders, they formulated a plan. Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who both wanted Gingrich gone, were to offer an ultimatum: resign, or be voted out.
However, poor planning and numerous communication failures cocked it up. DeLay supposedly told the group of rebels that it was Paxon, not Armey, who was supposed to take over Gingrich’s post, and when Armey found out, he rescinded his support. Someone leaked the plan to The Hill, and news soon spread. Armey, when questioned fellow members of the GOP in a House session, denied any knowledge of any coup. Lindsey Graham, a rebel and small-time House member from South Carolina, rushed to a microphone to challenge him, but was restrained by another Representative. Armey, not wanting to be seen as complicit, quickly changed his story: he was “surprised” to learn that DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon were all complicit in a putsch against the Speaker. DeLay was demoted, Paxon groveled before Gingrich and resigned, and Boehner laid low for years. Gingrich was permanently detached from the Republican establishment, and became more radical as the years went on.
Now, if the plan went through as intended and Gingrich was forced out, you could have an entire spectrum of possible scenarios play out. Armey could take the Speakers job and things run smoothly, or you could have a prolonged battle between Paxon and Armey for power. Tom DeLay most definitely isn’t replaced by Gingrich with his own deputy, Dennis Hastert, which delays Hastert’s aspirations for higher Leadership (and keeps his crimes under wrap for at least a few more years). This could even have as such far-reaching impacts as the 2000 Primaries, with Gingrich now having time to plot his own machinations on the Presidency (or Vice Presidency), or by making Bush moderate his “compassionate conservatism” dramatically to keep party insiders in his camp.
This is one I’ve never seen anybody do, and it’s quite a doozy: it was the summer of ‘97, and Newt Gingrich was starting to become an image problem. Political correctness was the hot new thing in America, and Gingrich had begun to destroy any goodwill the GOP had to the public after Bob Dole failed to take the White House the year prior. So, John Boehner, then Chair of the House Republican Conference and Bill Paxon, who was a major player among the party elites began plotting to oust him. Meeting in the offices of one Steve Largent with twenty other rebels with other Republican Leaders, they formulated a plan. Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who both wanted Gingrich gone, were to offer an ultimatum: resign, or be voted out.
However, poor planning and numerous communication failures cocked it up. DeLay supposedly told the group of rebels that it was Paxon, not Armey, who was supposed to take over Gingrich’s post, and when Armey found out, he rescinded his support. Someone leaked the plan to The Hill, and news soon spread. Armey, when questioned fellow members of the GOP in a House session, denied any knowledge of any coup. Lindsey Graham, a rebel and small-time House member from South Carolina, rushed to a microphone to challenge him, but was restrained by another Representative. Armey, not wanting to be seen as complicit, quickly changed his story: he was “surprised” to learn that DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon were all complicit in a putsch against the Speaker. DeLay was demoted, Paxon groveled before Gingrich and resigned, and Boehner laid low for years. Gingrich was permanently detached from the Republican establishment, and became more radical as the years went on.
Now, if the plan went through as intended and Gingrich was forced out, you could have an entire spectrum of possible scenarios play out. Armey could take the Speakers job and things run smoothly, or you could have a prolonged battle between Paxon and Armey for power. Tom DeLay most definitely isn’t replaced by Gingrich with his own deputy, Dennis Hastert, which delays Hastert’s aspirations for higher Leadership (and keeps his crimes under wrap for at least a few more years). This could even have as such far-reaching impacts as the 2000 Primaries, with Gingrich now having time to plot his own machinations on the Presidency (or Vice Presidency), or by making Bush moderate his “compassionate conservatism” dramatically to keep party insiders in his camp.
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South korean political PoDs: Kim Young sam and Kim Dae-Jung unifying their votes in 1987 presidential election?
He was friends with Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He introduced Nixon to Bebe Rebozo. He tried to position himself as vice president in 1960. He could have been an alternative to Johnson had Kennedy lived in 1964. He could have become Senate Majority Leader. Don't follow the money; follow George Smathers. He's like the 1960s glue between it all.