Which Losing Presidential Nominee Would've Made the Best President?

  • William Jennings Bryan

    Votes: 5 4.5%
  • Alton Parker

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Charles Evans Hughes

    Votes: 15 13.6%
  • James M. Cox

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • John W. Davis

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Al Smith

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Alf Landon

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Wendell Willkie

    Votes: 2 1.8%
  • Thomas E. Dewey

    Votes: 8 7.3%
  • Adlai Stevenson

    Votes: 4 3.6%
  • Barry Goldwater

    Votes: 3 2.7%
  • Hubert H. Humphrey

    Votes: 20 18.2%
  • George McGovern

    Votes: 18 16.4%
  • Walter Mondale

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Michael Dukakis

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Bob Dole

    Votes: 2 1.8%
  • Al Gore

    Votes: 21 19.1%
  • John Kerry

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • John McCain

    Votes: 4 3.6%
  • Mitt Romney

    Votes: 5 4.5%

  • Total voters
    110
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How much involvement did the US have in the Vietnam conflict after Jan. 27 1973? Serious question, not rhetorical.

USA bombed the hell out of Cambodia as the Khmer Rogue closed in on Phom Penh. I was wrong in my assertion but I feel like McGovern was more of an embodiment of someone who actually opposed the Vietnam War while I feel as if Nixon did it simply for political salvage as he had no problem sabotaging the previous peace talks for political gain.
Plus, McGovern wasn't Nixon. That's good enough for me. But too bad his own party killed him.

The irony is Nixon called McGovern the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion" and we got two of those by the end of the decade anyway.

Ironically it wasn't Nixon who started it.. it was McGovern's own VP candidate Thomas Eagleton who himself also crashed the campaign with that statement plus his hospitalization scandal and subsequent McGovern gaffes.

From Wikipedia on Thomas Eagleton.

On April 25, 1972, George McGovern won the Massachusetts Democratic primary, and conservative journalist Robert Novak phoned Democratic politicians around the country. On April 27, 1972, Novak reported in a column his conversation with an unnamed Democratic senator about McGovern.

Novak quoted the senator as saying "The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot. Once middle America — Catholic middle America, in particular — finds this out, he's dead." Because of the column McGovern became known as the candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid."

On July 15, 2007, several months after Eagleton's death, Novak said on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Eagleton. Novak was accused in 1972 of manufacturing the quote, but stated that to rebut the criticism, he took Eagleton to lunch after the campaign and asked whether he could identify him as the source; the senator refused. "Oh, he had to run for re-election", said Novak, "the McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that." Political analyst Bob Shrum says that Eagleton would never have been selected as McGovern's running mate if it had been known at the time that Eagleton was the source of the quote. "Boy, do I wish he would have let you publish his name. Then he never would have been picked as vice president", said Shrum. "Because the two things, the two things that happened to George McGovern — two of the things that happened to him — were the label you put on him, number one, and number two, the Eagleton disaster. We had a messy convention, but he could have, I think in the end, carried eight or 10 states, remained politically viable. And Eagleton was one of the great train wrecks of all time."
 
USA bombed the hell out of Cambodia as the Khmer Rogue closed in on Phom Penh. I was wrong in my assertion but I feel like McGovern was more of an embodiment of someone who actually opposed the Vietnam War while I feel as if Nixon did it simply for political salvage as he had no problem sabotaging the previous peace talks for political gain.
Plus, McGovern wasn't Nixon. That's good enough for me. But too bad his own party killed him.



Ironically it wasn't Nixon who started it.. it was McGovern's own VP candidate Thomas Eagleton who himself also crashed the campaign with that statement plus his hospitalization scandal and subsequent McGovern gaffes.

From Wikipedia on Thomas Eagleton.

Interesting.

That's the reason for the Gipper's Eleventh Commandment. The other party will pick up what you said and run with it.
 
In a way, even Mitt Romney can't be discussed without reference to current politics. Because, let's face it, some people who now wish he would have won in 2012 do so because his victory would presumably have prevented Trump from winning in 2016...

Even as a Trump presidency-aborting measure, it's still pretty... giggle-inducing that people would be willing to vote for him on a poll like this. Out of all those options, Mitt Romney would have made the best president! Pretty tenuous anyway given any of the names above would have changed history by definition if they'd won.
 
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Even as a Trump presidency-aborting measure, it's still pretty... giggle-inducing that people would be willing to vote for him on a poll like this. Out of all those options, Mitt Romney would have made the best president! Pretty tenuous anyway given any of the names above would have changed history by definition if they'd won.

As the OP, I'll remind you (and all other users) to not bring current politics into this thread.
 
As the OP, I'll remind you (and all other users) to not bring current politics into this thread.

Romney's qualities can't really be discussed without intruding on current politics - unlike all the other options he's an active politician and a sitting Senator, still casting votes and all the rest. Tbh this is more of a Chat thread than an after 1900 thread.
 
Romney's qualities can't really be discussed without intruding on current politics - unlike all the other options he's an active politician and a sitting Senator, still casting votes and all the rest. Tbh this is more of a Chat thread than an after 1900 thread.

Yes they can if you focus on 2012 and the issues relevant to that election and not current politics.

Anyway, I've reached out to @CalBear about this so we'll see what he says.
 

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Yes they can if you focus on 2012 and the issues relevant to that election and not current politics.

Anyway, I've reached out to @CalBear about this so we'll see what he says.
If it was actually possible to get everyone to focus ending discussion in 2012 this would work. Of course if we could get folks to do that, we wouldn't have to constantly intervene in threads, including threads that are entirely apolitical, after someone brought in current politics as a reflex action. Four years ago you could possibly have made this work, possibly.

Today? Not a chance in Hell.
 
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