Romney was seen by many republicans as being to far left, and he had that Mormon thing going for him.
It seems strange to me how little respect many on the right have for McCain now.
The far right has always hated McCain… Same for Romney.
It’s just that their partisanship and lack of any kind of requirement for consistency allowed them to just turn that hatred off when those guys became candidates for the GOP.
If you go and look at the attitude of the right wing media towards both of these guys when they were running in primaries, you’ll see there was a huge amount of vitriol directed at them from folks like Limbaugh and Hannity. Once they actually won the nomination, those guys flipped their tunes… Then flipped them back after they lost.
One is not. He was a scumbag.
He was not. You can disagree with all of his policy decisions, but I do not believe that Reagan ever acted out of anything other than a love of America and a desire to do good.
This stands in stark contrast to Trump, who literally does not give one shit about anyone or anything other than himself.
If you ever happen to come across a Republican on television these days, chances are that you will hear the name Ronald Reagan. Recent Republican debates are the perfect example of the love fest that the current Republican party has for Reagan as each candidate name drops the former president at every turn. If you only listened to conservatives you would think that Jesus Christ was the only person above Reagan on the totem pole of conservative love. They talk about his love of low taxes, less government and conservative family values. The problem is that when you step out of the conservative dream and come back to reality, you find that not only was Ronald Reagan a bad president, but he was one of the worst presidents we’ve seen in modern times. Reagan’s policies have destroyed the United States for three decades, and for the eight years he was in office, here are eight reasons why Ronald Reagan was the worst president of our lifetime.
- Reagan cut taxes for the Rich, increased taxes on the Middle Class -
Ronald Reagan is loved by conservatives and was loved by big business throughout his presidency and there’s a reason for it. When Reagan came into office in January of 1981, the top tax rate was 70%, but when he left office in 1989 the top tax rate was down to only 28%. As Reagan gave the breaks to all his rich friends, there was a lack of revenue coming into the federal government. In order to bring money back into the government, Reagan was forced to raise taxes eleven times throughout his time in office. One example was when he signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. Reagan raised taxes seven of the eight years he was in office and the tax increases were felt hardest by the lower and middle class.
- Tripling the National Debt -
As Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy, the government was left with less money to spend. When Reagan came into office the national debt was $900 billion, by the time he left the national debt had tripled to $2.8 trillion.
- Iran/Contra -
In 1986, a group of Americans were being held hostage by a terrorist group with ties to Iran. In an attempt to free the hostages, Ronald Reagan secretly sold arms and money to Iran. Much of the money that was received from the trade went to fund the Nicaragua Contra rebels who were in a war with the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. When the scandal broke in the Untied States it became the biggest story in the country, Reagan tried to down play what happened, but never fully recovered.
- Reagan funded Terrorists -
The attacks on 9/11 by al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden brought new attention to international terrorism. All of a sudden, Americans coast to coast wore their American flag pins, ate their freedom fries and couldn’t wait to go to war with anyone who looked like a Muslim. What Americans didn’t realize was that the same group that attacked the United States on 9/11 was funded by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Prepping for a possible war with the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan spent billions of dollars funding the Islamist mujahidin Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan. With billions of American dollars, weapons and training coming their way, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden took everything they were given and gave it back to the United States over a decade later in the worst possible way imaginable.
- Unemployment issues -
When Ronald Reagan came into office 1981, unemployment was at 7.5%. After Reagan cut taxes for the wealthy, he began raising taxes on the middle and lower class. Corporations started to ship more jobs out of the United States while hiring cheap foreign labor in order to make a bigger profit. While corporations made billions, Americans across the country lost their jobs. As 1982 came to a close, unemployment was nearly 11%. Unemployment began to drop as the years went on, but the jobs that were created were low paying and barely helped people make ends meet. The middle and lower class had their wages nearly frozen as the top earners saw dramatic increases in salary.
- Ignoring AIDS -
By the time the 1980s came around, AIDS had become one of the most frightening things to happen to the country in recent memory. No one understood what AIDS and HIV really was and when people don’t understand something, they become scared of it. The fear of the unknown was sweeping across the country and Americans needed a leader to speak out about this horrible virus, that leader never came. Instead of grabbing the bull by the horns and taking charge, Reagan kept quiet. Reagan couldn’t say the words AIDS or HIV until seven years into his presidency, a leader not so much.
- Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million Undocumented Immigrants -
In today’s GOP, the idea of any immigrant staying in the United States whether they are legal or illegal isn’t something that conservatives embrace. What might shock them is that in 1982 Ronald Reagan gave nearly 3 million undocumented workers amnesty. The biggest reason for undocumented workers coming to the United States is because corporations hire them at a cheaper rate than they would an American citizen. All the laws that would have cracked down on companies who hire undocumented workers were, of course, removed from the bill.
- His attack on Unions and the Middle Class - The Republican war on unions and the middle class has been heating up in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, but it has been going on for a long time. Unions are formed to give a united voice to the workers in an attempt to create fairness between the corporations and their employees. On August 3rd, 1981, PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) went on strike in an effort to get better pay and safer working conditions. Two days later, taking the side of business, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 workers for not returning to work.
http://kimcampion.com/human-rights-history/why-reagan-was-a-scumbag/
Scumbag.
Wait man, Charlie Wilson errr Tom Hanks was awesome! Didn’t you see the movie?
Rich, no offense, but those pieces are total trash, and hardly worth even arguing against. You were alive then. You know that a bunch of that stuff is absurd on it’s face. It goes from demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of the economic conditions in the late 70s/early 80s, to actually attacking Reagan for giving amnesty to immigrants.
I have no idea who Kim Campion is, but they clearly aren’t any kind of expert on any of this.
Again though, we don’t need to agree on the merit of his ideas. The distinction between him and someone like Trump, is that Reagan was TRYING to do good. Trump has absolutely no desire to do good.
I think charisma is very important governing. If you look at Gordon or most any other list of great President, they almost all have high charisma.
As far as winning the election, I’d argue that charisma is damn near the only thing that matters.
I’m hard-pressed to think of any time in the last 100+ years that lower charisma candidate beat the higher one.
Maybe Nixon vs Humphrey in 1968, but Nixon was smart and he refused to debate Humphrey cause he knew he was more charismatic. But, Humphrey was no 18+ charisma guy, just your above average politician that could get people to like him. Nixon could also be charming at times.
The great electoral wipeouts have been a very high charisma president vs a low charisma challenger, Reagan vs Mondale, Clinton vs Dole.
I do think that Trump has shown most of the American people the limits of just high charisma and nothing else. But if the 2020 election has a chance of being close why risk it?
I feel like Adlai versus Ike was probably a wash…
This is actually my biggest beef with Oprah - she doesn’t appear to understand evidence based anything. Her ability to use belief instead of facts is dangerous, as we’ve seen far too much in the last year. Now, she’d be doing it for good instead of evil, so there’s that, but it’d still be bad for the country (see anti-vac) and continue the horrible precedents that the trumpist believers have enabled.
I was alive them. I lived through the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Are you saying that this
is untrue? Are any of the points in that first piece untrue?
I think she could absolutely win.
But I also think she would be a shitty president.
I’ll buy that. Many of us think Reagan did horrible things, but his intention was to reach his vision of a better America (even if it was actually worse for many).
Mind, he wasn’t a saint. Not everything was altruistic (eg - how AIDS was handled was pure PR/politicking due in part to some “down with the gayz!” voices in his party), but I agree in general he felt he was normally doing “the right thing.”
The right thing for who though? Believing you are doing the right thing has never been an adequate defense.
I think Trump has a good chance of beating Oprah. I mean, if a lot of people didn’t like Hillary and Obama, they’re going to like Oprah even less. They might once again choose what they think the “lesser evil” is, e.g. Trump.
I don’t want Trump to win again, but . . . freaking Oprah?
That section undermines its criticism within itself. It straight up says that in the early 80s no one really understood aid. It wasn’t like everyone else was all about doing something and Reagan somehow stopped it. It wasn’t his focus. And while you can criticize him for that, doing so tends to involve some significant degree of Monday morning quarterbacking. But even then, his lack of focus on that issue wasn’t done out of malice.
In terms of what parts are wrong, a lot of it takes facts out of context to make ridiculous inferences. Like the idea that Regan somehow caused the unemployment in the early 80s? Really? Cause that’s absurd. On some level I suspect that the author of that piece is simply unaware of the greater economic picture at that point, where we had basically every possible economic metric in the red, even ones that we had previously thought were inversely correlated. Their suggestions there are maybe at best, and grossly misleading at worst.
The idea that Reagan giving amnesty to immigrants was somehow a “scumbag” move is, at least to me, nonsensical. Especially given his stated motivations, where he basically thought that America was awesome and that everyone should have a chance to be an American if they wanted.
Again, I realize that you and many here hate Reagan. I am not going to change that. But I think it’s important to separate the man from his policies. He did the things he did, because he believes they were in the best interests of the country. I think virtually every president thus far had acted in this way. Except for Trump.
And that is what separates Trump from them, in that Trump actually acts out of malice, or at least disinterest. Trump’s only motivation is his own, personal, benefit.
I don’t think so, it seems to me Adlai was the 50s version of Al Gore. I tried listening one of his speeches, couldn’t make it past the 10-minute mark.
Ike was no great oratory, but he had the same presence that most generals posses.
Stevenson was known for being an egghead in his time. He might have made a good candidate in another time but after WW2 with the Soviet threat people felt better having Eisenhower running the show. And as a WW2 hero Eisenhower was a natural to become president.