2008: Historical Oddities & Trends
By: Roderick T. Beaman
Sunday, April 01, 2007
****Rogue comment....If the internet remains free until the 2008 election, will Ron Paul have a great fighting chance to be our next President "against all odds"?????......Stay tuned.*****
As the 2008 race heats up, there are a number of historical oddities that will be coming into play, more than any other in recent memory and possibly more than any other in history.
Never before has a president from one party served two full terms to be succeeded by a president from another party who served two full terms. Barring unforeseen events, the 2008 election will be unique in American history for that reason.
Not only that, but neither William J. Clinton nor George W. Bush’s reelection victory was resounding, in contrast to many others. Reelection victories are often landslides. Clinton did not resoundingly defeat his lackluster but honorable challenger, Robert Dole in 1996. Electoral College results were 379-159 while Bush’s 2004 victory was even more suspect, 286-251, against an opponent who was not only lackluster but had some chinks in his armor of honor. Both of George W. Bush’s victories could have been defeats with a switch of just one state. Not one of the past four elections has been a landslide.
Despite, Republicans’ assertions that more people voted for Bush in 2004 than any other presidential candidate in history, clearly, neither he, Clinton, Dole nor John Kerry is a vote getter like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan. Either that, or people didn’t discern much of a difference between them.
Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama said, repeatedly, that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties. He tried to make one and was scoring well in the 1972 Democratic Presidential primaries before he was stopped by an attempted assassination, in Maryland, that left him paralyzed. There isn’t a penny’s worth today.
Another interesting fact, is that a third party candidate for president has not tallied a single electoral vote since Wallace did it 1968. The nineteenth century was peppered with them, some elections having four and five candidates receiving electoral votes. It happened just three other times in the twentieth, 1912, 1924 and 1948. With almost no discernible difference between the two parties, the situation seems ripe for a third party insurgency this time around but there doesn’t seem to be one. We’re overdue.
George Bush will be recorded as one of the very worst spendthrifts in history, outdoing Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson in every possible way. He has been the very antithesis of Republicanism. And, although the Democrats exploited frustration with the Iraq War during the midterm elections, they clearly offer no foreign policy change other than the window dressing of placing a time limit on our presence there. There are many reasons why they can’t.
Among them is the huge Jewish influence in the Party. In the 2006 elections, 80% of Jewish Americans Jews voted Democratic. The Children of Israel worldwide have an understandable emotional stake in the survival of Israel and they equate any softness in Mideast interventionism with a threat against Israel.
The neo-con movement began around 1968. In the 1960s, Jewish students, such as Jerry Rubin, Levi Taub and Abbie Hoffman, were prominent in campus campaigns against the Viet-Nam War and international engagement against communism. But if we were to withdraw from an engagement against communism, the next logical step would be a disengagement from the Mideast and support of Israel.
Many Jews recognized this, and thus was born the neo-con movement, with a small but very potent group of influential American Jews becoming Republicans. Indeed, Robert Kennedy must have recognized this danger for he steadfastly supported Israel while campaigning on a platform of withdrawal from Southeast Asia. That led to his assassination by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian In his diary, Sirhan wrote ‘RFK must die.’
Jewish influence in the Democratic Party remains strong, especially in the New York-Washington-Hollywood-media axis. It would take an extraordinary act of courage, a quality foreign to politicians, for any Democrat to risk alienating that segment of the Party’s base. The resolution of that potential conflict works against the Democrats.
But, no matter foreign policy, elections are decided on the economy and here, the Republicans are sitting on a land mine. The Federal Reserve Board, the Fed, has been propping up the economy by pumping money into it for years. That lays the groundwork for inflation. But inflation has been kept under control by the real estate market which has absorbed all of it that it can. As the fed pumped the money in, people have used their homes as ATMs which has been the driving force behind the reasonably stable economy that we’ve had for the past eight or ten years since the dot com collapse.
The problem is that it’s dried up now and the long postponed ‘readjustment’ can’t be put off any longer. In economics, the longer the economic discomfort is put off, the worse it is when it arrives. Worse is coming.
The potential dimensions of the real estate bubble finally bursting, should not be underestimated. Two trillion dollars worth of mortgages will need to be renegotiated and the equity just will not be there. In some areas, mortgage foreclosures are four times what they were 18 months ago. Many of the imaginative mortgages are ultimately underwritten by Uncle Sap which means taxpayers will be picking up the tab, and it could be for years.
Some economics pundits have been saying that 2006-2008 will be see the worst destruction of wealth in history. Never mind that Clinton and the Democrats are partially responsible, which they may be. As the party in the White House, the Republicans will take the blame and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
All candidates will need money. Lots of it. Democrats will have a bit of a struggle placating their Jewish base for its financial support while staking out a platform that differs from the Republicans. The Republicans will be in the position of either backing this unpopular war or distancing themselves from their own party head who was the architect of the fiasco.
The wild card is the internet. This will likely be the first election with it as a battlefield. Howard Dean was the first to exploit its potential for fund raising before he crashed and self-immolated. The Hillary U-Tube video has been the buzz for over a week now and is not letting up. Newspapers seem to be on their deathbeds. The major networks are hemorrhaging viewers.
Could the internet hold the key for a third candidate? The power of the internet has forced some mainstream media to take notice of Ron Paul when they were previously committed to ignoring him. Will it be a factor in some way not anticipated? Who knows but whoever hopes to draw any support better have some advisors who know how to use this new media. And that could be the most historic aspect of this election.
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