Too bad we never got to see Clinton vs. Reagan. That would have been a presidential celebrity death match to watch.

Carter: If you keep on stuffing yourself with ice cream , you’ll get so fat you won’t be able to put on your pants.
Reagan: I heard somewhere that some study proved that ice cream has negative calories, so eat as much as you want and you’ll get thin.

The most reliable predictor of who will win the presidential election in recent history has been that a state governor will beat a senator. Only two senators were elected president in the entire 20th century (Harding and Kennedy).

Some people think this is due to the fact that most senate seats are safe, so senators are out of the habit of doing hard campaigning.

Take the infamous case of Howard Dean’s rant. To me, that made him more of a regular guy; he was letting off some steam. The rap was that instead it represented a lack of dignity and judgment.

Popularity contests are notoriously fickle.

I think you’ve got good instincts. Bill Clinton was hugely popular and John Edwards could be also.

The Buchanan reference reminds me of another question I can’t figure out. What is that fine line that separates the Reagans and the Bushes who can win Presidential votes from the Buchanans and Phil Gramms and Newt Gingrichs that can’t.

Its the flip side of how most Americans hold populist and progressive opinions (national healthcare, progressive tax rates, enviromentalism, etc.) yet the Ralph Naders of the world who rationally present these opinions are non-starters presidentially.

Why?

The wild card would be to go with a populist.

Of the possible 2008 candidates John Edwards strikes me as the one who can come closest to filling that bill. And at least he’s openly apologized for his initial support of the war, which some of the others still can’t bring themselves to do.

The task is to select the past president that best represents the appropriate strategy for the current situation in the USA that can also win an election.

In other words, what past presendents have an aura of succesfully managing a withdrawl. I’m not a great hagiophile of US presidents but it seems to me that the mythology of pre-WWII presidents are too tied up with expansionism.

So I came up with Carter, Eisenhower and Nixon as possible choices. Let’s call them the moral, the institutional and the political options.

Carter seems to represent the feeling (the smart thing to do is to leave off expansionism (Panama canal, Iranian hostages) and promote peace (Egpyt-Israel relations) etc. things will be alright.

Unfortunately for the moral strategy, a Carter can’t beat a Reagan. That’s the whole political point, the sensible moral strategy is a one-term strategy.

So that leaves Eisenhower and Nixon setting aside that they are Republicans for a while, let’s pretend you have the democratic equivalent.

Th problem with Eisenhower, is that we need a successful general. And since Iraq II has tainted Gulf War I, we don’t have any successful generals to use. Gen. Clark is a Carter, not an Eisenhower. Yes, Powell is a general, but everyone knows he’s not a REAL general. The real generals (Franks and Schwarzkopf) don’t seem to represent the policy.

So that leaves a Nixon or (Clinton is you prefer)they both represent the middle-class lawyer turned politician strain of President.

The trick here is that you need to have the “only Nixon can go to China” street cred. You need to have a Pro-Big Oil, anti-Islam (I could have said anti-terror but that wouldn’t have made the point as clear) reputation to win as a withdrawl candidate.

I see the problem for the Democrats is that they can’t decide which of the three to take a stand on is it the anti-war moral position (Dean?), is it the effective war general(Clark?) or the realist politician (Hillary Clinton?).

The wild card would be to go with a populist. An American Hugo Chavez might be able to pull it off.

I’m not asking what policy would be effective, I’m asking what given the effective policy, what mythology might sell. Any thoughts?

I’m not really kidding. Shorn of the sarcastic language, that’s pretty much the way a number of actual Bush-loving people I know “think”.

Of course here he is conflating two things – torture being used to gain useful information (which it generally isn’t very good at doing), and torture being used as a technique to keep a population in line (which it is effective at in the short term, but tends to rapidly multiply your opposition).

There are many ways to command respect, some are quick and easy, others are difficult and time-consuming. The trouble is that once you start using the quick ones, they become less effective, and they quickly sabotage any effort to use the hard ones. Once you start relying on force to get people to do what you want, you have to keep on using it, all the time losing real control

Ask any primary school teacher who has taken over for a strongly authoritarian predecessor.

“All of this crap I’m hearing about how torture doesn’t work, or being brutal doesn’t work…

Well, if it doesn’t work, then why are so many of you apparently convinced that it worked for Saddam??

…

Don’t say that brutality doesn’t work, because it clearly does for many totalitarian regimes currently in power. And they wouldn’t resort to torture and summary executions if it didn’t “work”. There wouldn’t be “death squads” performing “red on red” counter-terror campaigns if it “didn’t work”.”

This was intended as a defence of Adminstration strategy. Torture is a good thing, which we know because totalitarian regimes use it so successfully.

I don’t know if he’s working according to some sort of inverse variant of Godwin’s Law whereby you automatically win the argument if you compare you own side to Hitler first, or what. Weird & creepy.

Just one word.

I have heard it reported so, but since Americans have seen neither, the appropriate analogy is to a quigoflatch, the plumage of which curiously resembles Hiroshima precisely 61 years ago.