The next three U.S. Presidents

[Mr. Morden]

My updated tongue-in-cheek predictions of the next 12 presidents (and for most, their vice presidents as well), including only people who are alive and well known today (completely unrealistic, I know, but the list gets more ridiculous as you go down it), and I think there's no one here who would be older than 73 (Bob Dole's age when he was the GOP nominee in '96) when they begin their *first* term:

09-13 Rudy Giuliani / Connie Mack
13-21 Barack Obama / Evan Bayh
21-29 Jim Nussle / David Vitter
29-33 David Vitter / John E. Sununu
33-37 Mark Pryor / Harold Ford Jr.
37-41 Bobby Jindal / Matt Blunt
41-45 Harold Ford Jr. / Stephanie Herseth
45-53 George P. Bush / Adam Putnam
53-61 Chelsea Clinton / Al Gore III   (yes, Chelsea becomes the first female president nearly a half century after her mother failed to do it)
61-69 Bridget McCain (not born in the U.S., but the Constitution's been changed by now) / Jack Roberts (son of the chief justice)
<at this point, I stop predicting VP's, only presidents>
69-77 Jack Roberts
77-85 Suri Cruise

There you go.  Suri Cruise will be elected president in 2076, and will serve two 4-year terms.

[Mr. Morden]

To give another example:

At the beginning of Jimmy Carter's term:
Governor of California
ex-director of the CIA
Attorney General of Arkansas

So plainly, this is a stupid thread. But considering the author of it...

But Bush wasn't just a former CIA director.  He had also been a member of Congress and had held several other jobs in the Nixon and Ford administrations, *and* had been on Ford's shortlist for his running mate in 1976.  *And* he would have been a relatively young (by presidential standards) 53 years old in 1977, so it would have been perfectly logical to include him in a list of possible future presidents.  Also, Reagan wasn't just a former governor of California.  He had mounted a pretty serious primary challenge to Ford in 1976, so he'd be a logical choice to include on a list of possible future presidents as well.

So I don't think it's the least bit crazy to toss out guesses about the next two presidents.  It's not too early to guess who might the '08 VP candidates be or who might run for president in 2012 (2012 candidates will already start putting organizations together in 2009, which is only two years away!), so two presidents out really isn't a stretch.  Obviously, it's a shot in the dark, but this is all in good fun.  *Three* presidents out is really pushing things, but in some cases you can even do that.  For example, one could have predicted Nixon as a possible future president back in 1959 or Reagan as a possible future president in 1973 or Bush as a possible future president in 1975.

[Mr. Morden]

Let's go back to 1997 again and ask people who would be the frontrunners in 2008. How many would say:

-An uninteresting backbench Senator from Tennessee just elected to his first full term.

Back in 1997, there was already a lot of speculation that Thompson might run in 2000 (though of course no one was thinking about 2008 yet).  In fact, if Lamar Alexander, hadn't run, there's a good chance Thompson would have.

As I mentioned way back in this thread, there's nothing the least bit weird about speculating about two presidents down the line.  Whoever's selected to run as VP next year (just ~10 months from now) for either party has a decent shot at being the 45th president.  The 45th president might also be whoever runs for the opposition party in 2012, and we can already guess who some of the 2012 candidates might be (as someone in 2003 might have guessed that folks like Clinton, Edwards, and McCain would be running in 2008).

Predicting three presidents out is of course much harder.  But even there, you can *sometimes* guess who some of the contenders might be.  As I mentioned earlier, GHW Bush had served in many different jobs in the Nixon/Ford administrations, and was considered as a possibility for Ford's running mate in 1976, and he was still relatively young back then, so someone might have guessed that he'd be a possibility for a future president way back then.  And Reagan would certainly have been considered as a possible future president back when he was governor of CA during the Nixon administration.

Obviously, there are many more future contenders who we can't predict, and it's unlikely that any of us will get it exactly right, but this thread is all in good fun, so I don't see what the big deal is.

[Mr. Morden]

We'll just keep alternating Clintons and Bushes until we run out of both.

http://bushclintonforever.googlepages.com/

[Mr. Morden]

A good chance that Gabu will turn out to be wrong on this one:

I don't know about the next one, but I will say that probably the one after him, and definitely the one after that, will be guys who are not currently in the national spotlight, and may well be guys we've never even heard of yet.

…seeing as how Hillary Clinton is the frontrunner to be the one "after him" ("him" being Barack Obama from the perspective of 2007).

It's also fun to go back to these predictions:

It looks as if Hillary Clinton would almost certainly become our next president.  With the front-loaded primaries (which favor candidates with immense financial support, i.e. Hillary), and her juggernaught of establishment support as well as her appeal to women hungry to see someone with a uterus taking charge in the Oval Office, combined with the fact that Iraq is inextricably tied to the Republican Party, I am almost resigned to seeing Hillary Clinton take the oath of office on January 20th, 2009 as our 44th president.