McGovern to endorse Clark!

[dazzleman]

I don't think too many people care who McGovern endorses.  A lot of younger voters probably don't even know who he is.

I would have to say that it will hurt him somewhat.  I don't think McGovern really has a following, but there are still some people who will react negatively to a McGovern endorsement of a candidate.

It's funny how many in the loony left have coalesced around Clark, despite his having revealed little of his beliefs, and probably more importantly, despite the fact that most of the little he has said has tured out to be false.

They hate the president, and they've finally caught on that they have a problem with the national security issue, so they're blindly supporting Clark.  People like Madonna, Michael Moore, and now McGovern.  Their support only tells me that he's a bad character.

[dazzleman]

I think he was the first president to fight for universal health care.  Not sure though.

I think you're right.  Nixon put through a proposal at the beginning of his second term for some type of universal health care.  I don't remember the details, but Congress never passed it.

Nixon also sponsored a welfare reform plan in 1971 called FAP (Family Assistance Program) that would have provided an income floor to all Americans through significantly increased welfare payments.  Conservatives opposed it for obvious reasons, but many liberals didn't like it because it required the program's intended beneficiaries to perform some type of work in exchange for their assistance, and I guess the liberals thought that was demeaning (although I guess it's not demeaning for everybody I know to work).

Nixon was also very liberal on foreign policy in some ways.  He completed what amounted to a unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam without credible security guaranties for South Vietnam, initiated detente with the Soviet Union, and opened a relationship with Red China, as it was called at the time.  Liberals had talked about doing all these things, but it was Nixon who actually did it.  Some people call Nixon the last liberal president.

Interestingly enough, Nixon was hated by liberals most of all, just as Clinton was hated by conservatives despite the fact that he approved the first repeal of a federal entitlement (welfare reform) ever.

[dazzleman]

I remember when Clinton was fighting for Universial health care in 1993/4, Nixon came to the white house and said something to the effect of "we tried to do this 20 years ago."

I don't understand my conservatives hate Clinton, his policies hardly were far left and he helped them win huge gain in 1994.

I guess conservatives hated Clinton for the same reason that liberals hated Nixon.  Both men became so deeply associated with a certain way of thinking that nothing they actually did really mattered.  Nixon retained his conservative following despite his liberal moves, just as Clinton retained his liberal following.

Both men were judged by who the WERE rather than anything they did.  To conservatives, Clinton was a shifty, draft-dodging 1960s hippy whose first move in office was to try to lift the ban on gays in the military.  To liberals, Nixon was the person who helped convict Alger Hiss (although why they would so resent the conviction of a man who spied for a mortal enemy tells me a lot about liberals and where their loyalties lie).  Both men were indelibly alienated from large portions of the population, and nothing they could possibly have done would ever have changed that.

[dazzleman]

Yes, they won twice, but the nature of their victories was different than, say, an Eisenhower victory, or even a Reagan victory.  Neither of them ever elicted the sort of person vituperation that Clinton and Nixon did.

And attempts were made, one successful, to use scandals to force both men from office.

They were both deeply polarizing figures, but presidents who do big things usually are polarizing.  That holds true about Nixon  -- he revolutionized US foreign policy for a generation.  Clinton really didn't do any big things, other than the conservative repeal of the welfare entitlement.  So it's pretty unusual that a president who didn't really take aggressive policy positions would be so hated.

[dazzleman]

Yes, you're right, I forgot about that.  That was started by Bush and continued by Clinton, and as I recall, there was more Republican than Democratic support for NAFTA.

I think it will be a long time before people can assess the effects of the Clinton presidency without looking throught the prism of their personal political views.  

I do think that that the issues that people voted on, either for or against Clinton, will not be the issues that determine his place in history.