Well, damn. It seems that a Sindhudesh Liberation War would look more like a brutal civil war than a war of independence, what with such a divergence between rural and urban areas.
"Hipster" PMs and Presidents Thread
- Thread starter Comisario
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Well, damn. It seems that a Sindhudesh Liberation War would look more like a brutal civil war than a war of independence, what with such a divergence between rural and urban areas.
Really not a hipster pick for Canada, but Brian Mulroney was nominated by the United States to be Secretary-General of the United Nations while serving as Prime Minister of Canada in 1991 by George H.W Bush, who thought that he would make a great Secretary-General and reportedly favored him very much instead of Boutros-Boutros Ghali. Meech Lake among other internal issues in Canada caused him to reject the decision and drop out of the race, although it would be interesting to see him in such a position and potential impacts from that on Canadian politics and on global affairs.
Nice catch. That would make for a very interesting Poppy's Second Term TL with a pliant Mulroney at the UN. Dropping perhaps the largest crisis of Canadian federalism in his successor's lap would be rough on them but, eh, details
Nice catch. That would make for a very interesting Poppy's Second Term TL with a pliant Mulroney at the UN. Dropping perhaps the largest crisis of Canadian federalism in his successor's lap would be rough on them but, eh, details
It'd be ironic to see him as UNSG with an independent Quebec entering into the GA.
Boy, that’d be a fun timeline.It'd be ironic to see him as UNSG with an independent Quebec entering into the GA.
My apologies for taking so long coming back around to this -- backlog from work and then that defining crisis of modern life, wifi outage for a while yesterday. It's remarkable how that ranks right up there with whether the food in the fridge is going to hold up when the power goes out.
I don't know that "losing the people back home" is a full assessment of Blanchard's situation in 1990. It was really down to three factors, none of which were a popular mandate about Blanchard no longer being viable. The first was turnout: the longer a successful politician is in office especially here in the States, or their machine is (e.g. someone who's "keeping their seat warm" because of term limits or the like), the more there's typically a fall-off in marginal voters for them, by which I don't mean late deciders but people who like them yet reason that "well he/she keeps getting elected, there are enough people who'll vote for them that I can skip this time." Which is not "rational" in the economic sense but like a lot of voter behavior basically self-justifying and based on limited information. That sluggish turnout alone was more than enough to make the difference. The second was a hard cycle, the timing was bad in terms of the Poppy Bush Recession which started to hit Michigan hard in the late stages of the 1990 campaign, and the old law about blaming sitting executives for hard times, that vestigial instinct from monarchy, kicked in. Butterfly either of those things and you're already home.
The third was that it was, overall, a tough cycle for the Democrats despite their being in opposition to a sitting Republican president. In the Senate they gained a whopping one seat and that was just Minnesota regressing to its Democratic mean, and on both sides of the aisle a lot of incumbents either had narrow escapes or, like Blanchard in the gubernatorial statistics, were very narrowly beaten. Bill Bradley, hugely popular in New Jersey, barely survived a challenge based on many of the same dynamics that affected Blanchard, anemic turnout and anti-incumbent feeling in a recession (add to that the fact Michigan was a deeply purple state at the time and the last Democratic governor had left office twenty years before Blanchard was inaugurated; 1986 was a demonstration he'd done something truly remarkable, not that he would always command overwhelming majorities like that.) Also both of them in particular, Bradley and Blanchard, faced high-quality opposition. John Engler wasn't elected to three terms of his own on a lark; he was the absolute best, most experienced, and most relentless candidate the Michigan GOP could put up against Blanchard, much like the John Kerry-Bill Weld battle in Massachusetts in '96. Blanchard hadn't "lost the people" any more than the difference between, say, Roosevelt's results in '36 and '44 indicate that he had. It was simple erosion over time, incumbency, touches of voter fatigue (not with him, necessarily, but with voting), and a badly timed economic downturn. And even then a more effective pitch to late deciders would've been more than enough. There are butterflies flapping all over the place in that race.
If it goes the other way -- if the right butterflies flap and Blanchard's returned to office however narrowly -- I don't think it hurts him. Indeed the spin is going to be "he beat the best Michigan Republicans could throw at him in a tough year -- he's a survivor." For two other examples, that Kerry-Weld senate race where Kerry won by the flimsiest skin of his teeth, or Mike Dukakis' career in which he was straight-up primaried after his first term because he'd incurred the wrath of the state party establishment, then clawed his way back to two more terms after that. In both cases, each man suffered what could be pitched as a career-crippling setback. But in practice that set them up to prove they were survivors; that, to use a sports metaphor, they could win in the clutch. Blanchard's national profile, given the substantive things he did as governor as well, could actually be enhanced by these contrasting wins: the big one when he was fresh off being "the man who saved Michigan" rather like Hugh Carey in New York, and the one where times were tougher and he outlasted the mighty John Engler. Americans like cyclical narratives that come back around to redemption, it's one reason the country's founders revived the old term "revolution," which of course at the time meant returning things to an earlier pristine state. It is as the great Johnny Mercer put it, the "come rain or come shine" dynamic. Shows consistency whatever the weather.
As for Campbell, however you cast him I certainly wouldn't make it as a Bubba-analogue. (Now, he may very well have been cast in that fashion in TLs back in the day, my working knowledge other than a handful of classics before about 2013-14 is poor so I grant you that's a bad analogy if it was made.) Cast as an antidote to Clinton in the South, maybe, from a Southern Republican's point of view, but certainly not an equivalent. Campbell was as clean-cut as Clinton was loosey-goosey, as focused as Clinton was perambulating and scattershot, and "presented" (almost in the medical sense...) to the bulk of moderate-to-conservative Southern suburbanites and rednecks alike (although there's certainly overlap in the "exurbs") as the old "polite Christian gentleman" type beloved of Southern politicking as the kryptonite to the impassioned (often below the beltline as well as above -- Clinton and John Edwards were proof only that there's nothing new under the sun), rabble-rousing, poor-boy-made-good type. (Jimmy Carter was a curious animal in that he squared the circle of the two types, drawing on the passion and the hardscrabble backstory but portraying himself as the ramrod-straight paragon of morals.)
Campbell (and let me make clear, I'd have crawled across broken glass to vote against the guy, I come from a stubborn strain of Appalachian leftists going way back) was also to a much greater and more meticulous degree than Clinton a builder. Before his rise the GOP in South Carolina was Strom Thurmond's machine, ably run by Harry Dent for as long as he lasted (Strom of course was probably getting injections from the harvested pancreases of sinless children to keep at it until over 100), and beyond that the state was full of tory Democrats, who were ideologically more or less moderate Republicans of the old school except when Fritz Hollings was in the right mood (there were slender exceptions like Tom Turnipseed and Jim Clyburn, but they were very much individuated exceptions.) By the time Campbell was done the GOP had lasting majorities in both houses of the state lege, and the Congressional delegation, and a permanent advantage against even the Bluest Dogs for the governorship. He methodically cultivated candidates and donors and media managers and door-knockers and bagmen until South Carolina displaced Mississippi as a center of gravity for the Southern GOP. And he understood, long before Poppy Bush decided the Oval Office was worth employing the guy, how to make "best" use of Lee Atwater. Campbell's central difficulty wasn't whether he had spoken to one batch or another of fringe right-wingers, no matter what flavor of odiousness their politics involved (in any case that was the primary "open secret" category of the Nineties and Aughts, displacing the old-line journalists' attitude towards senatorial tomcatting; if you were part of the modern generation of Republican politicians all paid speeches in front of anyone short of the Illinois Nazis was a non-story unless someone created a reason why it would be one. That's part of what got that old preener Trent Lott in the end, not that he palled around with the most vicious sorts of Neoconfederates but that he'd made the wrong enemies in the party in his rise to power and they decided that his actions "counted," rather than being subject to standard IOKIYAR [It's OK If You're A Republican] rules.) It's that, while Campbell was a skilled Doctor Faustus -- miles smarter than Dubya, far cleaner-cut and more upright (and more easily airbrushed in the short attention span of the media) than vanity projects like Trent Lott or bantam roosters like Jeff Sessions -- his Mephistopheles up and died on him before he could make a play for center stage.
I'm not surprised Dole's people didn't like Campbell: the GOP often outdoes even the Democrats (who tbf are practically idiots-savant on this score) when it comes to infighting over factional bigotries and personal grudges. Hell the 115th Congress is practically performance art on that score. As such the politicos and staffers involved are great primary sources for what those conflicts are, but far from rational arbitrators of how things are likely to play out in practice. It's still more than a little amusing that bitter old Nixonian hatchet man Dole enjoyed this odd period in the Nineties where he benefited from the collective delusion of the pack media that he was some kind of stalwart of old-school Republican decorum (Republican decorum? In a party that had nothing but an endless series of civil wars within itself from Lincoln's rise until the New Right leveraged the Dixiecrats to claim ownership? I'm not sure there is such a thing although it was absolutely essential to several generations of establishment journalists that such an illusion be maintained. The Democrats, to both their credit and their blame, were much too flagrant in their disorder to get away with any dissembling.) Dole was hardly alone in looking down his nose at the Republican Dixiecrats; the '96 campaign in particular was a long exercise in what was left of any kind of Republican "establishment," in the traditional meaning of that term in American party systems, looking down its nose at all of the factions and factors that were actually the moving parts of the modern party. Hence that wonderful anecdote about Goldwater showing up to a Dole rally (that in itself was something, the OG New Righter and a paleocon with strong Nixonian tendencies making peace in the common experience of old age) where both party elders listened to a Gingrich-generation freshman congressman open up for them with fire and brimstone. After that Goldwater turned to Dole and supposedly said, "my God, Bob -- we're the liberals now." Truer words. And at the end of the day rather than taking the fight to Clinton throughout the South, Mississippi and Ohio River valley states, and more of the inter-mountain west, Dole pulled 40.72% of the vote at a time when Democratic numbers were in a state of collapse across most of those regions, the South in particular. (Attempts by the DLC to say the Clinton/Gore era "won back the South" or at least significant parts of it for the Democrats are literally like saying the grass is blue and the sky green. Their Southern vote totals did nothing but tumble from 1992 to the point in 2000 where Gore couldn't win his home state where even Walter Mondale had topped 40% of the vote and a better candidate than Dukakis easily could have won, and the great engine of the Gingrich Congress in '94 besides an odd massacre of Democrats in Washington state was almost entirely the secular collapse of Democratic candidates across the old Confederacy. And that's before we get to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Mike Huckabee in Clinton's home state.)
Dole himself won the nomination (1) because rather like the John McCain of '08, in the Late Soviet GOP it was His Turn Dammit; (2) because of his gymnastically heartrending speech at Nixon's funeral (talk about Late Soviet, getting the top job because you cried at the right time when the old General Secretary popped his clogs); and (3) because Pete Wilson showed the nous at presidential campaigning of a medium sized cabbage and no one like Campbell got in the game who could own a region, showcase Dole's structural weaknesses as a presidential candidate, and force the establishment to recognize that this particular year was their death rattle, not their chance to get back on top of all the recent developments. Change those last two factors and at the least you have something like a Wilson/Campbell ticket uniting the nativist-Bircher West Coast right with the Dixiecrats, and fully prepared to mobilize full metal Clinton Derangement Syndrome in order to get ahead. And right around the corner of the cycle lay the Southrons' other poster boy Dubya, with Karl Rove horns and all on his left shoulder, and a feudalized, feral pack of billionaire donors set to displace any properly functioning party apparatus. In that sense any unfortunate timing on Campbell's part was being ahead of it, not behind like some kind of Ross Barnett-like relic. Campbell was where the party was already going, the butterflies just lay in when and how it was going to get there.
I'm a touch dubious about this notion of 'how many people vote for you totes isn't a reflection of your deep popularity'. You're right that the early nineties recession hit hard and early in Michigan, (It had never really fully recovered from the auto slump of the late seventies, but unemployment spiked again at that time) but that's not some abstract factor that you can put in a side box. A 'domestic' record is what a governor runs on in a campaign, however much that isn't or is influenced by outside national factors. Bubba, the factor you're assuming Blanchard could cast aside, was re-elected in 1990 with close to 60% of the vote. You can say that Michigan was naturally in a worse state economically than Arkansas and the upper South - true, but only the optics of these things hold at the end of the day. I think you can take Blanchard over the line by avoiding his disastrous campaign that cycle, but I'm not seeing an obviously fist-tier presidential campaign in the making.
I'm seeing a large amount of extraneous Bob Dole character assassination and not a detailed exposition of why Campbell was presidential. I think you are right in identifying a part of Campbell as reflective of a new GOP sunbelt/southern managerialist takeover, but on softer ground in overly inflating the personal role in that (That's a regional historic shift, not something exclusive to South Carolina) and diminishing the baggage he had as someone whose career pre-dated that takeover, as a Deep South pol. This stuff mattered, a lot, to precisely the kind of donor/new establishment class that Campbell in the above managerialist form would be relying on. It's precisely why, coming off the natural two-term gubernatorial tour at which point the presidential run is the obvious coda, he quite pointedly didn't run in 1996. Didn't in fact come close to doing so. The backing was not there. It's not gong to be. The national establishment and donor class aren't going to back someone with so much specifically Deep South-only-ever-meant-to-be-for-home-consumption baggage if a decade down the line they decide to go national.
As for Campbell being reliant on Lee Atwater for national success, Lee Atwater was a one trick pony - albeit one, enabled by George Bush, who set down the marker for all future GOP national campaigns. Hug the right, inflate the opponent's negatives. It's obvious why this was the strategy for Bush senior. What this board doesn't seem to realise is that it's the exact strategy that the Bush campaign in 1992 followed. Pat Buchanan given air time for the 'culture war' speech. Bubba-as-the pot-smoking, draft-dodging-protesting-Vietnam-on-foreign-soil hippy. All is what Atwater would have done. All staples of the nineties. You don't need Atwater in physical form to inject some unspoken, never-quite-touched-on-what-it-was genius into the show, his strategies lived a healthy life beyond him. Now - Lee Atwater might have pulled back from doing what the Bush campaign did that cycle in trawling through Bubba's passport files in a bid to find proof that he'd considered renouncing his citizenship. Pure Nixonism from Bush and Baker.
The GOP was, and is, fully capable of Atwaterism without Atwater. As would Carroll Campbell. That's not the problem Campbell faced.
I'm seeing a large amount of extraneous Bob Dole character assassination and not a detailed exposition of why Campbell was presidential. I think you are right in identifying a part of Campbell as reflective of a new GOP sunbelt/southern managerialist takeover, but on softer ground in overly inflating the personal role in that (That's a regional historic shift, not something exclusive to South Carolina) and diminishing the baggage he had as someone whose career pre-dated that takeover, as a Deep South pol. This stuff mattered, a lot, to precisely the kind of donor/new establishment class that Campbell in the above managerialist form would be relying on. It's precisely why, coming off the natural two-term gubernatorial tour at which point the presidential run is the obvious coda, he quite pointedly didn't run in 1996. Didn't in fact come close to doing so. The backing was not there. It's not gong to be. The national establishment and donor class aren't going to back someone with so much specifically Deep South-only-ever-meant-to-be-for-home-consumption baggage if a decade down the line they decide to go national.
As for Campbell being reliant on Lee Atwater for national success, Lee Atwater was a one trick pony - albeit one, enabled by George Bush, who set down the marker for all future GOP national campaigns. Hug the right, inflate the opponent's negatives. It's obvious why this was the strategy for Bush senior. What this board doesn't seem to realise is that it's the exact strategy that the Bush campaign in 1992 followed. Pat Buchanan given air time for the 'culture war' speech. Bubba-as-the pot-smoking, draft-dodging-protesting-Vietnam-on-foreign-soil hippy. All is what Atwater would have done. All staples of the nineties. You don't need Atwater in physical form to inject some unspoken, never-quite-touched-on-what-it-was genius into the show, his strategies lived a healthy life beyond him. Now - Lee Atwater might have pulled back from doing what the Bush campaign did that cycle in trawling through Bubba's passport files in a bid to find proof that he'd considered renouncing his citizenship. Pure Nixonism from Bush and Baker.
The GOP was, and is, fully capable of Atwaterism without Atwater. As would Carroll Campbell. That's not the problem Campbell faced.
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Sidney Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier was a Fabian and a civil servant who twice served as Governor of Jamaica and as Secretary of State for India under MacDonald. He might be an alternate Labour leader, I suppose, although he never stood for Parliament. However, he was the uncle of Laurence Olivier, who seems a bit more fun as PM. Olivier was a Tory, but a change early enough in his life might make him Labour.
William E. Jenner, a senator of Indiana that was a strong supporter of McCarthyism and the isolationist Republicans lead by Senator Robert Taft. While not a particularly strong supporter of foreign intervention, he was still an pure-blooded anticommunist who sought to drive the reds out of Washington. When McCarthy was censured by the Senate during 1954, Jenner blamed the communist conspiracy that infiltrated the resolution. This 'communist shadow government' was something that the senator strongly believed in. When the infamous general, Doug McAurther was dismissed by president Truman, he spoke to the Senate, "I charge that this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie, which is directed by agents of the Soviet Government. Our only choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government". His anti-communist paranoia would start pointing fingers at international communities such as NATO and the United Nations which he accused of 'infiltrating the American education system' in 1952.
William Walker (1871-1919) was a trade unionist and joiner at Harland and Wolff dockyards (of Titanic fame...) and was a founding member of the Independent Labour Party and an advocate for a form of unionist socialism in Ulster. A member of Belfast Corporation (council) from 1904 onwards and the President of the Irish Trades Union Congress (which funnily enough my first cousin twice removed held the same position in the eighties... I think that level of removal is correct...) Walker would contest the seat of North Belfast several times in the early 1900s under the Belfast Labour label (or Labour Representation Committee) in the 1905 by-election in the seat. That time he would face the Irish Unionist candidate and Lord Mayor of Belfast Daniel Dixon (another alliterative name as well). Dixon was a rather upper class and snobbish individual and nearly managed to whittle away a strong 39% majority in favour of a slender 474 vote majority over Walker. The two would face each other at the 1906 general election and Walker would come within 291 votes of winning. It seemed inevitable that Walker would gain the seat at the next election, but Dixon would die in 1907 thus forcing another by-election. Walker seemed likely to defeat the new Unionist candidate George Smith Clark, yet his loose tongue would cost him the seat after he advocated gerrymandering districts throughout Ireland to cut down on representation for the "disloyal" Catholics - this led to his nearly 2,000 vote loss and James Connolly branding him as a bigot. Walker was an opponent of Home Rule and would be elected to the executive of the British Labour Party and would summarily contest the constituency of Leith Burghs in 1910 (January) where he came a distant third behind the Liberal and Liberal Unionist candidates, thus spelling the end of his political career. He would nonetheless famously debate Connolly in 1911 in favour of trying to influence and participate in the British labour movement - yet his taking up of a local government position forced his withdrawal from the speaking circuit. What makes Walker especially interesting was not only that he nearly became an MP but that he posed a significant and very real threat to the stodgy middle-to-upper class dominance of Ulster politics by what would become the UUP. The party had been threatened recently before by the Russellite Unionists (named after Tyrone based MP Sir Thomas Russell) who advocated unifying working class and agrarian Protestants and Catholics behind his campaign - he would eventually have three MPs elected under this label before being repelled at a by-election and being summarily consigned to history. The UU dominance was also harmed by the election of Loyalist preacher Thomas Sloan as the MP for South Belfast from 1902 to 1910 - he would incite anti-Catholic riots and would form his own Independent Orange Order - before his defeat in January 1910. These coupled with a victorious Walker/an empowered labour movement, could see the rise of more radical (not hardline Unionist) alternatives to the UUP during this period, potentially making the already remarkably strong NI Labour Party even stronger in the 1920s.
Even thou there are a metric ton of people with that name, I will always think of the filibusterer when I read it.
This one might be more of a "fun fact" than a real option, but if you're looking for a literal hipster candidate, the famous LSD manufacturer and Grateful Dead sound engineer Owsley Stanley was born Augustus Owsley Stanley III, scion of a Kentucky political dynasty. Augustus the first was a Democratic governor and Senator in the early 20th century and - aptly enough - one of the leading opponents of Prohibition, while his ancestor William Owsley was an early Whig governor of the state.
Unless he had an entirely different life story, it'd be nearly impossible to get him anywhere near political office, but maybe in some alternate reality Governor Stanley III's state-subsidized psychedelic labs are being credited with Appalachia's economic revival...
Unless he had an entirely different life story, it'd be nearly impossible to get him anywhere near political office, but maybe in some alternate reality Governor Stanley III's state-subsidized psychedelic labs are being credited with Appalachia's economic revival...
Well, if I may mention early American politial figures who weren't Founders, allow me to recommend George Logan. He was a Democratic-Republican senator from the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, who garnered praise from Jefferson himself. The man (seemingly) nearly stopped a war against France singlehanded, only to be thwarted by the conniving Adams Administration. He was no political giant, but perhaps a good choice for an unconventional Republican.
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
As a Deadhead fairly well versed in the who's who of their entourage, I was entirely unaware of his background. Wow!
Me too. This is genuinely shocking to me, though definitely in a pleasant way if that makes any sense (it probably would've to Owsley). I've never heard this anywhere, and it isn't even mentioned on his wiki page at all outside of his wikibox which mentions his senator grandfather as a relative. THIS IS GROOVY MAN
I've just stumbled upon the case of Ruthann Aron, a real estate developer who had lost three lawsuits and then ran for the House and Senate in Maryland, being defeated in the primary in her latter attempt. She was convicted of trying to hire a hitman to murder her husband in 1997. Just imagine that sort of scandal in Congress or the White House...
I think most of us have heard of Jawaharlal Nehru, but have you heard of his father Motilal? Born posthumously to a father who was dispossessed after supporting Bahadur Shah Zafar in the Indian Mutiny, Motilal was able to become a wealthy lawyer who became an integral part of the Indian national movement, jailed a few times. He was the president of the Indian National Congress, and was a staunch supporter of India becoming a dominion. When in 1920, the British gave India some self-government, Motilal broke away from Congress to form the Swaraj Party, which entered government in order to obstruct the local governments to win dominion status. In 1926, he wrote the Nehru Report, an unofficial which envisioned India becoming a dominion much like the white regions of the British Empire. Sadly, declining health meant he played little role as the Indian national movement became an independence movement, and Nehru died in 1931.
If the British made India a dominion in 1920 or any time in the 1920s, I strongly suspect Motilal Nehru would be first in line as prime minister. He seemed to have a more pragmatic stance than his son, as can be seen in how he decided to obstruct rather than boycott the Indian self-governing legislatures, so you wouldn’t see that same Nehruvian idealism.
Also, his moustache is amazing.
If the British made India a dominion in 1920 or any time in the 1920s, I strongly suspect Motilal Nehru would be first in line as prime minister. He seemed to have a more pragmatic stance than his son, as can be seen in how he decided to obstruct rather than boycott the Indian self-governing legislatures, so you wouldn’t see that same Nehruvian idealism.
Also, his moustache is amazing.
Linda Smith (four-time winner of the Northwestern Generic Name Championship) was a two term Representative from Washington who during her time in D.C. became known for being a massive conservative on social issues, a maverick reformer on most other things and not liking Newt Gingrich. After losing a run for the Senate against Patty Murray in 1998 she retired from politics and went on to found and run Shared Hope International, a (from what I can find pretty successful) anti-trafficking NGO. Have her beat Murray or get her back into politics some other way and I could see her as a McCain-in-2000 style candidate later on.
John G. Winant was a progressive New Hampshire Republican who, after two non-consecutive terms in the Governor's Mansion served in the Roosevelt Administration on the Social Security Board and then as wartime ambassador to the UK where he worked closely with Churchill (and allegedly had an affair with his daughter). Unfortunately he took his own life after the war but I can absolutely see him as some sort of gestalt creature of Wilkie and Dewey.
John G. Winant was a progressive New Hampshire Republican who, after two non-consecutive terms in the Governor's Mansion served in the Roosevelt Administration on the Social Security Board and then as wartime ambassador to the UK where he worked closely with Churchill (and allegedly had an affair with his daughter). Unfortunately he took his own life after the war but I can absolutely see him as some sort of gestalt creature of Wilkie and Dewey.
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