Quote:
Originally Posted by StellarWind
Hi guys,
The election is over, Kodos won, gg.
Any further discussion belongs in the Politics forum. Future politics posts in this thread will be deleted.
SW
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leader
Do know what all these Presidents had in common? They almost exclusively had to deal with congresses that were controlled by the other party. Divided government means only the stuff that really really needs to get done does. When one party is in power, they start passing all their ideological bs and we pay for it.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
On a serious note, I still don't think your explanation is sufficient, Leader. The only thing that I can tentatively conclude is that things seemed to go well when Reagan was president, and things seemed to go well when Clinton was president. Now the question is how much credit we should attribute to those in power? Not only is this a very difficult question to answer, I'm highly skeptical that it can be answered at all.
For example, lets think about Herbert Hoover, the president who took office on March 4, 1929. I don't know if government was divided or not but lets assume hypothetically that it was. Now the question is, if Reagan or Clinton took over in 1929 would they have the shining legacy they have now or would they have the forgettable legacy of Herbert Hoover? My money's on the forgettable side.
Another example: Lets assume Reagan took over in January 2001, just before the stock market bubble burst, just before the economic boom reached it's apex, before 9/11. Do we really think Reagan would be remembered as fondly as he is today? I don't think so.
This all comes back to the problem of complexity and trying to figure out dynamical, multivariate systems. When it comes the question of how well or bad a president did, I see no other choice but to take an agnostic position.