U.S. 2-party system seems like a 2-family system to some voters
at 10:59 on September 28, 2007, EST.
By Nancy Benac, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - Forty per cent of Americans have never lived when there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Anyone got a problem with that?
With Hillary Rodham Clinton hoping to tack another four or eight "Clinton" years on to the Bush-Clinton-Bush presidential pattern, talk of Bush-Clinton fatigue is increasingly cropping up in the national political debate.
The dominance of the two families in U.S. presidential politics is unprecedented. (The closest comparisons are the father-son presidencies of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, whose single terms were separated by 24 years, and the presidencies of fifth cousins Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, whose collective 20 years as president were separated by a quarter-century.)
"We now have a younger generation and middle-age generation who are going to think about national politics through the Bush-Clinton prism," said Princeton University political historian Julian Zelizer, 37, whose first chance to vote for president was 1988, the year the current president's father, George H.W. Bush, was elected.
As for the question of fatigue, Zelizer added: "It's not just that we've heard their names a lot, but we've had a lot of problems with their names."
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