When was the last time we elected a liberal president...

[Perky]

Based on his liberal agenda?

Gore was no liberal
Big Dawg wasn't by lefty standards.
Carter wasn't.
LBJ was president by Tragedy and he ran against Goldwater
Kennedy? Maybe.
Truman?
FDR?

Humphrey
McGovern
Mondale
Dukakis
Kerry

all were liberals who lost.


Why would anyone think that having a died in the wool liberal would be sucessful in 2008?

[hecate77]

1. Kennedy/Johnson

Even if Johnson was a shoe-in, he was progressive in his domestic policies.

[Mountainman]

2. LBJ was a liberal president but the war took over his presidency

LBJ signed the civil rights legislation and wanted to put into place his "Great Society" ideas and the war on poverty.

Nixon was actually more liberal that Clinton or Gore. He wanted what he thought was good for Americans. He made peace with China, enacted wage and price controls, and I think Medicare came about during his administration.

[lapislzi]

3. Yeah, back in the days before "liberal" became a dirty word

When the liberals stood for all that was good and fair. It's no accident that a liberal came up with The Great Society.

I prefer to remember LBJ the visionary, not the communism-obsessed whack job.

[Goldmund]

11. And the EPA as well

[DerekG]

4. Lyndon Johnson

LBJ was the most stalwart liberal we've had in office--too bad he was also one of the great destroyers in history.

[Cheswick2.0]

5. I think Gore is quite liberal

read his last book and some of his speeches. He supports gay couples civil rights, to adopt children etc. He supports the idea of single payer universal healthcare. He was against the Iraq war. He supports choice with no conditions. He is as pro-environment as anyone out there. He supports afirmative action. What else do you want?

[lapislzi]

8. Define your terms

and correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember hearing a single thing about single-payor healthcare during his 2000 campaign. It's easy to be a "liberal" about choice and the environment when these are popular, well-supported positions and these cost you nothing politically.

It becomes a different matter when the liberal policies start costing taxpayers money. Gore stayed far away from that nasty "tax and spend" brush.

Gore NEVER stood for the poor during his campaign. He's more liberal now than he was before (he's got nothing to lose).

[Cheswick2.0]

21. you define your terms

He never picked up speed in the election until he moved to the left, dropped the DLC idiots and started talking like a populist. Did you hear his convention acceptance speech? It was quite liberal/populist.

[lapislzi]

29. Agreed, but the damage had been done by then

If they'd let him be who he was, it might have been better. Hard to say. He was very, very beholden to corporate interests--much in the same way Clinton was. That's my (and many others') beef with the DLC.

Too many palms to grease at the end of the day.

PS I wept during his acceptance speech.

PPS--Liberal and populist do not necessarily mean the same thing. You get some rural populists who are quite socially conservative. Cf William Jennings Bryan.

[Hippo_Tron]

41. I started thinking about this, Gore actually is pretty liberal...

Probably more than Kerry. I think, however, that this has come about in recent days and I don't think that he was fully willing to express some of these views when he was running for president.

[WI_DEM]

6. LBJ was the last authentic liberal

even more so than JFK.

[FubarFly]

7. Anyone who stands for Democratic values is a liberal.

If you believe every American is entitled to the same basic rights, you are a liberal.

If you believe in freedom of expression, you are a liberal.

If you believe in the power of diplomacy as an alternative to war, you are a liberal.

If you believe that strengthening the American middle class is a ticket for prosperity for all Americans, you are a liberal.

Do you get the drift?

Bill Clinton was most effective and popular when he was acting like a liberal.

[Perky]

9. Ummm under this criteria

Nixon was a Liberal

[WI_DEM]

10. Nixon in some respects was more liberal than any president

who followed him. Too bad he was a crook too.

[FubarFly]

13. The irony is that Nixon was in fact more liberal than some of

today's DLC Democrats.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

17. If You Sign DOMA Into Law Are You A Liberal?

nt

[FubarFly]

19. You've missed the point.

DOMA was an unnecessary compromise that undermined Clinton by weakening his standing with his base. Clinton's regressions hurt the Party in the longterm and allowed the moral majority hypocrites to shift the debate to the bigoted right. It wasn't worth it.

[Perky]

Ok lIberals belly up to the bar. I am buying

A beer for anyone who can give me a liberal who has a real honest to goodness shot at the nomination and the White House.

Since 1964 we have not elected a liberal president....liberall lose tight elections(Humphrey,Gore, Kerry) or they get spanked (Dukakis, McGovern, Mondale)...but they do not win.

Is there anyone out there who is an ubabashed liberal who might run in 2008 who has a chance in Hell of winning the nomination.

I think not but give me names.



Presidential Politics require moderate candidates. Electoral Migration away from the Northeast makes the math a real bitch for Liberals as well. African Americans and unionists arefairly marhinalized in swing states and inconsequential in Southern Red States.

I just don't think liberal candidates have a prayer.

[FubarFly]

15. You're presenting a false dilemna.

These candidates didn't lose because they were liberal.

When is the last time we presented a candidate who had strong, personal charisma , inspiring oratory skills, and the ability to sell Democratic values as palatable to mainstream America?

Oh, that's right- Bill Clinton.

We've been running bland, dull, milquetoasts for ages. Why are Democrats so unconvincing and bloody boring?

[Perky]

28. So you maintain that a liberal with great presensce and Charisma would win

Ok so its the all about personality and not policy?

OK can you think of anyone anyone at all amon the Dems who is a liberal and has charisma? And the balls to run for president?

[Julien Sorel]

12. An excellent question.

The problem with these gentlemen is that they weren't liberal enough. If they moved even further to the left, the public would respect them for their strength and vote for them, even though they disagree with their political positions. As an example of the potential of this strategy, I will point out the success of Nadir, and Camejo, and Cobb, and Kucinich, and wonder why Democrats don't try to emulate that success.

[Perky]

14. Ummm I am guessing your tongue is firmly in your cheek right?

I can't believe you would put those four up thereas role models...haha

Hey actuially the most liberal major candidate we have had in the last 40 years may well have been John Anderson.

[Cheswick2.0]

23. no dear

The problem is not that we are running people who are more or less liberal. The problem is that we are not fighting against election theft. Gore won and I believe Kerry did too absent lots of voter supression. The problem is that the DLC keeps forcing candidates to play their game at least partially and that makes the election close enough to be stolen.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

16. Never...

FDR said he was going to balance the budget...


JFK said we was going to close the missile gap with Russia...


and LBJ said he was going to roll back communism in southeast Asia...

[Reality Not Tin Foil]

18. Outstanding question.

But give it up, you won't get your answer.


The answer is LBJ...And that was during the 60's...And the 60's are LONG gone.

And as you stated, him running aginst a bufoon didn't hurt his chances.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

20. He Was A Hawk...

He was economically liberal and liberal on the race question but he was a hawk....

[Reality Not Tin Foil]

22. Good!

Nothing wrong with being a Hawk. Kennedy was a Hawk. FDR was a Hawk. Thomas Jefferson was a Hawk!!

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[DemocratSinceBirth]

27. Kennedy Also Ran On An Alleged Missile Gap With The Soviet Union

and came up with all kinds of cute ways to off Castro...


Yes, events forced FDR's hand and he wanted to intervene earlier but the America Firsters stopped him.....

All wars aren't wrong just the unjust ones...

[robbedvoter]

26. When was the last time we elected anyone? PS: Kerry is NOT liberal

[DaveinMD]

30. Kerry was our most liberal nominee since Mondale

Kennedy and Johnson both ran with elements of liberalism, but with a hawkish foreign policy.

[flaminbats]

32. no he wasn't..

Dukakis was the most liberal since Mondale. Politically Kerry was somewhere between Gore and Clinton.

[DaveinMD]

34. Dukakis

was a technocrat who ran on competence. I think Kerry was more liberal. They are pretty comparable. Kerry was Dukakis' LT Gov.

[flaminbats]

35. Dukakis was more liberal on every issue, even the death penalty

Dukakis supported national healthcare which would have been funded with an employer mandate and payroll taxes. Clinton's model for mandatory national healthcare in 1992 and 1993 came from what Dukakis campaigned on. Rather than proposing a new entitlement, Kerry campaigned on a voluntary healthcare program which allowed people to buy into the FEHBP. Dukakis opposed the welfare reform and anti-crime measures supported by both Clinton and Kerry. And unlike John Kerry or Bill Clinton, Dukakis had very little to say about the deficit.

Even Senator Tsongas was more liberal than John Kerry, and he helped found the fiscally conservative Concord Coalition.

[DaveinMD]

37. being anti-deficit isn't conservative

after all, Democrats are the only one's that have balanced the budget. Long term, eliminating the debt gives us the money we need to fund programs. Conservatives know this. They run up deficits in the hope of starving the government.

[flaminbats]

39. being pro-deficit isn't conservative..yet

for the last 40 years Republicans have focused their efforts on defining Conservatism as good, patriotic, American, pro-business, and pro-God..liberalism as pro-criminal, pro-murder, pro-taxes, anti-God, and anti-American.

The DLC has always responded by dragging our party more to the right with every passing election. The only way to win is by dragging the political spectrum back to the left, not by running from every neoconservative attack.

[DaveinMD]

40. its not a matter of left v right

and such argument only serve to divide our party and ensure losing elections. There are some good DLCers and some bad ones. Clinton was a DLCer, but did some great things as president.

The key for the future is reframing Democratic policies as part of a populist message and wrapping it in American values such as hard work, fairness and equal opportunity for all.

[flaminbats]

45. name something positive which Clinton has left us..

the only things I can list are the Kennedy-Kassabaum law and peace in eastern Europe.

redefining liberal and conservative has divided our country and weakened our party only because too often we refuse to acknowledge the importance of these labels.

[DaveinMD]

46. hope scholarship funds

are very helpful to people going to college. The tax credit of education helped me and my wife go to school. During the clinton years, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare improved greatly.

Clinton left us with two supreme court justices who support the right to privacy and a woman's right to choose.

Clinton also passed the Children's Health Insurance Program which was a very big help in getting health insurance coverage for children of the working poor.

These are just off the top of my head.

[flaminbats]

52. is the Children's Health Insurance Program even funded?

those Hope Scholarship funds are now only adding to our massive deficit with Bush in office. Your children will pay higher taxes because you have a tax credit.

the solvency of Medicare and Social Security improved during the Clinton years, but this solvency has been buried under the Bush taxcuts and wars.

Clinton did leave us with two excellent Supreme Court justices.

[flaminbats]

31. 1948...

Truman ran as a Fair Deal liberal, and Dewey ran as the Democratic-lite moderate. Truman was the first President to support national healthcare, he opposed Taft-Hartley, and fought for civil rights.

Truman help set the standard for modern liberalism. But every Democratic President since has either been a watered-down neoliberal or a southern conservative.

[JohnKleeb]

33. I gotta go with LBJ on this

Yes, a hawk but very liberal domestically.

[StevieM]

36. FDR, Truman, Stevenson, LBJ, McGoven, Mondale, Dukakis were all liberals

Carter, Clinton, Gore and Kerry were not.

JFK was somewhere in between.

This last election WAS NOT "a classic liberal/conservative showdown." If we liberals are going to get blamed and told we lost the election then we should at least get a chance to run an election on our issues with one of our candidates.

Steve

[Zynx]

38. Truman, FDR, and LBJ certainly were.

[Hippo_Tron]

42. I'm sorry, but I have to include Jimmy Carter

At least in the area of foreign policy, Carter beats almost every 20th century democratic president as far as a liberal foreign policy goes; FDR can be excluded from this for obvious reasons. As I recall on the domestic front, much of his liberal agenda was destroyed by the conservative democrats in congress. In my view, Carter had the guts to stand up and say that we don't need to defeat the soviet union with brute strength, because if we come to terms with them, then they won't be a threat. Of course, we all know that the Ronnie Reagan and the Repukes destroyed him because of that. But hey, which of the two presidents won a nobel peace prize? I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Reagan.

[Forkboy]

43. Hear hear!

Cartr was by far the best man to hold office in my lifetime,imho.

[DaveinMD]

47. If Carter was a liberal

he wouldn't have been challenged from the left by Ted Kennedy.

[flaminbats]

57. the champion of deregulation..

National healthcare died in Congress only because Kennedy and Carter couldn't forge a compromise. During the Carter years Republicans didn't have enough votes or unity for a filibuster.

[leesa]

44. Oh, yes let's bend over once again & become just like the fascists to win!

Exactly WHAT do we win when we become like them, Perky? And would you please give this crap a rest?

[DaveinMD]

48. was Clinton a fascist

I don't think he was. I don't think Carter was either.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

49. Maybe that's why the Dems keep losing or getting into squeakers that

should have been landslides (e.g. 2000 and 2004). Maybe that's why Clinton needed Ross Perot's help to win in 1992.

Don't give me that tired old crap about Dukakis and Mondale, neither of whom could campaign their way out of a paper bag. They were such pathetically bad campaigners that I seriously wondered whether the Dems had been bribed to throw those elections. I still remember a Dem activist trying to talk a bunch of liberal arts college professors into supporting Dukakis and being laughed out of the room. "Come back when you have a real candidate," was the taunt. I remember cringing when Mondale opened his acceptance speech with a pledge to raise taxes and acted gleeful about it. I knew it was over then.

Hubert Humphrey? He nearly won, but he was the least liberal of the Dem candidates in 1968. The left wing of the party favored Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, and after the Chicago convention, a lot of the left wing stayed home rather than vote for a man they associated with the Vietnam War. Humphrey didn't lose because he was "too liberal"--and the race was so close that the results didn't come through till the following afternoon--he lost because he wasn't liberal enough for the anti-war activists. I'm pretty sure that Robert Kennedy would have won in 1968 had he not been assassinated. He had coasting toward the nomination at the time.

I also remember the McGovern campaign, and there was hardly any talk of his policies in the news coverage, just reports about his "flip-flop" in choosing a running mate and shots of him being surrounded by adoring young people. To Middle America, that was enough to make him the "hippie candidate." The vote against him was the vote of Middle America against the youth culture, not against any particular policy of McGovern's.

Perky,I don't know what kind of slanted American history they teach you DLC interns, but take it from one who was already in college by the time Hubert Humphrey ran: between disgruntled peace activists, assassination by press, and hopelessly inept campaigns, liberalism hasn't had a fair shake.

The days, when liberal candidates do turn up, they are either ridiculed (Dean) or ignored (Kucinich) by the press. Then the Dems run a centrist (Kerry) whom the Republicanites immediately claim is "too liberal." As another poster said, we could run Zell Miller, and the Republicanites would still say that he was "too liberal."

If the DLC is so damned wonderful and successful, how come it can't pull off elections that should have been too lopsided to steal? Given the Bushboy to run against, both 2000 and 2004 should have been a replay of Johnson versus Goldwater.

[DaveinMD]

51. Kerry was not a centrist

He was liberal. Maybe not Wellstone Liberal, but he was not in center of the senate caucus. This was not a DLC candidate. Lieberman was a DLC candidate.

[flaminbats]

54. Kerry is very active in the DLC..

http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=251078&kaid=106&subid=122

http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=250872&kaid=106&subid=122

[dolstein]

50. How about Woodrow Wilson?

Think about it:

Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 as a different kind of Democrat.

Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 as a plain spoken Evangelical Christian from Plains, Georgia.

LBJ certainly governed as a liberal in terms of social programs, but he wasn't originally elected to the office.

JFK ran to the right of Richard Nixon on foreign policy. And both JFK and Nixon were pretty moderate on social issues, at least within the context of that time.

Harry Truman was certainly a liberal on economic issues and civil rights, but he was a hardline anticommunist. Moreover, he wasn't originally elected to the office.

Franklin Roosevelt clearly governed as a liberal on economic issues, but he was a foreign policy hawk. Moreover, he wasn't originally elected as a liberal. Go back and look at his speeches during the 1932 campaign. He was still talking about balanced budgets. His domestic agenda was decidedly vague.

Woodrow Wilson was a liberal, or at least a progressive, when he was first elected. But a liberal back then isn't quite the same thing as a liberal of today. For example, Wilson was not very enlightened on racial matters.

So I'd say you have to go back to 1912 to find a liberal Democrat who was elected president. Some liberals have been RE-ELECTED, but they didn't originally become president by running as liberals.

[mitchum]

53. LBJ

[Starlight]

55. But Kerry is NOT liberal!!!

Why do people keep claiming that as a fact when it's been debunked many times?? :eyes:

http://www.factcheck.org/article284.html

"Summary
A Republican National Committee ad released Oct. 16 claims that Kerry is "the most liberal man in the Senate." It's true that vote rankings by the politically neutral magazine The National Journal rated Kerry "most liberal" in 2003 and in three earlier years during his first Senate term: 1986, 1988, and 1990. But over his entire career the Journal ranks Kerry the 11th most liberal Senator. And by other rankings he's only a bit left of his party's center."

[dionysus]

56. I've seen lots of your posts, shouting for us to be moderate.

There you have it folks, us libruls are dragging the Dems down.. we need to go further to the right to win. Yeah.....
FDR, JFK, Carter, not liberal? HAHAHAHAHA! please gimme a toke of what you're smokin'.

[charlie]

58. Well, lessee...

In 1976, we ran a conservative born-again Georgian against a moderate secular Michigander. Think the Repubs will let us enjoy that sort of dynamic again?

In 1992, we had a national 3-way, with a jug-eared Texas yipdog firmly attached to the prez from Connecticut's butt. And Lee Atwater was freshly dead. Chances of that happening once more is pretty remote.

So, the lesson is obvious. Unless circumstances are juuuust so, a centrist isn't likely to cut it. What we need to win is a hardline conservative from the deep-deep south, below the Florida Keys if possible, with bigass televangelist hair, sequined suits, and a 30-lb Bible glued to his right hand. And a campaign slogan of "Lock Up the Democrats!"