General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Who was the last decent Republican president? [View all]kurtcagle
(1,602 posts)Again, looking at achievements rather than political leaning.
Clinton was a borderline conservative, was responsible for founding the pro-business DLC, and his priorities tended to be focused primarily upon moving the Democratic party to the right. He was brilliant, but I consider the tech bubble and consequent recession of 2000 to be primarily due to his move towards deregulation. Obama was more liberal, but I think he got caught flatfooted with the speed of the gay marriage movement. Nixon was definitely more conservative than Humphrey, but you look at things like the Clean Air Act and similar initiatives, he was actually pretty typical of a California Republican of the time, which was more like Eisenhower than Gingrich. Balancing that was his pushing the Southern Strategy, which ultimately laid the groundwork for the conservative vicious circle that would emerge forty years later.
Until Trump, I think it reasonably safe to say that most Presidents tend to end up slightly right of center, as this tends to reflect the geopolitical orientation of the country overall until recently. Obama was the first GenXer, and his views were definitely more "open" than older presidents, but I don't necessarily see him as being all that far politically from Clinton or even post-Rumsfeld Bush. He was admittedly a more honorable one, which was a novelty.
Trump's the wild-card. By today's standards, both Kennedy and LBJ were incredibly racist and sexist, but the difference was that this was not atypical of men of power at that time. Trump strikes me as someone who never grew out of that when the rest of America did, because he never had to. In some respects, he's more like a time capsule from another era, mold and all.