What if Robert F. Kennedy became president?

[Koch Ebola]

Last edited Mon Jun 18, 2018, 01:07 PM - Edit history (1)

We all sometimes ponder "what if" questions. I often wonder if Hillary Clinton won the election, what would America be like? In my latest article, my mind goes back 50 years. The question is: What if RFK never got assassinated and became president. How would have affect me personally? Read all about it.

Do have "Click phobia"
https://stephenjaymorrisblog.tumblr.com/

[StevieM]

1. I think the effects of the 1973-1974 Arab Oil embargo would have put the Republicans

back in the White House in 1976. I am not sure if the Fed would have made the same mistakes that they made under Nixon. But by 1976 there would have been enough of a backlash against the Great Society that the GOP would have come back to power.

I think Ronald Reagan would have been elected in 76, and would have been pretty right-wing, even if he wasn't quite as bad as he would become by 1980. The GOP might have taken back the congress by the time he was elected, but it is possible that the Dems would have narrowly retained control. Either way, conservatives would have maintained ideological control through an alliance with southern conservatives.

A key variable is Jimmy Carter. He was able to win through an alliance of liberal states and conservative southern states that were proud to elect someone from the deep south. But in the absence of Watergate it is possible that he doesn't win, especially if running against a lawmaker who rose to prominence as a champion for the RFK agenda. So maybe Morris Udall is the Democratic nominee against Reagan.

I think there were some problems in the late 70s that were going to be there, regardless of who the president was. So maybe Reagan doesn't win re-election. His 1980 opponent? Terry Sanford, the progressive former governor of North Carolina.

It is hard to know if the recession of the early 1980s would have been as bad under Sanford as it would have been under Reagan. But it definitely would have been held against Democrats in a harsher way than it was held against the GOP, and 1982 was actually a pretty tough election year for them. The Republicans would have captured the Congress in that year. The real question is whether Sanford could have won re-election after the recession. Reagan himself had struggled in the polls for quite awhile and Sanford would not have had an opponent, like Mondale, who pledged to raise taxes. I am thinking that Sanford would have won by a narrow margin, like Obama's margin over Mitt Romney.

By 1988 or 1992 there would have been a backlash. My guess is that a racist Republican would have narrowly lost to a Democratic candidate in 1988 as the economy was doing better. But in 1992 there would have been a ton of problems, even if not as bad as the ones we had under George HW Bush after 12 years of Reagan/Bush/Quayle. And Jack Kemp would have begun an era of trickle down in the 1990s, 12 years later than it began under Reagan. To his credit, he would not have promoted racism like Reagan and Nixon did. Factors surrounding the global economy would have propelled him to re-election, and a GOP successor to victory in 2000.

The next Republican president would have been rallied around after 9/11 like George W. Bush was. I am not sure if the Iraq War still would have happened. My guess is that it would not have. (Of course, we don't know if Saddam would have felt like he could invade Kuwait in 1990 under the alternate timeline). And the GOP president would likely have been re-elected in 2004. I think the economic problems that had long been building up after 16 years of trickle down would have finally come crashing down in 2007, or early 2008, a year earlier than they did under Bush. And that would have allowed a Democrat, whether it was Barack Obama or somebody else, to win the White House back in 2008, along with a Democratic congress.

Of course, the Democratic presidency, whether it was under Obama or a different Democrat, might have played out differently, in terms of what congress would have agreed to do in those first two years. It is hard to say at that point.

The interesting thing about this timeline is that it involves a 60 year period of Democratic dominance dating back to the Depression. It includes a 20 year run of Dems in the White House, followed by a 16 year run, followed by a 12 year run. The GOP would have only held the White House for 12 years, 8 of them under the war hero Eisenhower. This 60 year chapter would have been somewhat comparable to the 72 year chapter the GOP had from the start of the Civil War until the Great Depression.