Why was GW Bush (Jr Bush) better than Obama?

[Mr Khan]

SamuelRSmith said:

richardhutnik said:

And you get back to why I am not as optimistic as you.  What I see the GOP doing is running candidates who shift further and further out of the mainstream, to get the nomination, and then build product they are marketing, which most people won't be happy with, or excited about.  It is, "Well the Democrats are bad, so need ANY option".  This shift Romney has made, got him the nomination, but risks not getting him the election.  It puts him in the same category as John Kerry as being a flip-flopper.  And the policies he proposes aren't really different from what GW Bush had at all.   Romney is also a a loser, the way McCain was.  Both lost the last primary, but then built political base that enabled them to roll off key states.  The candidates, in other words, aren't the top choices of the GOP, but the ones who lost prior.

And Obama seems to be a candidate to facilitate the sliding further and further out of the mainstream. Obama's proposals are right out of the GOP playbook, like individual mandates, and tax cuts for the middle class.  The GOP ends up opposing policies they had.  The are becoming less and less mainstream.  And then Obama runs wiht Bush foreign policy, and also infringing upon civil liberties the way GW did.

It's clear that no Republican who plays politics (that is, pretty much all Republicans except Congressman Paul) would want to compete in 2008 (coming off George Bush) or 2012 (competing against Obama), so what they had was the bottom of the barrel... I don't think this will be the case in 2016. Lots of great candidates for the GOP. Depending on how Obama's second term goes, we'll see either good or bad candidates from the DNC (if Obama's second term goes well, people will be willing to come off his hightails).

It's like Dole against Clinton, or Kerry against Bush.

Or, you know, it could just be an agreement between the parties, to not seriously gun for office during re-election.

It's a simple matter of incumbent momentum, really. Incumbent presidents who were dethroned in an actual re-election campaign either seriously screwed up during their term (emphasis on serious, because every president has incidents of varying severity, but a serious screw-up is usually a full-on failure to act, or perception thereof) or because of some unforeseen shift in the political spectrum

We'll go through defeated incumbents one at a time:

John Adams: Blatant Federal overreach, namely in the form of the Alien & Sedition act, a law very blatantly opposed to the First Amendment in a way that we've pretty much never seen since then. Also a lot of foreign meddling in a time when America had no stomach for it.

John Q. Adams: Used the so-called "Corrupt Bargain" to get into office, which people basically saw as him stealing the election

Martin Van Buren: Presided over the Panic of 1837 when America went bankrupt

Grover Cleveland: Opposed the influence of big business at a time when big business was at its absolute height of influence in American politics

Benjamin Harrison: A ruinous tariff.

William Taft: Shift in the system with TR running for another term, split the Republican electorate.

Herbert Hoover: Great Depression

Gerald Ford: Pardoning Nixon for Watergate

James Carter: Tehran Hostage Crisis

George Bush (1): Ross Perot serving as a glitch in the system

So political parties know by now to not run their most charismatic guys in these scenarios, because you have a low chance of winning historically unless something really breaks in your favor.