Hiku said:
PAOerfulone said:
Reagan did it to Grenada. The Bushes did it to Iraq.
I sense a trend here.
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Yeah, I said 'probably' because if you ask them they have another explanation. But iirc, no president has lost re-election during a war.
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LBJ did.
Johnson has the distinction of being the only U.S. President to be effectively "primaried" out of office. He was up for re-election in 1968 during the height of the Vietnam War, but he was so incredibly unpopular that he was subject to primary challengers in 1968 and, after a disastrous showing in the early primaries, withdrew his bid, which led to the contentious Democratic National Convention that saw Hubert Humphrey win the nomination. Humphrey would later be defeated in the general election by Richard Nixon.
LBJ is a cautionary tale that an unpopular war can ruin a president. Grenada and Desert Storm were brief and not very costly to the U.S., and so didn't generate much negative reaction (and Bush I didn't get re-elected anyway, so it's not like Desert Storm helped him in the long run). The Iraq War was unpopular among many people, but in its early days, including ahead of the 2004 election, it still had a lot of popular support, and only became opposed by most Americans as it continued to grind along with seemingly no end in sight. With Iran, that will be a far tougher sell. Not many Americans are eager to go to war with Iran. Such a war will be even worse than the one with Iraq, and there are still a lot of war-weary American that aren't looking forward to yet another decade of war after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars finally started to wind down. Trying to go to war with Iran could actually bite Trump in the ass. Then again, if he starts a war and is defeated this year, the incoming Democratic president will be saddled with the war, and that could hurt them.
EDIT: And might I add that all of this mess with Iran could have been avoided had we not deposed their democratically-elected secular government back in the 1950s just to protect an oil company's bottom line. Blowback is a bitch.
Last edited by Shadow1980 - on 03 January 2020