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my father in law, us ranger, said that LBJ was the only politician that kept a promise he told me. in the 64 election, he tells me, that LBJ said that a vote for Goldwater meant he'd go to Vietnam. my father-in-law voted for Goldwater and sure enough, he ended up in Vietnam.
More important is the point that a Goldwater Administration would not have pursued the "crony capitalist" policies which, after a brief rally in 1965-66, led to 16 years of stagnation before the restoration of sanity under Ronald Reagan took effect in 1982. A free-market-driven economic boom would also likely have hastened the collapse of institutionalized Marxism under the weight of its own inefficiency.
As a kid, I was always impressed with Adlai Stevenson II who ran against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. He was the right man for the job but so was Eisenhower. He had bad timing. He tried again in 1960 but Kennedy took the nomination. Stevenson was divorced and a Unitarian which was not healthy for a presidential candidate in the 1950s. He died in 1965.
1) Everyone thinks 'their candidate' will be the next FDR (or Lincoln, or whichever of the consensus greats don't ruffle your ideological feathers). Yet most of them don't get the nomination, half of those who do don't win, and most who do win aren't generally considered great.
In other words, prediction presidential greatness is a fool's game. Predicting that someone losing candidate would have been the greatest - ie, greater that Washington, Lincoln, FDR - is absurd. It's conceivable, but there's no reason to affirmatively believe it.
2) This thread was about a candidate who might've been the greatest. Predictably, there are lots of contributors who can't differentiate history from their ideology, and are approaching the question from the point of view of "Well, A won in 19XX and I think A sucked, so I wish B would have won!". But that just political promulgation; it's not addressing the question. This was probably inevitable. A lot of posters (and this is the sort of thread where you just know certain suspects are going to pop up and do what they do) just can't restrain themselves.
Goldwater by far. LBJ greatly expanded the welfare state which permanently changed our culture and had many negative ramifications. It destroyed the American family in all social classes below the upper middle class.
After we enrolled in Medicare, my rock ribbed republican DH announced, "Thank you LBJ."
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