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It was graceful. One only has to read the personal note Bush left Clinton. Later, they became friends.
It was handwritten on White House stationary.
Jan 20, 1993
Dear Bill,
When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.
I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.
There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I'm not a very good one to give advice; but just don't let the critics discourage you or push you off course.
You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.
Your success now is our country's success. I am rooting hard for you.
Good luck — George
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I was once given a letter of resignation by a staff member when we disagreed about something important. I did not accept it. I told her "I need someone to tell me when my pants are not zipped up." Trump needs someone to tell him that. (Of course, today, I could not say that!)
Here's the letter. How someone loses says more about their character than how they win.
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,329 posts, read 54,381,135 times
Reputation: 40736
Quote:
Originally Posted by Retroit
Percent of popular vote:
Clinton: 43.0%
Bush: 37.4%
Perot: 18.9%
No one should hold office unless they receive 50+% of the vote. We should have a run-off election between the top two.
Just for reference, Hitler won by 43.9%
Putin won with 77%. I don't see a requirement for >50% ensuring much of anything. If we're going to change something I'd say at the very least Electoral Votes should be awarded proportionally to the popular vote.
Pretty simple. George Bush lost because he broke is "no new taxes" promise. His Republican base was furious and a significant number fled him to vote for Ross Perot.
There was no controversy over who won because most of the ballots were cast in one day at the polls and counted in one day. There was no early voting, ballot harvesting and ballots were all paper. There were no machines electronically storing votes. I think if we went back to all paper ballots that you either punched a hole in or filled in a circle, people would have more confidence in voting than they do now.
I voted in that election.
I did not use a paper ballot. I voted on a machine with little levers that were switched down to record my choices. These machines were in use all over the greater NYC metro at that time and had been for many, many years.
There were no questions about the validity of how votes were recorded for that election and the transition was peaceful.
For those who never experienced voting on a lever voting machine:
You obviously were out of the country in 2000 because it was anything but smooth and as the Clintons left office their minions did tens of thousands of dollars of damage to the White House and executive offices.
Pretty sure the poster you quoted was talking about the transition following the 1994 election.
President George Bush I was a gracious, dignified man who always tried to do what he believed was right for his nation. Ask Bill Clinton, who said he grew to love the man like a father, and he will tell you Bush and his staff did everything they could to assist his transition.
Clinton or his staff, on the other hand, did lots of sabotaging, both big and small, such removing all the “W”s from the keyboards when the son won, as a repayment. That refusal to cooperate has also been cited as perhaps one of the things that contributed to 9/11. So, that is closer to our current model. They were upset about Gore’s loss.
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I don't remember this being any kind of issue, nor even that the words "first term" meant a thing. As had happened for many years before - presidents came, presidents went. It was only 12 years earlier that Jimmy Carter was a one term president, and before him, Ford (technically...he was president for less than 4 years).
It has been a while now, though, that's true - but the back-n-forth between ideologies has been fairly often.
Bottom line is - it's a non-issue. Always was for me. Remains so. Obviously, some individual candidates may have more grace than others - that remains to be seen - but pretty much no big deal.
Bush would have won had Perot not been in the race. Probably wouldn't have been close to be honest.
Perot siphoned off a bunch of the now Trump supporter types and left Bush with the country club republican set.
As was said, Bush was a decent man. It's a disgrace that we have devolved to a man like Trump from a statesman like George HW Bush. Even Perot was a decent guy although a bit goofy. But Perot's base was kind of the first harbinger of Trumpy type momentum. They turned into the Tea Party during Obama and now that group is the base of the Trump party and the country club type Republicans have kind of split on Trump.
As far as "transition" we have never really had any issues until now. The 2000 thing was a bit weird because of how long the results were in question and the pranks in the WH but Clinton and W Bush didn't seem to have issues.
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