I hate to beat this horse, but I wish some of you would read ol' Jacques Ellul......Politics is a matter of methodology and once you establish the method, the actions of those holding any office are limited by it. Period.

That's why it's such an incredible waste to argue over the actions of one versus another. Let's say that each president has a 10 degree arc he can function in. Bush pushes the outside to one direction and sooner or later gets swatted down as happened to Clinton on the other side of the arc, although Clinton pushed very little (and was effective because of it). Bush may screw things up for the liberals but it will come back again because the system will not allow it to ever get too far....It's the method, not the man. We could have elected Wallace years ago and things wouldn't have been too different.....same with say McGovern. Only a revolutionary change will affect the method, and that's not happening here at the moment either. Nader or a Green Party candidate wouldn't be revolution, just another funtionary within the method just as Wallace or McGovern would have been.

I think you could get a lot more out of discussing Nixon-Kennedy in 1960. Kennedy pushed too hard to seem a master of foreign affairs when in fact Nixon actually was to some degree. Nixon had absolutely NO interest in anything having to do with VietNam and his policy toward Cuba fell under the Eisenhower doctrines of very covert operations........So no assassination of Nixon, no expansion in VietNam, no Bay of Pigs, no Missile Crisis...........What might have happened though? The country was ready for social changes and Nixon was not the man for that, although the system may well have forced him there, as it forced JFK into Cuba.

Spaw