bush v gore

While everyone has a political slant, I am trying very hard to come across as objectively as possible here because the observation this is built on is objective in nature.  I'm very interested when I see similarities between people who others see as diametric opposites.  I've reworded several portions already to try to avoid sounding like I'm taking one perspective or the other, but word choice is almost never completely apolitical.

For a very long while, and definitely before Obama was elected in 2008, I have viewed George W. Bush and Barack Obama as very similar candidates.  Sure, they are very different in many respects to the point where Obama essentially ran against Bush's record in 2008, but I do think their similarities actually outnumber their differences.  I even believe this when looking at points of policy rather than personality.  Both men have campaigned at the opposite extremes of the political spectrum at one time or another, but aside from issues that almost every nationally-elected Republican and Democrat are obligated to disagree on, they ultimately ruled similarly.  This is especially the case when Bush's second term is the object of comparison rather than his first (a fact I'd attribute to Bush to asserting himself more in contrast to certain specific advisers).

For example, monetary policy under at least the second half of Bush's term and throughout Obama's term has been nearly identical. Some may point to the Fed and Ben Bernanke as the reason for that, but I think it has more to do with Treasury Secretary Geithner and his similarity to the multiple treasury secretaries that served under Bush.

Since I think Obama sort of fills a "Bush" role, I was interested to see Mitt Romney nominated on the GOP side.  If there has ever been a Republican that reminded me of Al Gore, Romney is it.  So, without being too political, the following are the similarities I see between Bush and Obama, and also Gore and Romney.

Bush and Obama

Both saw enormous spikes in popularity in their first year in office

This is sort of a fluke for both of them.  Bush was popular because he was the central stabilizing figure in the wake of 9/11.  Obama was popular because he literally and figuratively represented change from a system that a lot of people had become cynical about.  Neither of them saw their incredible levels of popularity last, but that's the way these things go.

Both more well liked personally than politically

This ties in to the last one.  Each presents himself as the type of person the average person would enjoy shooting the breeze with.  Both are very likable on a personal level.  Once they start making their policy positions known, however, they become more polarizing.

Both were lauded in their home state for being unifiers but were eventually seen on the national stage as being polarizing

I don't know if anyone else remembers this, but Bush sold himself in the first election as a "unifier, not a divider."  Obama, likewise, was supposed to usher in a new way of doing things in Washington.  Statements could be made defending or accusing either or both in this regard, but the point remains that this was a major selling point for both men at one point, and it was a way they attempted to contrast themselves with their political opponents.

Both initially ran on specific significant tax cut proposals, but were largely vague about other policy stance details

Enough said.

Both started their terms inheriting an economy headed south

Where a president's responsibility starts and stops regarding the economy is beyond the scope of this comment.  However, the seeds for the dot com bust were sown in the nineties and the seeds for the Great Recession were sown in the preceding decade.  Again, arguments can be made about who was responsible for how the economic situations progressed, but not here right now.

Both selected VP candidates with extensive resumes who could not realistically be elected president

Most VP choices in the last few elections have baffled me.  While Dick Cheney and Joe Biden may have been among the best choices made in the last twelve years, (depending on your opinions of Lieberman, Edwards, and Palin), they both confused me.  Cheney is smart and very good in debates, but he did not have apparent political aspirations, did not excite many people, and proved easy to cast as the villain.  Biden did, and probably still does, have political aspirations, and has a history of working through complicated foreign policy issues.  He also has a long history of saying very dumb things.  If nominated as a presidential candidate his odds of winning would be extremely long and would nearly rely on the GOP candidate being indicted for a felony.

Both, for good or for bad, increased access to and the size of the healthcare system by expanding the government's role in it

I'm not saying more on this right now.  There are positives and negatives that could be stated here, but my role at the moment is not to make value judgments.

Both were bailed out of a bind by General Petraus

Without General Petraus and his 2007 military surge, the odds are that the Middle East would look dramatically different now.  The geopolitical problems there that the surge addressed in this reality may have impacted the global economy by this point in a different reality due to the constraints on getting oil if the surge had not happened.  If Bush ever proves to have a legacy, the person who single-handedly saved it would be General Petraus.

Likewise, when President Obama had to replace General McChrystal in Afghanistan more or less overnight, the only person qualified in that short of notice to fill in the gap was Petraus.  Obama's opinion of Petraus' job must be good since he was nominated to be director of the CIA roughly a year ago.  Quite a change for someone Moveon.org targeted as a military stooge just a few years prior.

Gore and Romney

Both have boring personalities to a fault

In contrast to Bush and Obama, few people would want to chew the fat with Gore or Romney.  They are both monotone speakers who like to shift topics to things people in general are not interested in.  It blows me away that either have had any success in a field like politics, where personality matters more than most anything else.

That is me understating how uncharismatic both men are.

Both were originally elected to office in states that leaned the opposite political way

This may seem random, but I think that both of them being politicians from states that lean the opposite direction made them both more calculating.

Both selected VP candidates that separated them from the previous president of the same party

Joe Lieberman was on record severely criticizing President Clinton and was seen as the most morally aware option available to Gore.  Paul Ryan is to many conservatives the anti-Bush, someone who will deliver on a small-government promise that Bush did not.

Both had wives who were involved with awkward attempts to make their husbands seem more human

Here for Gore, and here for Romney.

Both had fathers who preceded them in political office

Okay, so did Bush.  The difference I see is that George W. Bush was not very similar to his dad in leadership style, and differed on policy as well.  Think about it this way: the younger Bush made a decision on a question only his father had faced to that point in whether to invade Iraq, and his dad chose very differently for the reason that Iraq might turn into a quagmire.

Romney's father was a moderate GOP governor from the north and Gore's father was a Tennessee senator.  I would argue that both lived in their fathers' shadows more than George W.

Both have made a lot of money in hedge fund management

Not merely investing in hedge funds, mind you, but taking leadership and founder roles.

More than in most election years, my main hope this election period is simply that whoever wins actually wins it on the night of the election rather than how the Bush/Gore election ultimately played out.  I am unequivocally ready for this to be over.

102 years

Today, I attended the funeral for my great-grandmother who was 102 years old.  As I only knew her in the later decades of her life I only knew her as a somewhat rough-edged individual.  From the stories I have heard she had always been blunt and capable of getting her hands dirty to the point of killing whatever needed to be killed with her hands or a shotgun on the farm, so I think elements of that personality were probably there when she was younger as well.

What has always struck me, and what I gave a lot of thought to this weekend, was how she essentially lived two lifetimes.

Her husband, and my great-grandfather, lost his first wife during childbirth.  So, she married him as his second wife as a teenager, and was eleven years his younger.  She had seven kids of her own plus his daughter from the previous marriage, and so she lived the life of a farm wife until her husband's death in 1962 when he was 63 and she was 52.  Their youngest son at the time was two days short of his thirteenth birthday.

I don't know too much about her life from the years immediately after her husband's death, but I do know that in the seventies she moved from the Midwest to Arizona with my grandparents to assist in missions work on the Navajo reservation in Arizona.  She was there over twenty years before coming back with them to Missouri where she lived another sixteen years.  Those years had to have been strikingly different from what she had lived up to that point in her life.

I can see how some of the segments of my own life are very different from others, but I have not even reached one third of the life that she has led.  When I think of life being short I think in terms of living seventy or eighty years.  At this stage of my life, one hundred years feels like more time than I would even want.  As she was married into her fifties then lived another fifty unattached, that had to feel like she was two different people.  That's how I believe I would feel in that same situation.

Coming full circle back to my grandmother's personality, it was very strong.  She had zero qualms telling anyone what she thought of whatever and whoever.  As a result, she was incredibly blunt.  She also did what needed to be done, at least when she was physically capable of it.  As she has a strong personality, it makes complete sense that she would establish her own way for the fifty years that she outlived my great-grandfather.

In any case, they are meeting up again now for the first time in literally decades.  That has to be joyous.