USA President political thread! (switching terms.)

[Nickelking]

This is for our politics junkies to have fun without getting confrontational

ok, been reading some on politics lately and was just wondering which two presidential terms would you switch if you could?

This all came about because I realized that if Carter's term was 85-89 and Reagan's terms were 76-84 the Iran contra thing would have been the perfect thing to solve the iran problems of the time (and hopefully the future) as even the shah was shocked that we refused to talk to the ayatollah in early '79.

That would have delayed the Iran Iraq war and there would have been almost 0 Iraq arms deals until carter's term where his policy of nonintervention would have prevented out current debacle.

Ideas? If you could switch any two former presidential terms what would you do? How do you think it would alter history.

and please, this is all philosophical, not meant to jab any political party. (Hmm, does that mean Roosevelt is off limits? or can we better that?)

[Wildtim]

But if you switched Carter with Regan's second term you would have lost all the momentum Regan built up that led to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, unless you expect that he would have had this done by '84.

For sure the economic boom then building would have been stifled by a Carter presidency. Of course possibly Carter would have survived his first presidency on the residual effects of the Regan years and been re-elected to a second term and I shudder to think what the world would look like if you had eight years of Carter followed directly by eight years of Clinton.

However the most likely outcome would have been that Bush was elected directly after Regan's two terms whenever they ended (everyone was really casting their vote for the Regan administration not Bush senior anyway) happily eliminating the Carter debacle altogether. If we were to write Carter out of history entirely I would rather have liked to see what Ford could have done with a second term, one wholly his own where he wasn't cleaning up any messes but his own. I think the whole character of the late seventies would have changed and conservatives would now talk about Ford in nearly as glowing terms as Regan usually is.

[Nord Jim]

I would trade George W. Bush for Millard Fillmore.

[peas_and_corn]

So... you're asking what would happen if you put a president in power in a different time period to when they actually did?

[Nickelking]

Essentially yes, who do you think would be a better president at a different time?

[Brother Jeeter]

Since Jimmy Carter's ONLY term was the most miserable four years of my life, I'd gleefully put it in the time frame of 2081 to 2085. Let THEM put up with his silliness!

[Nickelking]

Hilarious! Your placement that is, not the fact that you had a miserable four years.