re: #193 Belafon

Democratic presidents willing to get involved in conflicts: Obama, Clinton, Johnson, Kennedy, FDR, Truman, Wilson. And those are off the top of my head.

Scratch off Wilson, FDR, Truman, and (to some extent) Kennedy and Johnson…they served in the Oval Office before the conservative bigot exodus from the Democrats to the GOP and Nixon’s Southern Strategy really bore fruit, back when there really wasn’t a lot of differences between Democratic and Republican presidents in how they handled national defense and foreign policy.

After Jimmy Carter’s perceived failure in those areas during his term, any Democratic president has been and will be compared to him. Presidents Clinton and Obama have had to fight the right-wing noise machine’s insinuations that Democrats are weak on defense and foreign policy; though I don’t necessarily think that these have driven them to be as militarily aggressive as they have been, I don’t really know that to be true.

William also brought up another point I missed: President Obama has been a very business-friendly president, compared to how the rest of the party seems to lean.