re: #482 HappyWarrior

I still like President Eisenhower but I admit it would have been hard for me to vote for him because of A) Silence during McCarthy’s worse moments, B) Making Nixon his number 2, C) Operation Wetback, and D) Some homophobic stuff too. I admit some of that is hindsight and 21st century views on a man born nearly a century before my birth.

In hindsight, to me it seems the worst thing President Eisenhower did was run as a Republican.

He was famously non-political before he threw his hat in the ring. He would have been accepted in either party, but the GOP was on the ropes from the Great Depression and he thought that they should be supported because we needed two strong parties.

In the past, major parties have collapsed before (the GOP came out of the collapse of the Whigs). Had he allowed them to collapse, perhaps we’d have a saner conservative party today.