I don’t know if people have speculated about this previously, but as an alternate history, what if Reagan had beaten Ford for the nomination in 1976? Would he have beaten Carter then, or did we have to live with him for four years to realize what a lousy president he was?

It’s not clear to what extent Ford lost because of general backlash over Watergate, or because of the Nixon pardon, or because of the debate gaffe, in which he said that Poland wasn’t under the thumb of the Soviets. Reagan would have likely suffered only from the first factor. If he did lose to Carter, would he have gotten the nomination again in 1980 and beaten him then (I suppose the answer to that depends partially on how close the race was in ’76)?

And if he’d won, would the Cold War have ended that much sooner as well? Would we have avoided the stagflation, the sky-high interest rates? Would we have avoided the Iran hostage crisis, which was arguably our first of many acts of irresolution toward Islamic aggression, which ultimately led to September 11?

One more thought–one wonders how much different things might have gone if he hadn’t been shot. That was what gave him the political momentum to get much of his agenda passed in his first term. Ironically, while Reagan didn’t fire a single shot to win the Cold War, perhaps John Hinckley’s single shot was responsible…

Has the anti-globo looniness run its course?

…the demonstrations have been nothing short of a dud, and the 20 or so protesters who quietly rallied yesterday were unable to hide their disappointment at the meager turnout.

“I think we overestimated ourselves,” Sandra Kwak, 22, said with a laugh in a light drizzle in expansive Forsyth Park. “But even if the few people who are here learn something, it’s not a total loss.”

Denied access to Sea Island for security reasons, two groups of around 150 people each gathered in the cities of Savannah and Brunswick on Tuesday to kick off three days of planned protests. But by the second day of the summit, only a fraction remained out in force.

“It’s a victory just to have this event,” protest organizer Kellie Gaznik said Tuesday. “If we didn’t have a place for people to do their art and make their statements, they would just walk around and maybe break things, which doesn’t accomplish anything.”

No, Kellie. No it doesn’t.

Steve Hayward has unearthed a nice quote from Reagan’s sixties debate with Bobby Kennedy:

One of my favorite bits of this exchange was the rhetorical question Reagan asked about America