Presidential Responses to HIV/AIDS

With the passing of George H.W. Bush, I saw a lot of posts about how his inaction around AIDS led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Let me be crystal clear, I am not a fan of George H.W. Bush, or really a fan of any Republican since Lincoln, but I have also spent four years obsessively researching the early years of the AIDS epidemic and I’m not sure Bush deserves some of the criticism he’s been getting. But I realized if I was going to talk about what George H.W. Bush did to combat HIV/AIDS, I’d have to do a little more research about where he stacked up against other presidents.

And so, in order of historical appearance, our Presidents and their responses to HIV/AIDS.

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Primary Challenges

Researching the Kennedys and hating the President has me thinking a lot about primary challenges to incumbent presidents. After FDR fundamentally changed the American presidency by running for president until he died, the 22nd amendment was added to the constitution, limiting each subsequent president to two terms. This means that most presidents, once elected, do try to run for another term. Of course, presidents usually face challengers from the opposite party, but do they ever face a primary challenger?

I mentioned the Kennedys earlier, because one of the more famous primary challenges was Robert F. Kennedy, who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1968. In 1968, LBJ was the incumbent candidate. He had taken over after JFK was assassinated in 1963, and was elected in his own right in 1964. But come 1968, LBJ was very unpopular with anti-war segments of the party. After anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy won a primary in New Hampshire, and RFK entered the race, LBJ sensed the changing winds and withdrew, choosing not to run again.

Of course, RFK was later assassinated, and McCarthy lost the primary to Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's Vice President, who then lost the general election to Nixon.

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Three Times Now

I was really trying not to write a post about throwing your vote away by voting third party. I know that posts like that can come off as patronizing, and I do strongly believe that it is better to vote for a third party candidate than not vote at all. I told myself that I would be content writing about why those two candidates were just fundamentally unqualified to be president, instead of doing a post on why voting for a third party can ruin an election.

But Jill Stein and Gary Johnson have been so annoying that I feel compelled. What can I say, they brought this on themselves.

It's impossible to talk about third party spoilers without talking about Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate for president in 2000. For those too young to remember, George Bush won the state of Florida by 537 votes, giving him the electoral votes to win the presidency. Now, yes, there were Democrats who voted for Bush. And yes, if Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee, the Florida loss would not have been as much of a problem. And yes, Nader wasn't the only third party candidate running.

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