Has the site actually been running all this time? I notice that the generator tag says "FrontPage 12" (post-2003), and site has a TLS certificate, which in 1996 it most certainly would not have had.
The current domain registration also dates to 2003 and as someone lower in the thread notes the current owner is connected to "4president.org".
I'm having trouble accessing old snapshots, though. The Internet Archive has one as far back as April 1, 2000, but the snapshot viewer has been giving 503 errors all morning.
I got the snapshot to load and it appears that at that point it was being sat on by scammy domain parkers, complete with promises of scandalous celebrity photos and dick pills.
I wish they would simulate the extremely slow load times to make it feel time-period accurate. You were waiting multiple seconds for images to appear before you even had any idea what you were looking at.
I used to host at a facility in DC that hosted Pat Robertson's presidential campaign's server.. they had surrounded his server with all of their adult hosting clients as a... show of support.
"The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again! Tomorrow, when you are sealed in the voting cubicle, vote for me, Senator Ka... ... Bob Dole!"
"It's a two party system. You have to vote for one of us."
I think about this episode so much. It has lived rent-free in my head for decades. I pronounce Clinton and Dole's names in the Kodos and Kang voices. >sigh<
Well, they didn't win, but the economy boomed under Clinton (from the Bush recession through the dotcom bubble) and violent crime plummeted in the same time frame as well.
Violent crime plummeted throughout the 90s because abortions was legalized in 1973, 17-27 years before 1990 and 2000, respectively, roughly coinciding with the early adulthood period where a vast majority of criminal offenses are committed, the offender having the freedom of an adult without the fully formed prefrontal cortex of one yet.
The fetuses that were aborted were overwhelmingly from socioeconomic demographics (e.g. poverty, single mother households) where they would've been statistically far more likely to become criminals, so by allowing that generation to be aborted, we effectively aborted (for the first time) a large chunk of an entire generation of people that would've been statistically overrepresented among criminals, entering their peak criminal years right when Bill Clinton was president.
This is likely a myth; crime dropped all across the developed world in a similar timeframe, but dates of legalisation of abortion likely don't line up. One popular speculation is the phasing out of leaded petrol, but really this one seems to remain a case of "shrug, dunno".
The world is complex and most phenomenons are high dimensional.
It’s very likely:
- criminal potential populations were reduced
- economics lead to stable options for more individuals in the late 90s
- lead was removed
- a myriad of other improvements in society that generally led to
Less crime
An assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994, the number of deaths from mass shootings fell, and the increase in the annual number of incidents slowed down. Any guesses as to what trends in firearm related deaths looked like when the ban was allowed to expire in 2004?
Freakanomics made that argument, but there is very little statistical evidence abortions were the cause. For one thing, abortions were legal in states like California and New York, which also saw crime drops.
Don't worry, we tripled incarceration rates between 1980 and 2000, particularly of nonviolent drug offenders, to make up for the difference. This is America, after all, we can't just let the businesses fail!
This broadly attributed to the infrastructure spend of the internet and greenspans new “unlimited productivity in the digital age” realization — which Clinton did agree to, but at the price of the promises he made
Beg pardon, but I can't quite make out what your point is. Dole/Kemp lost, but they get credit for the Clinton-era economic boom, which is well known to have been stronger and lasted longer than the more famous Reagan-era boom?
My point was, in response to the OP, to explain to the commenter what had subsequently happened in the context of that motto, pointing out that democrats deliver even what republican strategists think voters want.
I can't imagine a reading of my comment that suggests I am giving Dole/Kemp credit for any of this though.
Seeing the phrase "Smaller government" in a main tagline is so weird to see. Don't think that's an idea really any politician would even pay lip service to anymore.
It’s not as central to the GOP platform as it used to be, though. Really ever since the “War on Terror,” their messaging has mostly been around whatever the enemy du jour is. Small gov’t was a paleocon thing and McCain, maybe Rand Paul, are pretty much the last of them.
Bob Dole was the first and last Republican I ever voted for. I still think he was kind of a fun guy, although it’s good that his candidacy failed.
It goes further back than 50 years for sure. Was small-government rhetoric embraced by the whole party that far back though? Seems to me it wasn't embraced by the whole party until after Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. I think it really got going after the New Deal as Republicans started framing their opposition to helping the working class in terms of small government and states rights.
It says it's maintained by "4president.org" at the bottom of the cookie page, at least. But their blog.4president.org goes to a broken Network Solutions page so ... probably unmaintained now?
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