I am not happy about the idea of Hillary Clinton becoming president. She’s too conservative for me, too deeply in the pocket of Wall Street, was far too hawkish, and it is simply disturbing that the US, nominally a republic, has the same families running for the presidency over and over again. That tells me we’re actually living in a plutocracy, where money and connections define leadership.
When the Minnesota caucuses roll around next February, I’ll vote for anybody-but-Hillary. I would hope that at least some more progressive alternatives arise before the primaries, but right now she’s the anointed one, and her nomination is depressingly inevitable.
But if she is the nominee, come the general election, I’ll pull the lever for Hillary Clinton. I have no choice, sad to say. The opposition is a gang of clowns.
Ted Cruz is a tea-party nitwit, who has a billionaire backing him. Did I mention how I despair at our descent into plutocracy?
Marco Rubio? Deer-in-the-headlights, I-am-not-a-scientist Rubio? No way. He’s a vacuous twit with no brains at all.
Mike Huckabee is ‘considering’ a run. He must, because he’s got to put God back in government.
During an appearance on the Christian Life Today program, Huckabee told televangelist James Robinson that he was considering a 2016 presidential bid because the country needed to become a “God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God.”
“It’s the natural law of God,” the former Arkansas governor said, adding that he was not calling for a theocracy.
“We have a theocracy right now,” Robinson interrupted. “It’s a secular theocracy.”
“That’s it,” Huckabee agreed. “It’s a humanistic, atheistic, even antagonistic toward Christian faith. And that’s what we need to understand. Our basic, fundamental rights are being robbed from us, taken from us piece by piece.”
I don’t really care who the Republicans nominate, because right now they’re driven by racism and classism, and no decent human being is going to want the Republican nomination. When Wayne LaPierre articulates the party position, you know they’re going to be awful.
The next 650 days are the most dangerous days in history for the Second Amendment and for our personal freedom. That’s how long President Obama has left. Between now and the day he leaves office, he has 650 days to do whatever he wants to whomever he wants. He disregards the Constitution. He ignores his oath of office. He snubs Congress. And he dismisses the majority will of the American people.
For nearly seven years now, the president has forced his transformation down America’s throat, and our nation is choking on it. As he prepares to leave office, and leave his final legacy, there’s no telling how far President Obama will go to dismantle our freedoms and reshape America into an America that you and I will not even recognize.
…
And when he is finished, he intends to go out with a coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
…
I have to tell you, eight years of one demographically symbolic president is enough.
No blacks or women allowed in the presidential clubhouse anymore!
If LaPierre keeps on talking, I might end up enthusiastically voting for Clinton in the primaries, just to spite him.
Kindly explain how it’s not a theocracy when your laws are explicitly made in accordance with religion. Because it sounds somewhat similar to a theocracy to me.
Of course, White Men are not demographically symbolic. Likemthe sun, they just are and are thus the default everyone else deviates from
I can’t think of much that’s more “demographically symbolic” of the American establishment than an old rich white guy.
Secular theocracy. Fucking rich.
Also how the fuck do people not see the NRA as the far-right racist society of idiots that they obviously are? People, and not just fellow far-right fuckwits, still take these fuckers seriously.
Secular theocracy. Secular… theocracy. In Robinson’s world, do colourless green ideas sleep furiously? Words, how do they work?
The President has always been a symbol. I suppose I wouldn’t mind seeing a female symbol for once.
I was going to comment about how apparently it’s not ‘demographically symbolic’ to have 40+ presidents in a row all of the same race, gender and religion*, but a single deviation is: either it’s both or neither. Or that Barack Obama is just ‘some black man’, rather than someone who is competent at US politics. (Trust me, if one swapped him out with Colin Powell, Neil deGrasse Tyson, WIll Smith or your neighbor, one would get a different set of policies, because black men are not a monolith.)
* And, IIRC, Kennedy caused a fuss because he was Catholic and not a form of Protestantism.
“Forced”, except for those two elections he won.
You might want to check out Martin O’Malley. I have the same reservations about Hillary, but will vote D over any R; that’s just how it works in a two party system unfortunately.
Apparently he’s been quietly making the rounds here in Iowa and has a pretty liberal history as governor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_O%27Malley for more. The worst I’ve heard about him is that he’s not the most charismatic speaker, and that does make a difference in an election.
Racist and sexist as he is, I honestly can’t see Lapierre lamenting and vehemently “demographically symbolic” candidates were Herman Cain and/or Sarah Palin to get the nomination. He is a partisan pro-gun hack by trade. I’m sure he could put his bigotry aside in order to be an utter hypocrite long enough to ensure that guns remain completely unregulated. I’m sure that results in enough women and black people killed to make up for the sting he feels at having to vote for one of them.
Well, maybe I should be Candidate O’Malley’s running mate. I’m a charismatic speaker, and that’s about all I have going for me at the moment other than being Constitutionally eligible.
The reason Hillary is so talked about is, she is the only one who could beat any of the Republican candidates. That’s why they hate her so much.
What?
This LaPierre chap appears to be some sort of arsehole. Who knew? Besides which, I am absolutely damn certain that Barack Hussein Obama II is not statistically representative of your average African-American, or indeed your average damn-near-anyone. To the best of my knowledge, he is from a very wealthy background and attended an Ivy League University and then Harvard Law School before becoming an attorney, then teaching constitutional law, then becoming a Senator, then becoming President. Hardly your average guy, is he?
Professor Myers:
I, once again, would like to “thank you” for making yourself a captured voting block and thereby insuring that Democrats never actually move to the left, and indeed continue their drift to the right. Pretty soon because of people like you we will be choosing to vote for a Pawlenty with a D after his name and even crazier Ted Cruz.
@ Gen #2
@ robinjohnson #3
Huh. I read that as LaPierre saying that Obama is representative of the black demographic.
[just for laffs]
LaPierre ain’t no racist, he just talks like one cuz all his crowd are racists (and they all have guns waggling at him so he’s got to talk like them).
/laffs
…sigh…, that sarcasm had a bit too much actuality in it… ;-(
I, too, was gobsmacked seeing him use that phrase, “…demographically symbolic president…”, as a fig-leaf over the racist slur (that he would have preferred to use).
Oh fuck off already michael with your standard points.
I addressed this last time: https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2015/03/23/ted-cruz-is-running-for-president/comment-page-1/#comment-925826
You are repeating unsubstantiated bullshit. Not even that, much of it is refuted by actual evidence.
Either find the data supporting your case or shut the fuck up already.
Since you provide no viable and electable alternative, what you say is drivel. Evidently you wrongly think that a rethug administration will help progressives. No evidence is available that it would indicate that would happen.
Democratic presidential candidates lose when the democratic base doesn’t show up.
Hillary will not get the base to show up because she is a war mongering, plutocratic, zionist.
If Hillary gets the nomination, our next president will be a Republican nut job. Said Republican nut job will be marginally worse than Hillary, but the differences between them aren’t nearly as scary as the values they share.
I would so vote for a candidate/party whose platform was simply: do the opposite of whatever the Democrats and Republicans agree on and ignore the rest of the bread and circus distractions.
That’s not a dog whistle; it’s a fucking steak and a “here, puppy! come and get your num-nums!” As if a rich white guy isn’t demographically symbolic of the U.S. presidency, eh?
Elizabeth Warren would make a fine candidate, but it seems that she’s decided that there’s more important work to be done in the senate. Can’t hold that against her. Best we can do for her is to vote every Democrat we can into the senate and hope they stay in bloc.
Please, Christopher, elaborate on what you believe the differences are between Hillary Clinton and one of the three Republicans listed in the OP of your choice. Please show us what they are and why they are so petty that they shouldn’t be considered at all.
I wait with bated breath.
Bernie Sanders ’16!
(I would freakin take a leave of absence from my job to campaign for Sanders, seriously).
Christopher @ 19 – maybe we should remind the “Democratic base” that the next president will probably be nominating about 4 SCOTUS justices and that’s a good enough reason to turn up? I think you’re basic premise is wrong, though. The progressive left will show up to elect the first woman as a US President and be part of history even if the candidate is not far enough to the left, just as they voted for Obama who was nowhere near far enough left for most progressives in 2008.
Michael, once upon a time I would have said there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties. Then George W. spent eight years as president.
No, Hillary is nothing to write home about, but at least she’s not batshit crazy like most of the Republican candidates, she’s been around Washington long enough to know how to get stuff done, and she has shown she can hire competent people. I supported Obama in 2008; in retrospect I think she would have been a better president.
Ah good, we have michael here to represent the two-year-old throwing a tantrum wing of the party. Sure, vote-by-proxy for the Republican by staying home or going third-party. That’ll show those big-money dems you mean business! Obviously they won’t just chalk it up to the generally apathetic and uninformed voter base. And clearly it’ll be much easier to get the One True Progressive elected after the Republicans get another decade of unimpeded clearance to gut voting rights, gerrymander the hell out of all levels of government, and stack the Supreme Court with *four* new, even more ultraconservative activist judges.
You know what would actually be productive to putting leftward pressure on the party? Getting our damn people informed, registered, and out to vote in primaries, and local and state elections. Showing voters locally the quality of progressive government, and building up the pool of experienced progressive talent that can also be tapped for credible national leadership. But that shit’s hard, yo. Sitting on your couch and whining about captured voting blocks is much more effective, right?
They voted for Obama because he sold himself as the antithesis of Hillary. His lack of a long record let people project their values onto a blank canvas and hope for change.
Hillary has too many skeletons in her closet and too long a track record of being a sleezy politician who wants to milk your tax dollars to bomb brown people so that her buddies can maintain control over world-wide petrochemical transport.
I didn’t say that the differences shouldn’t be considered at all, I said that the differences in the all important realms of war and economic inequality are so minor that enough of the traditional democratic base will say, “fuck that noise” and protest the situation by staying at home on election day which will lead to the Democrats losing.
Christopher:
1. You originally made no such specification that it was only in regards to war and the economy.
2. Your dodging the question of specifics is noted.
Anteprepro#26 re Christopher #25
Yeah, I noticed that too. Handwaving is not an argument, much less an evidenced argument.
On Clinton vs. Let’s Say Cruz: I found this website: http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/past-years-national-journal-vote-ratings-20130213
Assuming its metrics are worth a damn (I didn’t look too thoroughly at methodology), Clinton was 15th most liberal member of the Senate in 2008. So she is a little better than middle of the road among Democrats (or, was, for that final year in the Senate).
Then there is Cruz: In 2013, the 4th most conservative.
I somehow have a hard time imagining that they agree on very much. I think those just saying that they do like it is common sense, or dismissing the relevance of all of the areas where they disagree, should actually have to show some fucking work.
Yeah, yeah, “marginal difference between Hillary and whatever Republican.” The same thing–the exact same thing–was said about Gore vs. Bush. Oh, the parties are all the same, the Democrats are so conservative now, I’ll vote for Nader as a protest. That sure turned out great, huh? You want to look back at the atrocity of the Bush administration, compare it against a hypothetical Gore administration, and say you’d expect the differences to be “marginal”?
Sure, just marginal differences like the Iraq War for sure never happening. With continuity around national security, maybe warnings about Bin Laden wouldn’t have been ignored, so no 9/11 and therefore no Afghanistan War, no PATRIOT act, no TSA, etc. No insane tax cuts for the wealthy. An administration that paid heed to environmental and climate science. No Medicare Part D debacle. So marginal.
What part of “Hillary will not get the base to show up because she is a war mongering, plutocratic, zionist” do you not understand?
You seem to be under the assumption that I am arguing that the democratic base *should* boycott Hillary and stay home during the election and then you are trying to get me to defend that position. I am simply stating that they *will* stay home resulting in another Democratic loss. I’m just describing reality, not making value judgements on it.
Hillary is one of the few candidates the Dems could choose that would lose against the collection of crazies lining up for the Republican circus. Ignoring that reality won’t magically make it go away.
Moggie at # 5: Your comment suddenly took me back, with a shock of recognition, to 1961, when I was a bright-eyed, eager young first-year graduate student in linguistics. Do people still quote that sentence? Anyway, thanks for bringing back memories!
I know I’m sounding harsh here, but this isn’t coming from some holier-than-thou attitude. There was a time I bought the “all the same” rhetoric. I voted Nader for president. In 2000. In *Florida*. I and ~400 other similarly terribly mistaken people could have changed history for the infinite better that day. That I didn’t is the single greatest regret in my life. Please don’t make my mistake.
Clinton has too many connections to religious nutjobs for my taste, both C-street and the Fellowship. She just comes off as sleazy to me.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/07/12/752573/-Hillary-s-Association-With-C-Street
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-hillary-clintons-religion-and-politics
Also of note:
Public opinion is the key to changing parties, not election results:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=246441&fileId=S0007123404000201
Another article about the “shrinking middle” from 1980’s into the 1990’s: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=227443&fileId=S0007123404000122
Partisanship decreases the chances of getting re-elected:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=208466&fileId=S0003055402004276
And a last one: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25098703uid=3739696&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21105999831291
“The degree of electoral strength has no effect on a legislator’s voting behavior. For example, a large exogenous increase in electoral strength for the Democratic party in a district does not result in shifting both parties’ nominees to the left. Politicians’ inability to credibly commit to a compromise appears to dominate any competition-induced convergence in policy”
(The confirmed hypothesis was that elections merely are a decision between which of two policies to implement based on the person voted for. The alternative hypothesis was that voters affect legislators and can cause them to meet in the center or moderate their positions.)
Christopher:
That would be what they have in common. You are ignoring and dismissing the differences. That’s the point. What part about that do you not understand?
Clinton would probably be the worst possible candidate on the Democratic side.
Basically the Republicans have been rehearsing for a run against her for decades now.
To a large extent she would be seen as a continuation of Obama. Obama isn’t bad, but then neither was Bill Clinton, and that “more of the same” image ended up hurting Gore.
Her religious statements and support for faith based programmes are legitimately off-putting to atheists. Atheists probably won’t end up voting for the Republicans over her, but a lot of them may not turn out at all without some serious effort being made to mend her bridges on that front.
Her statements on Grand Theft Auto will come back to haunt her with the youth vote. For younger people her stance on Grand Theft Auto is a bit like the 1980’s Satanic Panic around Dungeons and Dragons. It just made her look out of touch – which is something she will have to remedy.
The Republicans have been pushing for the gamer demographic lately, and Hillary’s past statements could hurt her there.
The Republicans are awful, but there is a lot of work to do on Hillary Clinton to patch those weaknesses up. It is doable, but it would require a lot of skill.
I think in all likelihood she is going to have the same thing happen to her this time around that happened with Obama – another candidate coming along with very similar policies, and without her baggage.
@ Nerd
Elections happen in cycles. The “viable and electable” alternative is the Democratic challenger in 2020 actually acting progressive because they know the base will punish them if they don’t. Hilliary is all but assured the Democratic nomination because, among other things, the base did not punish Obama in 2012 despite his absolute betrayals on civil liberties and the like.
The Republicans are so bad right now because the Tea Party base is simply willing to hold the mainstream Republicans accountable in ways that liberal won’t. Because liberals are too damn short sighted.
citation needed. Nothing I have said can be even mangled to mean that.
The Republicans replaced the Wigs because the Wigs were unable to hold the Democrats in check.
@eeyore
Funny that, because what convinced me there isn’t a moral distinction on core issues was 8 years of Obama rule.
@gmcard
Obviously, you have to do more than not vote for Hillary. But the I think it is a necessary condition that you let the Democrats know you will not always be there.
and uninformed? I can tell you precisely what Obama did that cost him my vote, I can more or less tell you the general policies of all the candidates. go ahead quiz me.
and once again I do not demand purity from candidates, I’m perfectly content to have great and grave policy disagreements. They just, unlike Obama and likely Hillary, can’t believe that president has the right to assassinate American citizens at will based on unvetted national security claims.
1) I do do that.
2) nothing I have said precludes people doing that.
3) this isn’t either/or. it’s a yes and
Ah Anteprepro once again trying to straw me, or talk past my statements.
Anteprepro your “evidence” that Democrats are not more conservative is that the Democratic base says they are more liberal. Which has nothing to do with the actual assertion I made. I’ll spell it for you, slowly. Regardless of statements, elected Democratic officials behave more conservatively, more consistently today than they did in 1970’s. I don’t have time to provide a fully comprehensive survey, but fortunately we can like at Carter vs. Obama a few points to get a gist for what I mean.
Budget:
Obama offered SS on the chopping block, which was unthinkable for Carter to do.
Civil Liberties:
Obama resigned the patriot act and NDAA 2012, which again was unthinkable for Carter to do.
Obama still favors the death penalty as of 2012, Carter is opposed (through to be fair that is a recent development for Carter)
etc.
Likewise, you second two points are what I am saying and works as evidence for my case. The Tea Party is the mechanism by which the Republican holds the party accountable, and by your own statement it has worked great.
I am advocating for liberals to do a “tea party” thing for progressives. Now, third parties are one way, and that’s fine, but if you think an internal dust-up works better, fine whatever. I not committed either way, I simply committed to not merely pulling a lever for someone because they have D after their name. Yes even if that means a Republican gets in for a term or two.
@13 Thumper: Obama was upwardly mobile; read his book (which in the end made the vast bulk of his money). His background was comfortable but hardly plutocratic.
@17 anteprepro: grand rant, especially in the linked version
@22 drst: Plenty of progressives thought in 2008 that Obama was much further to the left than he actually is. I voted for him with my eyes open, so I was not disappointed, but I heard complaints of betrayal by February 2009. I do suspect some lefty racism (black dude gotta be rad like us) but really I am just saying that anyone who voted for him thinking that he was a quasi-revolutionary was nuts.
I frequently find it strange how some of my political allies on the left seem to have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time — I don’t have to agree with Hillary to vote for her, and I don’t have to agree with everything you say to work in alliance with you, either. Less yelling, please, more attempts at persuasion.
brucegorton @ 36
Right, Clinton will totally get creamed by the Republicans. That’s why every single poll taken in the last couple of years shows her beating the crap out of every one of them.
Gore failed because the press corps hated him and liked Bush and the media had no idea how to handle the 2000 election mess. Also technically Gore won the 2000 election so I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss him as a precedent.
Clinton’s “statements on Grand Theft Auto” will not matter a tinker’s damn to “younger people” especially when she’s running against candidates that want to ban birth control, deport every Latino person they can and protect businesses and allow discrimination against LGBTQ individuals, all of which matters far more to millenial voters than something about a video game that pretty much everyone acknowledges is hella violent.
Michael, you are a fucking imbecile. My evidence is actual research on the subject. Your evidence is just your subjective description of an alleged change since the 1970’s, based largely on your assessment of maybe three topics that you personally find to be important. You are the one talking past my statements. I imagine it is just plain incompetence, but I am not ruling out the influence of dishonesty here. Also, continued lack of evidence for your stances is noted. All you have are appeals to common sense. And I have actual evidence showing that, surprise surprise, folk intuition isn’t enough here. Try fucking harder or shut the fuck up.
Sits in the corner with my “Sanders/ Warren” ’16 banner and sighs. It’s sad that it’s come to having to vote against candidates, instead of for them. Hillary doesn’t thrill me for the reasons everyone else has pointed out- but she is intelligent, competent, and not a bat-shit crazy godbot. It would put a woman in the White House. And mostly, it’s not one of the GOP fanatic offerings.
I have a serious question for people who are advocating to always vote for the Democratic nominee in the general.
Is there any stated position, or action that would preclude doing that? if so what?
I’m serious about this, I very well know what issues I’m willing to comprise on, and what issues I’m not. I do not require “purity.” I’m just wondering how others think.
This site is very feminist (observation of fact, not an attack). It is not inconceivable that a Democrat candidate is pro-life/anti-choice/force birther, maybe even at the presidential level. Is that sufficient reason to withhold your vote? If not, why shouldn’t Democrats run pro-life/anti-choice/force birther people? Your vote is secured any way.
Also already refuted the idea that conservatives are holding Republicans more accountable than liberals are for Democrats. Quoted in 17 for all to see. Michael, of course, wouldn’t care about facts though. It gets in the way of their set narrative.
michael @ 37
@ antepropo
Except it isn’t. the research you offered is off point for two big reasons, I’ll list them.
1) My claim is about the Democrat officials. The research is about the base. It is both possible and probably that your research is correct, and my claim is correct because of the disconnect between the base and the elected officials.
2) the research is about stated beliefs, not behavior. My claim is about behavior/outcome. I’m sure a lot of Democrats feel more liberal because they use my life as a political football, while not giving a shit about due process but that doesn’t mean their feeling corresponds to reality
I picked them because I knew them off the top of my head. Pick most topics and I think you will find the dynamic at work.
Let’s do this dialectically,
Is the federal gov’t more conservative today than it was in 1970? yes or no?
@michael #42
Anti-choicers would have a hard time in the primary. I would be shocked if somebody that wanted to “overturn Roe v. Wade” made it to a nomination.
There’s always an element of kowtowing to the religious/moneyed establishment. The system is infected with that kind of nonsense, but Democrats are typically more likely to stand against it. Now, can we please do away with the hypotheticals about what would dissuade us from voting Democrat and live in the real world where the Republican party is actively working against the rights of human beings?
Antrepro
The Tea party, which you even state moved the window to the right, is what I mean by holding Republicans accountable. I address this.
Also, idiot:
You couldn’t even be arsed to read the fucking title of the second link? It was about Congress. About actual voting records of members in Congress too. Showing the median position for Democrats at roughly the same position in both the House and Senate. Over the exact time frame that you make vague appeals about how Democrats were totally more liberal then, because Jimmy Carter.
What the actual fuck.
I’m a lot less bothered by another Clinton running for Pres as neither Clinton comes from a rich and powerful political Dynasty. Jeb Bush is a much more bothersome example. Seriously? The first 2 Bushes weren’t bad enough? The 3rd time’s the charm?
Is she “in the pocket of Wall Street?” Of course, she has to suck up the big money people. And, as I don’t see a serious attempt to create some form of serious public financing of campaigns on the horizon, I don’t think that’s likely to change.
Is she Hawkish? Of course she is. America is a very Hawkish, War Mongering nation that worships power and a tough-guy, Bomb ’em back to the Stone Age, approach. She has to be tough, especially since she’s a Democrat, especially since she’s a Girrrl.
Clinton is playing the part she needs to in order to get elected. What does she really believe in her heart of hearts? Who knows… We’re not likely to find out.
It’s like being given a choice between a Big Mac and a bowl of diarrheal monkey poop. Yea, a Big Mac is nothing to get excited over, but it’s a lot easier to swallow than a bowl of shit.
Obama is far from perfect, but does anybody seriously think we would’ve been better off with that hysterical drama queen, John McCain or that smug, entitled, clueless Mitt Romney as President?
My only complaint is that we can’t just elect HRC now and skip the next 18 months of electoral BS.
Michael 45, see my 48.
Michael 47, read 17 and 43 again because apparently you are too stupid to get that conservatives absolutely DO NOT break rank more often than liberals do.
The sheer magnitude of your incompetence is actually baffling.
@ Pete Shanks #38
I did not know that, so thanks; but you can replace “very rich” with “comfortably well-off” without making too much difference to my statement, seeing as it’s a list.
Threadrupt, but search feature tells me no one has commented on Shirley-Freuding-Chisolm!
Shirley Chisolm, FTW!
Or, well, the nomination. Or, well, not, I guess.
But Shirley-Freuding-Chisolm!
She deserved a better electorate.
michael @ 42
(hopefully not blockquote failing again)
Realistically? Not the way things are now, because it’s unimaginable that for whatever terrible opinions this hypothetical Democratic nominee held, their hypothetical Republican opponent would hold even worse. But the Republican party is balanced on the knife’s edge. Demographic shift should be prepping them to fall the way of the Know Nothings. Unfortunately, this is countered by their useful idiots like the Tea Party and their utter lack of scruples in applying their current power to gerrymander and voter suppress and court stack their way into permanent rule over a majority that hates them. If we can hold off the conservatives long enough for their party to implode again, there’s opportunity for a much stronger progressive coalition.
I agree with everything in the OP. However, this myopic focus on the Presidential race is part of the problem with American politics. While it is very important that we don’t get a Repub in the White House, all those progressives who didn’t bother to vote in 2014 essentially DID vote. They voted to make it harder for anything progressive to get done by anyone. By sitting on their hands, they gave majority control of the Senate to the crazy party. And this isn’t something easily undone in 2016. Those nutjob Repub Senators elected last year will be with us until the start of 2021, even if every Repub voter dies of terminal stupidity tomorrow. Also, think of all the school boards and state offices that were handed to the religious whackos. So, to Michael and others of his kind of shallow thinking, thanks for nothing.
michael kellymiecielica:
I agree with gmcard. You’re not thinking about this clearly. (No surprise there.) It doesn’t matter how bad their positions are in isolation. If a democrat’s positions are worse than another candidate’s, and that other candidate has a reasonable chance of winning, then I will vote for the other candidate. It’s very simple. That’s an extremely unlikely scenario, given the current state of the real world, but that’s an answer to your question.
There are no Republicans who will have a better (overall) platform than a Democrat. That’s not likely to change any time in the next several elections, if at all in the foreseeable future.
And there are no progressive third-party candidates who would win a presidential election. So, even if their positions are better than a Democrat’s, they’re not actually doing the things they say they would do if elected. In contrast, a Democrat has a chance of winning and actually doing better things than their Republican counterpart would. So that’s the best thing to do, given our situation, because anything else is making things worse than they need to be.
@52, Crip: sadly, yes. But old Bertie Brecht nailed part of it:
Or as Rummy would say, you go to an election with the people you have, not necessarily the people you want to have.
me, above:
Just to soften this up for you a little bit. I said “it doesn’t matter how bad” they are. But, of course, if our best option in the election is so bad that we should peacefully overthrow the government (for example), and that has some chance of success (by which I mean actually good results), then we’re not talking about what to do on election day anymore.
drst
Not what I said. I said she would likely end up getting pipped in the primaries due to the issues she can be attacked on.
That said, look what happened in the mid-terms. The Republicans are pretty much universally vile, yet they still win elections because their base shows up. Clinton needs to energise her support, not just have people saying they’ll hold their noses because of how awful the other person is.
I don’t think she would get “creamed” – but I do think the race would end up a lot closer than it would with another Democratic candidate.
Sooo… laws based upon the imagined will of an unevidenced deity would somehow not amount to a theocracy… even though a theocracy specifically describes a system of government based upon appeals to religious aurthority?
There is not enough possible head-to-desk contact in the world to express how utterly idiotic that notion is.
This is one of those days when I really do think that some kind of test needs to be implemented to ensure that a potential candidate for public office has some kind of basic competency in fundamental political, social, economic and scientific concepts before they are allowed to take office. Statements like ‘secular theocracy’ or ‘evolution is just a theory’, uttered in all earnestness, would be an automatic fail right out of the gate.
Gregory Greenwood: In fairness, the person who said “secular theocracy” was just a televangelist. Huckabee only agreed with the concept behind the term and babbled about poor persecuted Christians and the evil atheistic gubmint. Which, arguably, is even stupider, but it is less unique and hilarious sounding.
More on Wayne LaPierre, Lord King of the Association of Rifles:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2013/02/14/the-madness-of-wayne-lapierre-will-nra-members-suffer-the-consequences/
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/12/21/1368881/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-nras-wayne-lapierre/
And more good stuff:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/lapierre-national-firearm-database-will-be-hacked-chinese-or-handed-over-mexico
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/nra-loaded-guns-okay-schools-not-gun-shows
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/cpac-if-you-dont-have-gun-you-have-nothing
Hillary Clinton may have her faults, but reactions like those below make me more certain that I would side with her as a candidate rather than any right-winger:
Link
At the link, there’s a video of Klayman saying all that crap. There’s no doubt about the “evil man” language.
Background on Klayman.
brucegorton @ 58 – you’re still ignoring/assuming the progressive left would have to hold their noses for Clinton (personal and debatable), and that they won’t show up in a presidential election when we have no evidence from 2008 or 2012 that the Democratic base will not show up in a presidential election year.
Question. I live in Texas. We all know what way Texas is going to swing when the votes come in. Should I vote for Hillary, even though I can’t stand her, or should I go third party? Either way my vote doesn’t make much of a difference, so I’d rather vote my conscience and not for a warmongering neo-conservative democrat.
News for you idjit, the democratic base isn’t leftists, it is moderate toward liberal folks. Often more centrist than myself. You are out on the wings, so far you can’t see the center. I don’t support the green party as they are too out there to be electable.
You want progressive candidates? Either work at the grass roots level to make it happen, or shut the fuck up. That is what the rethugs did. Got out the vote, then the candidates that are so far right they would have been unelectable prior to getting out the vote. You add nothing cogent to these discussions with your inane and unevidenced projections.
May I offer one limited alternative to voting for the lesser of two bad choices? I live in Georgia. The electoral votes for my state might as well be cast right now – they’ll go to whoever the GOP nominee turns out to be. A similar situation exists in California, for the Democrats, and many other states for whichever party. In those states, we might just as well go ahead and vote for a third party candidate – I chose Dr. Jill Stein (Green Party) last time.
If you live in a swing state, please don’t do this. As gmcard (#32 above) noted, it could have devastating results. In the unlikely event Georgia seems to be swinging blue enough to be in play, I’ll change my strategy. But until that happens, I feel comfortable with using my insignificant vote as an insignificant signal to the Democrats that they are not capturing the loyalty of all the voters they’d like.
On Hillary Clinton and her chances of winning:
Better Than Joe Biden and Republican candidates: http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2015/images/03/17/poll.2016.pdf
Among women, better than Elizabeth Warren (or Palin): http://www.refinery29.com/2015/04/85532/hillary-clinton-president-survey-results-millennials
Young support for Hillary much larger than for alternatives: http://fusion.net/story/41972/fusion-poll-millennials-politics-hillary-clinton-jeb-bush-election-2016/
See question 37 and 39 here (Hillary is massively favored among Democrats for the candidate, and beats out all Republicans if asked if they would vote for either Hillary or one of the Republican candidates today) http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2014/images/12/24/poll2.pdf
But again, the primaries are a year away and the election a year and a half. It’s a little fucking early to speculate.
Can I vote for the Republican version of Hillary? I mean, the version of Hillary that exists in the Republican imagination–the one that will immediately turn our medical care over to Canada, tax churches in order to publicly fund abortions, open the border with Mexico completely and order the immediate seizure of all firearms? Because I’m sure that Hillary would be awesome.
@anteprepro
I some how managed to miss the second link. Looking over it, my initial reaction is too say it is creating a false non-moment because it’s not really measuring liberal/conservative votes, but democratic/republican votes. The chart charts roll-call votes. It doesn’t isolate the action on a grand liberal spectrum. For example, does it measure a vote for the NDAA in 2012 as a liberal vote because it was a Democratic bill? It shouldn’t because the NDAA is not a liberal bill under any reasonable definition. Furthermore, even through the article says it charts values on the traditional spectrum it doesn’t define how it breaks that down.
I still don’t think the research is measuring what I’m claiming. If the Democrats are not moving to the right, how did the federal gov’t get so conservative?
The Democrats have held power, repeatedly over the 30 years.
Oh god, again.
Can I please have actual evidence that you can communicate to the Democratic party that they should become liberal when you fail to vote to them? If they feel compelled to change, they are going to feel compelled to become more moderate, and move right-ward, to capture more moderate votes when they lose votes. It does not make sense for them, based on voting behavior alone, to move leftward to gain votes. So it is a good thing they don’t really shift based on wild guesses on what votes are supposed to mean, and rather change based on public opinion (see my comment at 38).
@32 GMCard:
Don’t beat yourself up. The George W. Bush presidency was not your personal fault. And something tells me that had 401 extra votes gone to Gore, Florida Repubs would have adjusted their counting methods accordingly.
Easy fuckwit. SHOW US A VIABLE (ELECABLE THAT ELECTION) CANDIDATE. You can’t do that. You lose.
anteprepro: I agree that Hillary is probably more electable than Warren would-have-been. I’m not sure that means that Warren wouldn’t have been the better way to go if she’d opted to run. (I accept her decision not to, even as I find it lamentable.) I think Warren would’ve had better coattails for one thing (look at both Bill and Barack; they tended to have very short coattails in terms of bringing the rest of the party into power, which is one of many reasons that BHO had such a hard time in office). It’s a weakness of the centrist approach that you end up having no real passion among your supporters. Warren would’ve been riskier, but the payoff higher. I’d say the same about most other credible progressive candidates.
@Quotidian:
I’m with you: if your state’s polling shows a margin significantly outside the margin of error, vote your conscience.
If more people were educated about the candidates, even if they voted lesser-of-2-evils in strongly contested states, the success of progressive candidates would cause democratic movement…and more importantly, it would cause big donors to see candidates as “viable” that are currently seen as too far left to be “viable”. Of course the “viable” metric is largely self-referential to the donor class, but the donor class is able to respond (well, the left-wing donor class is able to respond) to empirical evidence that the candidates they support are less popular than farther-left candidates, if you start getting situations, e.g., where the R gets 60, the D gets 15-20 and the P gets 20-25 in a race that wasn’t closely contested. Few of those D votes would go R if the P was nominated, but we simply **don’t know** to the R votes. We do know that Rs are rarely more than 50% of a district, so at least 10 points that went to the R should theoretically be up for grabs. What are they waiting for? Rs at least portray themselves as anti-establishment. Ds don’t. I appreciate that they don’t rail about government == evil, but would an **actual** anti-establishment candidate that covers well the dem-voter-desirable policy ground be able to significantly cut into that R anti-establishment vote? What if they had genuine enthusiasm and donor support b/c independent-minded (and government-suspicious) people in the district felt it was the first time they’d been given a choice between 2 candidates that are each represented as being an alternative to the establishment?
Rs lose badly on individual policy questions, even the most controversial ones (abortion, guns, and more are areas where the public is far more liberal than R-candidates), but Ds lose badly on being trusted to actually do the good that they say that they want to do.
It’s possible that the R noise machine is working too well right now for a truly progressive candidate to have much of a shot at congress, but since we’re not actually trying it, we don’t know that’s the case.
Thus R-dominated districts are great places to vote P, and represent good opportunities to test new issues and new messages. Currently the Ds simply spend money billing themselves as R-lite and hope that their particular opponent has a late-campaign flub or scandal or heart attack. I think that’s a total waste.
Voting your conscience can, IMO lead to a reduction of that waste and new/better candidates for important state and federal offices.
anteprepro @ 60;
So, not all that different froma Republican politician afterall… ;-)
Never let it be said that Huckabee doesn’t give quality stoopid.
I do see your point. I still think that a test of basic comeptetncy before taking office would be a good idea though. It might have spared us a lot of trouble with Shrub, for example.
Ante
By consistently voting, stating and explaining what you vote means in terms of issues/ideology. I.e. I voted for Obama in 2008 only because he promised to roll back the Bush era abuses. The restoration of the 4th amendment is literally the only thing that got me to pull the lever for Obama. I pulled lever for Gary Johnson because he promised to roll back the Obama/Bush era in 2012. I will be voting for a candidate in 2016 that hits the same issues again.
I don’t care about “party” I care about ideology. I only will vote in favor of liberalism, broadly understood.
I don’t see how this follows.
michael:
No, they are looking at how liberal and conservative these voters are.
The relevant link in the article is dead but wikipedia has an article about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOMINATE_%28scaling_method%29
Fucking duh: The Republicans moved more rightward. Which is also shown in the charts.
Okay, so we can hold their feet to the fire, criticize Democratic politicians, push public opinion and attempt to move the party leftward, but still vote for them then? Just like the Tea Party? Then we have no fucking disagreement. Argument resolved. Merry Christmas everyone.
michael:
Fucking idiot strikes again. The point is that the vote alone does not communicate that.
Let me say that again: THE VOTE ALONE DOESN’T SAY THAT.
They do not know that you would have voted for them. Even if they did, they do not WHY you didn’t. They don’t know you were too liberal for them: they are going to go with the fucking odds and assume you were not liberal enough for them. And push closer to the right to get more moderates to compensate. If they move at all.
Regardless, you have no fucking evidence for the idea that protest votes effect change or send a message in itself. Establish that fact with evidence or shut up. You are all fucking babble and not a shred of fucking evidence. Even if you had a point, anyone even close to having similar positions or opinions would be ashamed to bring light to it, because you are so fucking inept.
@anteprepro:
To whom were you responding? I know I hadn’t posted yet, but there were comments like BobApril’s comment in #66 that wasn’t merely about failing to vote democratic, but about actually voting progressive.
This isn’t about merely failing to turn out because the options suck, or districts where the R got more votes than the D establishment felt was likely. In those situations, you are correct that the signal to Ds likely is become more “moderate” on the issues (even if it’s rhetoric and marketing that are winning more than the actual positions of a candidate).
Voting for an actually progressive candidate, however, does send a different signal than merely “fail[ing] to vote [democratic]”.
it is a pity that no one is running of the stature or politics as Shirley Chisholm pictured on the right.
uncle frogy
Also, it is great that you are a single issue voter and all, michael, but it is fucking baffling that you expect everyone else to be. And that you think you can pretend to be Liberaler Than Thou in the process. While apparently giving zero fucks about racism and discrimination, sexism and abortion rights, LBGT issues, poverty, the environment, safe business regulations, infrastructure, and a thousand other fucking issues.
So yes, chastise us for voting for Hillary and mainstream Democrats to protect all of that, while you vote for a libertarian that wants to literally cut government spending in half, when that doesn’t even make fucking sense and will wreak incredible fucking havoc.
By fucking god.
Fair enough Crip Dyke. You can send a message if you vote for a party that is obviously and simply just a more liberal version of the Democratic party. When you have people like michael voting Libertarian, though, that doesn’t send a coherent message at all.
In this country, failing to get about 2% of the vote means you are ignored. The green party got 0.36% of the vote in the last presidential election. Voting green means your vote is ignored by the democrats. They know they can’t rely on the real leftists, who distain the party to get out and vote for them. You become a lost cause.
@anteprepro, #60:
Whaaat?
How is that any distinction?
Touche.
@anteprepro, #82:
That’s for damn sure.
Quotidian, #64:
Sure, all of Texas’ votes in the electoral college are certainly going to the Republican candidate. But for now, we don’t even know who that is.
I don’t know what the third party is. Do you? You’re assuming they’ll be better than Clinton, but who are they and how do you know that? (I also don’t know who can be on TX ballots, and write-in candidates are especially pointless in presidential elections.)
I don’t really understand. If you know it won’t make a difference, there doesn’t seem to be any moral weight behind your “conscience.” It’s more like saying you’d rather have chocolate ice cream than vanilla. Sure, you may prefer that. But it makes no difference and you know it makes no difference. That doesn’t look like a moral choice with some consequential oomph behind it, as people ordinarily mean when they talk about their following their consciences. Neither choice is more justified than another, if you’re claiming that it literally makes no difference. If that’s how you’re thinking about it, you shouldn’t think of it as wrong or unacceptable for Texans to vote for this “warmongering neo-conservative democrat.”
You might say that there is some almost-imperceptible difference, in that your popular vote (despite the electoral votes) will be counted on the side of the more progressive candidate. That’s true whether you vote for Hillary, who’s more progressive than the Republican, or for a progressive third-party candidate, who might be more progressive than either. But by voting you want to make it known that your individual support is behind one of those candidates, both of which aren’t actually going to win any electoral votes from your state.
Then, talking heads on television (or columnists, fund-raisers, etc.) won’t be able to plausibly claim certain things about you, like figuring that you’re probably among the large number of conservative Texans who didn’t happen to show up to vote for the Republican. Instead, you’re evidently a progressive Texan who voted somebody other than the Republican (or another third party candidate). People then know that there is some such political force to be reckoned with in Texas, even if it didn’t contribute to the outcome of the election.
So, whatever it may be and however small it may be, there is an actual physical effect to consider there. But it’s confusing to talk as if that’s merely what’s in your conscience. And if you’re thinking of it like this, then you might say it really is morally better (with definite and recognizable outcomes that are better) to vote for a third-party candidate than Clinton, but at this point it’s been watered down a lot, compared to something like a vote for neocon warmongering vs. no neocon warmongering.
The proper strategy, at least to me, is to infiltrate the Democratic Party at lower levels with progressive candidates, like the Tea Party did for the Republicans, and effect a gradual takeover, until you have enough control over the nomination process that the mainstream candidates have to bend leftwards to court you even if they are not personally that progressive.
But this is a long game. You won’t see fruition to your efforts for at least 30 years.
In the meantime, you vote in the manner that is most likely to advance the progressive cause in practical terms. That means voting for the most progressive candidate with a reasonable chance of winning, OR, whose vote totals, if elevated, are most likely to influence the actual winner to pull to the left.
In the primaries that likely means voting for someone to the left of Clinton.
In the general that means voting for Clinton, even if the Republican candidate is an actual exact clone of her in policy and position (which of course they are not. All of them are further right than Clinton)
You may quibble all you want about how there isn’t much difference between Clinton and a “moderate” Republican nominee, but even if the difference between their individual political philosophies is small and to rightward for your liking, there is one HUGE difference between them.
A Republican president is a member of the Republican Party, and is subject to the political pull of the far right Republican wing. He will NOT, in any way shape or form, be swayed by any kind of leftward political pressure of any type, which he can safely ignore, and he will NOT be very likely to be vetoing any form of far right legislation passed by Congress, which, may I remind people, is currently dominated by far right Republicans and will likely continue to be for at least the first 2 years of the next president’s term.
A Democratic president like Clinton, on the other hand, will not be subject to any sort of far right wing pull from within her own party. She’ll be subject to a center right pull and a center left pull, and she will be far more likely to veto far right legislation coming out of a Republican dominated congress.
And the third thing to consider is of course Supreme Court nominations. A republican president, even one IDENTICAL to Clinton in political alignment, is far more likely to nominate a Clarence Thomas/Antonin Scalia type to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg (the most likely next opening), while Clinton or any other Democratic president, is quite a bit more likely to nominate a Sonia Sotomayor type.
And which one would you prefer to be on the Supreme Court?
drst
Look, it is still a fair time away. Not all the candidates have announced they’re running, and really the attack ads haven’t even really begun yet. When the 2008 primaries started off, it was much the same as it is now, everybody thought it would be Hillary.
And it didn’t work out that way. I think it will happen the same way again – another left of field candidate coming in and snatching it from her as pressure builds against her.
But of course I could be wrong.
Because let’s face it. In the short term, the absolutely most critical thing the progressive cause needs in America right now is a presidential veto, and the absolutely most critical medium term thing the progressive cause needs right now is another Supreme court position that is at least centrist and not a flaming wingnut.
If we don’t get those two in this next presidential term, by the time a truly electable progressive candidate arises, there may not BE any progressive cause left to fight for.
I’m hoping to be able to vote for a progressive democrat in the primaries. I’m not sure I’ll get the chance since I live in Vermont, but I’ll most likely end up voting for the Democratic nominee since 3rd party candidates don’t often bother trying to get on the ballot here since it’s not worth the effort for the most part. Jill Stein didn’t get on the ballot for the 2012 election in Vermont.
The traditional left/right only includes economic issues…and it in of itself is a poor measure of actual liberalnesss. Again how is something like NDAA 2012 rated? This is a non-trivial problem with the evidence.
This is an insufficient explanation as the Republicans have not had a monopoly of gov’t power for those 4 years, and indeed most of the time it has been a split gov’t.
which is why my voting behavior is always coupled with people stating the message. Jesus Christ.
How? I’m stating it. I’m stating! I even emailed the white house to tell them why Obama lost my vote! I encouraged people to do the same. Jesus Christ. voting is the not the be all end of of civic engagement.
citation needed for when I made this claim.
Since when does thinking “4th amendment issues are so important” = “I don’t care racism.”
I’m queer. I resent and hate when liberals and progressive use my life and rights as a political football to keep people like me in line. I do not appreciate it when people use me like this.
The message sent is discordant, but because my politics are discordant with Crip Dyke’s. It doesn’t make my massage incoherent.
tea parties are willing to stay home.
That’s fucking great, again that is exactly what I have been saying too, but you are the one fucking blaming Democrats not being fucking liberal enough on people “making yourself a captured voting bloc”. I’m sorry that the entire fucking point of your own initial arguments are now inconvenient for you!
Citation. Needed.
The focus on the presidential election in the US, especially for third-parties, baffles me. It gets a lot of attention, but it is just not going to work out. If there is going to be any change in the US, people are going to have to start caring about local, and state elections. What happens at the top is not going to change unless there is movement at lower levels. I thought I would check out the current state of third-party support at the local level. I see that the Libertarian party has 146 or so members elected US wide, Green has 131 members across your country, and that there are maybe a few hundred others. It is amazing how low those numbers are.
I picked a mid-sized US city, the first that came to mind was Milwaukee and found out there was a spring election a week ago. Lots of state officials being elected. Then I looked at the results and was shocked. I expected a low turnout, but what I saw was jaw dropping.
http://itmdapps.milwaukee.gov/electionresults/elecweb.jsp
12.36% turnout. Wow. No wonder there are never ending stories of incompetent school boards, judges, and county supervisors in the US. Evidently, no one cares enough to stop them from getting elected.
anteprepro @ # 4: Also how the fuck do people not see the NRA as the far-right racist society of idiots that they obviously are?
For that, one needs the superior discernment of multiple thinky thought leaders:
Because at the end of the day actions (voting) speak louder than words, You can email Obama/other speech as much as you want disclaiming that you agree with policies but Obama/leadership won’t care because until not voting/funding them is a real possibility. What is your breaking point.
If I got was a Democrat, giving how unprincipled the left is and how adverse the left is to losing any election, I would be a mere milometer to the left of the relevant republicans because I still would suck up most of the engaged Democrats.
Romney lost. The dozens or so upsets in primaries, that are tea party lead. That the Republican nomination took forever to wrap up in 2012. that ted Cruz felt it was needed to shut down the gov’t despite all non-tea party people thinking it is a horrible idea. A priori reasoning
We don’t all suffer from libertarian mind-rot, michael kellymiecielica. You have nothing to add to a discussion among actual progressives, talking about what we can actually do with our votes, given some reasonable set of facts, values, goals and priorities (which libertarians lack). You want to turn this into some other conversation, but we don’t need to have it.
Side note: I’m not sure if increasing popular involvement in the voting process, by itself, is going to solve anything. The average voter is a moron. It’s probably a more of a good thing than a bad that ~87.5% of Milwaukians stayed home.
I am not a libertarian. Repeat after me: Michael is not a libertarian and it is beyond lazy to assume that.
The national Whig party fell apart because they didn’t have a coherent position on slavery. Local Whigs were elected until the Republican party scoop up many of those members.
What?
In other words, you would be as far away from the left as you can get away with. That reflects how you think. There is no actual reason why that must be a good thing to do, strategically or ethically.
Romney’s loss and the government shut down are proof that Tea Party actually will refuse to vote for mainstream Republican candidates. Okay, I have officially determined that this is a game of pigeon chess.
Let me just say one last thing: You are wrong yet again. Your lack of evidence is stunning. The fact that actual evidence refutes you? Unsurprising:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/14/upshot/100000003447904.embedded.html?_r=0
Elections are all about turnout for your group. After living here for 24 years, the congressional district finally elected a democrat in 2012. In 2014, the previous rethug got elected again? The rethug didn’t get any more votes than in 2012. The rethugs turned out to support him. But the democrats, and lazy leftists, didn’t bother to vote in the same numbers as 2012 with its presidential election. That is why getting your base out is the most important thing. And why we can’t get rid of our crazy alderman. The opposition is too lazy/disinterested to get out and vote.
Also, again with the “unprincipled left” thing, evidence I already cited at 17 shows that liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, are at least roughly equivalent in being unprincipled supporters of their party. And if anything, it ain’t the liberals that are the ones who are bad about that. But, again, michael is fucking allergic to anything resembling facts.
@
Unfortunately, in an objective sense, we know that the democratic party views libertarians (with good reason) as a republican faction. While they certainly *know* that not all libertarians lean Republican when a strong libertarian candidate is not present, it is enough for Dems that the demographic leans Republican.
The message of a libertarian vote is, objectively, not, “Get better on the 4th amendment or else your votes will continue to go elsewhere.”
Of course, you can vote that way AND do the other active things you were suggesting…but until those other things actually change how the libertarians are viewed by the Ds, the vote for a libertarian candidate in a poorly-contested race will be seen consistently with image of libertarians/libertarianism as a whole, and thus .6-.8 of a strong republican vote.
Especially when combined with the tendency to see “lefty-libertarians” as being predominantly “anti-drug war libertarians,” a demographic the Dems don’t **want** to court, a more principled stand on 4th amendment issues simply can’t get communicated to the Ds through voting, even voting consistently for the strongest candidate on 4th amendment issues in any race.
your vote’s messages is “incoherent” because it is, per Oxford:
If the Ds can’t comprehend the message of your vote, your message is incoherent.
This is true even if the reason the Ds can’t comprehend the message of your vote is stereotypes about (and political demography of) libertarians. The incoherence doesn’t have to mean that you, personally, are making a bad choice. By all means vote your conscience.
The message, however, remains politically incoherent.
First my #105 should have read:
Second, I hope it was clear that I’m taking you seriously as being a strong 4th amendment voter and not as a libertarian per se. I know others may have done so, but I haven’t labeled you as a libertarian. I have only used your Gary Johnson vote and libertarian policies on 4th amendment issues in my analysis.
michael kellymiecielica
What you’ve just said here is one of the most harmful memes in American politics. It is why politics is riddled with idiocy – it is not a good thing if most people don’t vote.
With low voter turnouts you end up with singular groups dominating the discussion. It is easy for the local fundamentalists to take over, they just tell their church to go vote.
And this stuff is where the most real power really is. You want to stop cops shooting black teenagers, the federal authorities cannot really do that. The state authorities have problems doing that. It requires changing the funding model for the cities – so that the police are not considered a major source of revenue.
Want to fix America’s poor education? The feds cannot do it, but your school board can.
It is all in city hall. Secular governance does not begin in Congress, that is not in fact where the biggest battles are being fought, it begins in your local school board, it begins in your city council.
The fact that the majority do not vote is not a good thing. It leaves the system vulnerable to nutjobs, and if the only people voting are nutjobs, you will eventually get squirrels running your city.
107 brucegorton: Well said.
Which is why the Dems will lose.
An anti-war canidate, anti-war abroad and anti-war at home, would mop the floor with Hillary in the primaries and any republican crazy in the general, yet the Democratic Party does everything it can to squelch any sort of anti-war sentiment within its ranks. Why is that?
Thank you for spelling that out. I did not think it needed to be spelled out, and was pretty obvious that this is one of the main problems with super low voter turnouts, but apparently some people do not understand this.
Local offices in the US really matter. I always hear people say their votes do not count, but at the local level in the US, they certainly do. You vote for so many offices, and since so few people actually vote, it is very easy to sway the results. In an election where 12% of the people vote, even getting a few percent of those that are normally apathetic to get out there can change the result.
You’re awfully confident about that, despite the fact that Obama just won twice.
That’s just false, so there’s no reason “why.” Democrats should reject the libertarian part which you’re neglecting to even mention. We shouldn’t care only about wars. Having a decent view about that is not at all sufficient.
Hey speaking of good ol’ Gary Johnson, gibbertarianism, and the NRA:
http://www.ontheissues.org/2012/Gary_Johnson_Gun_Control.htm
Obama made a slightly convincing show of being anti-war and actually implemented policies, that if you squinted hard enough, were anti-war actions.
Hillary doesn’t have that option.
Hey, will you look at that. Surprise surprise, Mike Huckabee’s old friend James Robison is homophobic and anti-abortion! And has apparently had some significant political clout to put behind those causes.
“Socially conservative” is always such a nice little code word to hear. Such a myriad of possible odious policies and an assortment of bigotries!
First of all, you claimed the fact that Democrats (for the most part) don’t want to court “anti-drug war libertarians” is the reason why she’ll lose. (Let’s just assume Clinton’s going to win the nomination.) That’s not the same thing as supporting the “drug war,” much less is it supporting wars in general. Also, wars in general don’t much resemble the drug war. Those aren’t even the same thing.
So where is this going, and how is anyone supposed to follow it?
Two out of three parts of the history of Hillary, part three due tomorrow:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/13/80658/
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/04/14/hrc-and-the-arkansas-elite/
Hillary supports the drug war and war in general.
They are both bankrupting this nation, destroying millions of lives, and will be the downfall of the American empire.
Hillary is the antithesis of what a Democratic canidate should be and as such will create such low enthusiasm in the democratic base that any of the wackadoodles on the Republican slate could take the office due simply to low turnout.
I keep hearing this bullshit, but where is your evidence other than your personal antipathy for HC?
Just gonna leave Nate Silver’s take on Hillary here.
From August
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/hillary-clinton-doesnt-have-a-problem-on-her-left/
From 2 days ago:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-begins-the-2016-campaign-and-its-a-toss-up/
Poll one HC 57% of the vote.
Poll two with HC ahead of Cruz and Paul
electionprojection.com/blog/
So would Huckabee be satisfied if you started calling that instution “godvernment”? That puts god in it… mission accomplished?
PZ may have a more sophisticated take on “demographically symbolic” — i.e. Americans want a privileged leader that does not seem to be privileged. (Note that we as nation seemed to be OK with non-symbolic presidents 1-43.)
But in the context of Wayne LaPierre’s speech, it’s pretty obvious that he was grasping for a euphemism for the N word. I will give him credit for creativity, even for such a clunker of a term.
PaulBC @122:
His euphemism covered N and W. Two for the price of one!
Just to ask: is there such a dryoancy of candidates that the best option available is one that you* don’t like? Does it happen that often or what?
[PS: for your information, I never voted D :-) ]
* I think I noticed a good reason for you, did you? (this has nothing to do with politics, or is it? )
Shirley Chisholm and 1972 bring back memories. That was the first presidential election after the 26th amendment was ratified, and I had just turned 18 the week before the Maryland primary. I actually researched the long list of candidates, and I even attended a George Wallace rally over the weekend before the vote. The crowd was tumultuous with both hippie protesters and neo-Nazi pamphleteers, and Wallace arrived late, said something forgettable, and left early. On Monday, Wallace was shot at a nearby shopping center, and on Tuesday, while in the hospital, he won the Maryland primary. But my first ever vote that day was for Shirley Chisholm.
Unless you live in a swing state, the only vote that counts is for “other.”
Doesn’t count for much at all… but in a non-swing state a vote for a D or an R is a total waste of time.
(unless of course everyone thinks that way, but in that case every state would be a swing state, so it would still be true.)
The problem is that currently a bit less than half the voting public would vote for Satan if the Prince of Darkness was nominated by Republican Party. A little less than half of the voting public would do the same if Evil incarnate was nominated by the Democrats.
Presidental elections are won and lost on the margins: can you supress the votes of your opponent through dirty tricks or convincing them that their canidate sucks more than normal? can you energize your base by showing how horrible the other guy is? can you convince the some of the people who have washed their hands of the whole endevor and usually abstain from voting to vote for your guy because they are super swell?
Democrats can’t match the republicans on the dirty trick front. Hillary will mobilize the Republican base into a frenzy of hate that has been building for decades. Anyone that can be convinced to vote for the lesser of two evils will vote Democrat regardless of who is nominated. And lastly, Hillary doesn’t energize anyone to get off their ass to vote for her: the best she can hope for is the kind of nose holding vote PZ started this thread out with:
You don’t win elections with that kind of support.
Christopher @117:
Not only can you not see into the minds of voters, you also don’t have precognitive abilities. You ought to dial back on your certainty over things you really have no reason to be certain about.
Nor with your support. If you have a candidate, be positive about them. Othewise, quit trashing HC. Makes you look bad.
I think you are the one in the wrong thread. Look at PZ’s post, this thread is all about talking smack about shitty candidates, not about supporting anyone.
Wayne is taking the gloves off right away, isn’t he?
“Enough uppity Negroes and wimmin! Time to get a reg’lar ‘Murcan back in the White House!”
Apparently, naked racism/mysoginy will be the early 2016 election tone from the wingnuttiest Republican pressure groups. If LaPierre starts it off this low, where do they go next?
It always strikes me how the filthy rich demographics is over represented among our politicians.
Democracy fail.
Shirley Chisholm. The first person I ever voted for for President, even though she didn’t get the nomination. I wrote in her name on the ballot. She was the absolute best. I wish she were still with us. And Molly Ivins. And Barbara Jordan. And Ann Richards. This country’s politics just suck so bad. It’s evil and embarrassing.
michael kellymiecielica wrote:
Maybe you hadn’t noticed, but the design of the federal government makes it really, really difficult to get laws passed unless you can get the support of members of both parties. That means that even when the Republicans don’t control the government, they still get to wield considerable control over which laws are passed. So, a party that hasn’t moved that is compromising with a party that steadily drifts to the right means your government gets increasingly conservative.
I’m Canadian (where the winning majority party has few limits on its ability to pass laws), and shouldn’t have to lecture you about how your government works.
If don’t have anything better in mind, why keep complaining ad nauseum? Unless your antipathy has the better of you?
Yeah, I have something better in mind:
Anybody but Clinton.
The Democrats could grab a random person off the street and have a better candidate. Hell, they could resurect Nixon from the dead and have a better candidate. Regan too. How fucking sad is that. And you want everyone to shut up and goose step behind an objectively horrible candidate. Why?
Christopher:
Could we get some actual specifics as to why Hillary Clinton is supposedly worse than Nixon or Reagan? Do you actually have a point or is it just histrionics and innuendo all the way down?
Typical of someone so caught up in hatred that they can’t see the forest for the trees. For any progressive, the first rule is anybody other than a rethug.
They, if you don’t like HC, offer a viable alternative.
Such a thing is required in science. If you have a bad theory, but it fits some of the data, it isn’t tossed for just any other theory. The acceptable new theory must explain more than the old one than the old one did. You just carp about the old theory, going nowhere, getting nowhere.
Clinton is pretty terrible. I don’t think arguing against that simple fact serves any good purpose. (But Christopher, you had been saying other confusing things besides that.) At this moment, I don’t know of anyone else who is likely to run as a Democrat and win. Bernie Sanders is maybe the best I can hope for right now. If, when the time comes, he (or similar) stands no reasonable chance of winning, it’s completely idle to talk about how reluctant we are to vote for the least terrible option available. You should just do it, because it’s better than anything else. It’s not sensible or relevant to say anything else. We ought to do the best we can with our votes no matter the circumstances, while doing whatever else we can (not just voting one day every four years on one federal candidate) to make the political atmosphere less awful.
We’re not doing science, we’re not explaining phenomena, nor are we theorizing about them.
And if we were, your doctrinaire approach of saying nothing productive while barking at people who disagree with you (or The Party, in this case) would not be acceptable either.
Nixon stopped a war rather than started wars.
Reagan stopped the cold war without a nuclear holocaust rather than poke the Bear until things got out of control.
Aside from Clinton, rethugs don’t run in the Democratic primary.
I did: any random person off the street.
I’m a random person off the street, but I’m not a viable alternative. If I wanted to run, my campaign would already be dead in the water. Not viable. I have better chances of being the next lottery winner, and I don’t play the lottery. So no matter how fucking fantastic my ideas may be (and honestly, I’m very sure they’re not perfect), they will not come to fruition. So, some other random person off the street (like Jeb Bush, let’s say) with much more horrible ideas will win instead of me, because in fact somebody wins and somebody loses in this kind of election. It is not just sets of ideas juxtaposed with one another, up in Platonic heaven — these are real world events with consequences for real people. And if that happens, that is in fact a worse state of affairs than if somebody like Clinton wins.
If the Democrats grabbed a few people off the street in order to have more than one person for a primary debate, Hillary would lose the primary to one or more Jo Randoms along with the Repubs.
The fact that the Clinton machine has the power to keep any Democrat from saying that they are even contemplating a presidential run should be sending shivers down your spine.
Martin O’Malley
Bernie Sanders
James Webb
Lincoln Chafee
There are four Democrats who have made it clear they are contemplating a run.
Which of them are you supporting?
Either you help an alternative candidate get the nomination, or by default it is likely HC. Did you bother to notice that Obama seemed to come out of nowhere and got the nomination instead of HC in 2008. HC has no lock on the nomination at this point in time either. But, if nobody else starts getting grass roots support, money, volunteers, primary votes….[you know what will happen]
Other possible women than HC, Elizabeth Warren or Wendy Davis, et al. Options are available.
Christopher @140:
Given this statement, I’m beginning to think much of your dislike for Hillary Clinton is irrational.
I’m honestly expecting a repeat of 2008 this election season. It is our only hope.
Hasn’t thrown his hat in the ring, just made a few barbs Clinton’s way. Might be worth voting for, but his record is pretty meh.
Said he won’t make a decision until the end of the month. Would gladly vote for him, but the dude is too damn old.
Christopher @ 147,
So you admit you were full of shit?
I’ve been following that topic with some interest and it’s a bit more complicated.
If you define “gamer” as “anyone who plays videogames”, then that demographic tends to swing Democratic. Turnout in the off-year elections is a bit low but they usually show up for Presidential elections. This isn’t likely to change.
If you define “gamer” as “a person who exclusively plays on-line FPS videogames with integrated voice chat and a culture of horrible racist/sexist/homophobic trash-talking”, then you’re right that the Republicans have been making inroads into that demographic. (Why anyone would want to use that definition of “gamer” is beyond me, though.) But that’s not a problem unique to Hillary Clinton – any Democrat would find it hard to win over that demographic and I’d be just as happy if they didn’t even try.
Also, keep in mind that Republican candidates can’t defend “Grand Theft Auto” very strongly, because that will upset other key elements of their base.
Has constantly maintained that she is not and will not run. I’d vote for her even though I disagree with her on some major foreign policy matters, but her anti-plutocrat stance would get me to give her money and hours if she did run.
Never even floated the idea of running for president. I would vote for her over Hillary, but her track record is nothing to get excited about.
My dislike for Hillary is far more rational than your love for her.
I admit no such thing.
Republican candidates are falling overthemselves to throw their hat in the ring. Non-HRC democrats are coy at best with, “thinking about possibly floating the idea” bullshit.
None of that makes me shiver, Christopher.
Maybe it’s time to flip the record over. What’s on the B side? More of your Clinton-bashing greatest hits? Or something useful to us?
It’s April 2015. What’s bullshit is starting an “election season” this early.
Hey, drink the Clinton Cool-Aid if you wish, but when she loses to whatever evil piece of shit the repubs put forward, you only have yourself to blame.
This time next year, the nominations will be pretty much settled.
Who says anybody here has love of Hillary? I don’t. But, until YOU provide an alternative that will become viable, Hillary may be all the democratic party has to offer. To me, it seems like you want to irrationally complain instead of taking rational, constructive action. If you do nothing and complain about all or dismiss the other possibilities, aren’t helping your own cause of preventing HC from getting the nomination. Are you rational enough to see that?
I don’t drink Kool-Aid, and there are plenty of people to blame. People like you who couldn’t form an honest statement to save their lives are not taking us to very nice place.
The Democratic Party is dysfunctional enough for that to very well be true.
If it is, expect a Republican win and the utter shitstorm that will follow.
Christopher @ 152,
You claimed that no Democrat would even admit to contemplating running for President in the face of the Clinton machine. I named four Democrats who have indicated to varying degrees that they might run, knowing (like all of us) that HRC was going to run. You pretty much admitted that in 147. So when you said
you were full of shit.
I’m not endorsing any of those candidates, or HRC, for that matter, but I will be voting my conscience next year and my conscience says that anyone the Dems nominated is going to be better for the country and the world than anyone the GOP nominates. Given that I live in a purple state that’s been trending blue in statewide elections, I will vote for the Dem. Just as importantly, I’ll be voting in local elections this year and, given that I’m in a part of the state that is solidly blue, I’ll give careful consideration to the greens or other progressive candidates who run.
Yep, it was as I feared: histrionics and innuendo all the way down. Oh well. Yet another incompetent advocate for what might otherwise be a defensible position.
All my statements have been honest. I’m not trolling for shits and giggles.
I fail to see how my honest assesment of the situation is “taking us” anywhere.
The only one on your list that said they are in the race is the Republican.
Does ‘histrionics’ count as an abilist slur or a sexist slur?
Oh really? Then it’s pretty odd how you don’t know any of these:
1) Dems will lose (for reasons)
2) the Democratic Party does everything it can to squelch any sort of anti-war sentiment within its ranks
3) any random person off the street is a viable alternative as a presidential candidate
4) Hillary would lose to collections of more than one random person off the street (for reasons)
5) the powerful Clinton machine explains why no Democrats are even contemplating a presidential run (they must not be random enough, I guess…)
6) The ones who actually have already contemplated that are too old, not to your liking, and/or ugly (or are possibly non-random)
7) anyone in this thread has expressed love for Clinton (even though they haven’t)
8) the Clinton power machine may also explain why people say coy bullshit, about whether they’ll begin their bullshit campaigns at this bullshit time, as non-bullshitters should expect
9) I have drunk the Clinton Cool-Aid
10) It will be all my fault when Clinton loses
Anything else?
Ah, goalpost moving time….
And the four of them are Democrats.
Again, Dems who “the Clinton machine has the power to keep… from saying that they are even contemplating a presidential run”
Jim Webb: “kicking tires”
Martin O’Malley: touring Iowa
Bernie Sanders “giving serious thought”
Lincoln Chafee forming an exploratory committee and says “anybody who voted for the Iraq War should not be president, and certainly anybody who voted for the Iraq War should not lead the Democratic Party into an election.”
In the same way that narcissism is a ableist slur, I suppose.
Lucky you. I live in the state with the largest population and highest GDP, yet we have no say in who is nominated in the primaries. There is little to no chance our electoral college votes will go anywhere but Democrat, so at least I can throw my vote away to someone I actually want to vote for without any moral debate. Sadly I live in a redneck part of the state, so it is unlikely that anyone will even run against the republican asswipes in the state elections. If I’m lucky, there might be a county supervisor that I can vote for that doesn’t make me retch, but that is a rare occurance. I’m too fucking poor to give even a piddling amount of money to candidates and work too much to have a chance of giving a useful amount of volunteer hours. My agency in this democarcy has been reduced to bitching on the internet, which is at least a step up from the pre-internet days of bitching to myself.
What A Maroon:
Goalpost movement seems to happen quite often when Christopher is around, come to think of it.
All those are my honest assesments of the situation based on the history of the parties involved.
We shall see what plays out, but I place my bet that if Hillary becomes the Dem nominee, she will lose no matter how fucked up the Repub nominee is.
“Chafee served in the United States Senate as a Republican from 1999 until 2007”
He is the only one that has thrown his hat in the ring aside from HRC.
Not possible. Few even take the form of assessments of the history of the situation based on the parties involved, you weaseling asshole.
When progressives are ignorant, making fallacious and false claims, can’t think or communicate clearly, and/or aren’t honest enough admit when they’re wrong, that’s hurting our chances of winning politically. Based on my assessment, a lot of people can see right through bullshit like yours.
I’ve identified four current Democrats who are contemplating a run (granted, Sanders is an Independent, but he’s thinking of running as a Dem). Whether they’ve “thrown [their] hat[s] into the ring” is irrelevant.
Admit that you were wrong.
anteprepro,
Makes for an interesting game of soccer…. Though really, you shouldn’t move the goalposts from behind your goaltender.
The goalpost shifting, combined with the assertions resting on no evidence that can be examined publicly, makes this conversation look like it won’t go anywhere…except maybe in circles…
Dishonest fucker is still dishonest.
But Christopher will no doubt keep insisting that this person is a Republican. Because reasons.
A sixty-two year old man who only became a Democrat two years ago after holding statewide and national office as a Republican is far more Republican than Democrat. Just because his party got too crazy for him doesn’t mean that he can pretend like his history doesn’t exist.
Does Robby Wells count as a Democrat too?
Christopher @151:
Da fuq?
Are you a fucking mind reader now? Where did I hint at, let alone say I love her? Such an insipid comment on your part lends credence to my belief that much of your dislike of Clinton is irrational.
Getting back to my point, which I guess you missed in your attempt to divine my innermost thoughts, no a random person on the street isn’t fucking likely to be a better Democratic candidate than Hillary Clinton (their lack of experience in politics would be one reason why).
Christopher @169:
No, they fucking well are not. You’re treating your opinions as facts and as consciousness razor pointed out, you don’t know these things you claim to know.
For instance, no one has said they love or even like Hillary Clinton in this thread. And yet you asserted that I do, in fact, love her. What history of mine leads you to believe that I love Hillary Clinton?
For another, you’ve said that cr has “drank the Kool-Aid” when you don’t know that to be true (and xe has refuted your stupid claim anyway). You really ought to apologize.
You don’t know that a random person on the street would be a better Democratic candidate than Hillary Clinton. In fact, you’ve presented no evidence in support of this ludicrous idea. You just threw it out there, and expected people to believe you. Back it up or shut the fuck up.
So yes, you’re being dishonest.
Christopher @170:
You continue to demonstrate your dishonesty. Try reading the Wikipedia entry a little further.
Lincoln Chafee:
I’ve helpfully bolded the relevant portions of his wiki entry.
So yes, What a Maroon did list 4 Democrats.
Christopher @175:
“Far more Republican than Democrat”
=/=
Republican
Own your dishonesty. Apologize. Back your assertions with some facts. Otherwise, brianpansky is right-this will go in circles, with you looking more and more the dishonest fool.
I’d love to vote for Sanders, but I think the stigma of “socialist” is just too tough to overcome. Personally, if I was going to play fantasy president and Warren wasn’t an option, I would want to draft Maxine Waters. She’s a little close to corruption for my taste, but she’s also a strong populist voice and a voice against mandatory minimums, two great positions that need more airtime desperately. She won major points with me recently when she called out regulators for sleeping on the job and letting Citi get away with not paying out required foreclosure settlement funds.
What a pitifully dishonest statement this is.
No he isn’t.
No more than a 62 year old man who only became an atheist 2 years ago after attending church as a Catholic is far more Catholic than atheist.
Or any more than Charles Darwin, on the day he finished writing “Origin of Species” was “far more” a creationist than an evolutionist since he at that time he had spent more years of his life as a creationist than as a evolutionist.
They might be more X than Y, but whether they are or not has NOTHING whatsoever to do with how many years they spent as X and what they did while they were X. It is what they do and think NOW that matters.
I think it is a false equivalence to equate the Clintons with the Bushes as families running the country. There has thus far been only one Clinton as president. Hillary is not the sister nor the daughter of a Clinton. Hillary is only related to the Clinton family through marriage. The Bush family has had members in power for over 100 years with two family presidents, two senators, two governors, a Supreme Court judge, a head of the CIA, etc.
In the 19th century the Bush family did have two respectable members who were abolitionists and one was involved in the Underground Railroad. It also had a respectable member in the 17th century, Mary Parker, who was hanged for witchcraft but other members of the family participated in the “trial”.
Sanders is NOT a Democrat.
But hell yes, he would get my vote.
anteprepro:
The rank-and-file conservatives did not “stumble” onto the “tea party”. It was created for them, by highly skilled political strategists: http://desmogblog.com/2013/02/11/study-confirms-tea-party-was-created-big-tobacco-and-billionaires
The left does not have the kind of well-funded long-lasting think-tanks that can do the research necessary to come up with highly effective political strategy, that combines many issues. Instead, it has a diverse array of poorly funded groups that struggle with one or two issues each.
The left also does not have the ridiculous amounts of money necessary to buy all the advertsing needed to implement any political strategy that might result from any think-tanks either.
Jafafa Hots:
But he’s said many times that if he does run, he won’t be running as a third party; he’ll run in the Democratic primaries. Probably Sanders figures that the people who refuse to register with either party are neither numerous enough nor well organized enough to accomplish anything, so he’s pursuing the “party within a party” idea, if he runs.
randay @182:
I think you misread what PZ said.
Note that he didn’t say the same families run the country.
Regan has the disadvantage of being a fictional character, and I can’t help feeling that the way she treated her dad and squabbled with her sister might be used against her.
pita:
The Republicans have invested a huge amount of propaganda in making Obama appear as socialist as possible. And a lot of people believe it. But, Obama won two elections, and for most of his career, his approval ratings have remained high when compared to past presidents at similar times in their presidencies. Would it work any better against someone who really was a socialist?
The people on whom red-baiting works are those who still think in cold war terms. Most of those people are relatively older, and more likely to vote Republican anyway. The young people mostly don’t care about red-baiting. The older people who realize the cold war ended in 1991 often view red-baiting as disingenuous.
Almost all the credit for the end of the cold War goes to Gorbachev. Reagan did his very best to get us all killed during his first term: his “Evil Empire” rhetoric convinced the Soviet gerontocrats that a nuclear first strike was possible. Google “Able Archer” and “Stanislav Petrov” for details. Reagan was also culpably slow to realize that Gorbachev really was a very different type of Soviet leader than his predecessors – in marked contrast to Margaret Thatcher, about whom in general I have very little good to say.
Not really. The following is from Wikipedia on Obama:
Warren has been insistent she will not run. Davis has held no post higher than state senator, lost a gubernatorial race, and has been caught out in autobiographical inaccuracies. That these are the best alternatives you could find is quite telling.
When you vote for a candidate (Gary Johnson) who tells racist lies such as:
I’m convinced by the material from Nate Silver linked by anteprepro@119, and by the lack of any credible alternative, that Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. Whether she wins the Presidency is unpredictable at this point, although it has been very hard since WWII for one party to hold the Presidency for more than 2 consecutive terms. If any Republican wins, we’re all in deep shit – including us non-Americans.
One reason that Hillary will be the Democratic nominee is the vast sums of money needed to defeat the billionaire-backed GOP candidate, whichever
goofballperson that may be. Only the Clintons have the connections to match that sort of money right now.I think individual votes count in small, local elections, but not in the Presidential race.
In other words, I believe in microelection, but not macroelection.
(/snark)
Anri, #194
I’m don’t believe in national selection either.
Tpyos bless.
Jafafa Hots,
Fair enough, but he has indicated that he’s thinking of running for the Democratic nomination.
I’d vote for him in the primary, but not if he runs as an independent.
Christopher, do you bother to vote in every election?
Some of the comments here, make me think that Hillary will be the nominee, ONLY because she’s NOT representative of your ‘run’of’the’mill’ Rethuglican. that ANYTHING is better than those guys and being a woman, having her as the Dem will be a real “slap in the face” of the Rethug candidate. That Dems don’t care want potential policies she may enact, as long as the Rethugs will sputter is all that matters. That she is simply a “demographically symbolic” spit in the Rethug’s faces.
I disagree. (somewhat)
The above is true, but only part of the full truth. Those are *some* of the reasons to encourage Hillary, but there are many reasons to vote FOR her, not just to vote AGAINST the Rethug candydate. {ewww tpyo’s are sly}
re 199: EDIT:
… That Dems don’t care
wantwhat potential policies she may enact, …BTW, isn’t Mammon a god? So technically, both parties support a theocracy.
In California as most states, I don’t need to vote for president because I know which way the state will go. If it were a popular vote, then I would have to vote.
If you can, Democrats should move to Ohio and Florida. Vote also for reps who would eliminate Republican voting machines. I mean the electronic and mechanical ones, not the political organization.
You know, I live in Massachusetts. With all this talk about blue states and how you can vote whatever and it won’t matter, despite being an infamously blue state, we somehow managed to have a right-wing governor that eventually went on to use that office as a launching pad to run as the Republican candidate for the Presidency. Then after the term of a left-wing governor, we elected yet another Republican governor! Despite being, as I am re-assured, super blue, we still managed to get a right-wing Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy during a special election after his death. Scott Brown, replacing Ted Kennedy. This despite the fact that we hadn’t had a Republican sent to represent us in the House of Represents since 1993, and the last one the Senate was from 1979. (And also 2012, a Right To Die ballot question failed to pass, and 2010 a ballot measure repealed sales tax on alcohol for some fucking reason.)
Votes fucking matter. You can’t just take for granted that even in the bluest of blue states, that the Democrat is going to win every time.
anteprepro,
I grew up in MA. The first presidential race I remember was Nixon/McGovern. Practically everyone in our suburban elementary school supported McGovern, even the jocks. But one thing I learned growing up is that MA is far from the liberal/socialist paradise of stereotype:
After one term in office, Michael Dukakis lost the Democratic primary for governor to Ed King, aka Ronald Reagan’s favorite Democrat, in 1978.
In 1980, Proposition 2 1/2 was passed, which capped property taxes at 2.5%.
MA went twice for Ronald Reagan.
I live in VA now. I’ve seen it go from solid red to leaning blue, at least for statewide elections. But somehow the state legislature still manages to be in the GOP’s hands, and as a result they get to oversee the gerrymandering and so most of our congresscritters are goppers.
Yep, voting matters.
Funny how all these Democratic presidents and candidates are supposed to take all our guns away. Yet there are more guns than ever.
I’m “lucky” in that I live in about the most solidly Republican state out there. I’m throwing my vote away no matter what.
@bruce
First I didn’t claim it was a “good thing” I claimed it is more of a good thing than a bad one given the current state of the electorate. I also don’t really disagree that low voter turn out allows single groups to dominate and as such distorts public policies away from the actual preference.
However, I don’t think public policy reflecting the general preference of a populace inherent results in good policies and given how mind boggling stupid and ignorant the average voter is I’m unsure if the bad policy that is resulting from insular group dominating the discussion is worse than the inevitable bad policies that is populace’s spectacularly uninformed would create.
Indeed, a significant plurality of American voters are so incompetent than shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because it is wrong to subject people to incompetent rule.
michael:
That’s great michael. Let’s go back to only letting people vote who pass a test. Sounds brilliant.
Ah, yes, as the old radicals back in college said we need a dictatorship of the proletariat (lead by them of course), to make the people know what they should want. Bullshit then, bullshit now. And you are not anybody I would follow. You lack intellectual honesty and integrity.
@anteprepro
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/08/30/the-unpolitical-animal
read.
Actually, I can’t think of a mechanism that I would trust to weed out people who shouldn’t vote beyond telling the morons they shouldn’t vote for the very reason you are implying. But the fact remains the American electorate contains some breathtakingly incompetent people who are acting wrongly every time they vote.
@ Nerd
Given that only 10% of the population actually even has what could be called, graciously, a coherent political ideology, yes most people do not understand what they want because they are unable to parse what is entailed by their stated values. I don’t care if they share my, but as a matter of fact they simply don’t understand what it means to be “fiscally conservative.”
~42% of Americans are creationists. In light of that belief they are not fit to discuss public policy connected to biology because they are acting from radically false premises.
I don’t want to “led” and I actually do hold myself to this standard as I won’t vote if I don’t have time to look into candidates. I, in fact, just skipped the Chicago may race as I didn’t have time to do the needed research into “chuy”
We do have a huge problem with the fact that advertising is highly effective at making people make poor decisions, perhaps especially in politics.
And we do have a huge problem with voter ignorance.
I can’t see how voter restrictions of any kind can do anything but make these problems worse, though. And that’s what has always happened when voter restrictions have been applied.
There’s far too much incentive to design the voter restrictions to weed out the “wrong” people, and it’s far too hard to design a test that actually corresponds to useful political knownledge, let alone ability to see through propaganda.
What seems to actually help is strict regluation of political ads, and strict regulation of the funding that pays for political ads, especially in transparency provisions. It’s not an accident that everything we had in that department was broken.
Better public education would help a lot too, and I can’t help notice that’s been attacked as well.
How can a party not be movi9ng if it is compromising?
That sentence is incoherent.
michael kellymiecielica: No, you are just as incompetent as always. That’s the issue.
Party X has position 1.
Party Y has position 5.
In order to pass legislation, they must meet in the middle somewhere. They compromise and pass legislation usually centered around position 3, give or take. That is just the laws that get passed. The deals that get made. Party X, if it had its way, would be passing laws around position 1 still. Party Y, if it had its way, would be passing laws around position 5. They have not changed their position by making a compromise to pass a law.
But, over time, Party Y gets more extreme. It decides to shift further out, putting its actual ideal position of policies around position 7. Suddenly, a compromise around position 3 isn’t considered fair. Party X needs to go further to reach a “compromise”. So to truly meet in the middle, they tend to settle on a deal around position 4 now. Without Party X changing position at all, Party Y’s shift has forced a shift in legislation in general, because the distance between the two parties is greater, and to best “meet in the middle”, they now have to go farther than before. Party Y shifted the discourse and shifted the area that is considered a fair compromise closer to their previous position.
This is, of course, stupid and favors the party that makes itself most stubborn and extreme. But that’s how it works (roughly). Welcome to political compromise.