I would guaren-fuckin-tee that America would elect Colin Powell over the Hildabeast.
Even though Powells a liberal, and very mediocre in his position IMH, he would slam a two faced liberal who has never accomplished anything on her own.
Powell has never run for office. Why does everyone who wants to vote for him seem to know his political bent?
What do you know about him really?
Until he gained experience as secretary of state, I couldn’t imagine why he would be qualified for president. Then again, GWB didn’t impress me either.
I have quite a bit of respect for Hillary’s campaigning skills, but my believe that Rice would trash has to do more with the natural advantages each person has.
Nowadays, any candidate is pretty much guaranteed to get the vote of his or her ‘base’. So maybe 30% of the people will vote for any Republican, and 30% of the people will vote for any Democrat. Those aren’t the people you have to win over to win - it’s the moderates and independents in the middle that make or break presidents.
And the fact is, being a Republican woman is an advantage, while being a Democratic woman is a liability. And Hillaries ‘negatives’ are very, very high. Possibly higher than any other politician currently in office. That means it’s going to be very hard for her to break through to members of the other party.
Then there’s the war effect. Rice is seen as an expert in international affairs, and that’s going to help her big time campaigning as a wartime presidential candidate. Hillary has pretty much zero international experience, and a well known disinterest or even contempt for the military. That will hurt her.
All in all, at this time Rice is a much more impressive candidate for national office.
But of course, she’s never actually run for office before, so we don’t know how good she is at it.
Sam
The question is, will Rice’s base be energized by a single [I heard on these boards she was a lesbian, I don’t put much creedence in rumors but she still doesn’t look good to the family values crew], black woman who is mildly pro-choice. I’d wager a credible third-party threat would emerge, and the race could possibly shift to a conservatives vs. liberals vs. moderates 3-way race, very volatile and impossible to predict. Still, I’d give the edge to Rice even in that one, but her base wouldn’t be the traditional GOP one.
There have been several ‘draft Condi’ movements coming from the far right. They love her. Granted, part of the reason is because she’s in a position where her views mesh with theirs (i.e. she’s a hawk when it comes to the military). Would they accept her as a candidate? I think so, unless she turns out to be a lot more liberal on social issues than she has shown to be so far. If she is ‘pro-choice’ the way George Bush senior was (mildly, and he didn’t make it an issue at all and didn’t act on his beliefs in any way while in power), then she’ll probably do okay.
But conservatives have absolutely nothing at all against blacks or women. That’s maybe where the Republicans were 50 years ago, but not today. In fact, they would LOVE to run black and female candidates, because it takes away major issues from the Democrats. Remember how strongly they supported Clarence Thomas? Many of the leading members in the Republican party are black (Thomas, Sowell, J.C. Watts, Larry Elder), and there are plenty of females. The females tend to be even more conservative than the men (think Anne Coulter and Kate O’Bierne).
The point is that a black female Republican will win over some black and female independants. But a female Democrat isn’t going to win over independants and females from the Republicans. I mean, based on just being female. It’s an ‘in’ into the Democrats, but not into the Republicans.
That’s why I’ve always said that the first black president and the first female president are far more likely to be Republican than Democrat. It’s just a structural thing. Only Nixon can go to China. And note that the first female Prime Minister in Britain was a conservative, as was the first female Prime Minister in Canada.
If she were Charlie Rice a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, she’d have a much easier time. I’m not saying conservatives are racist (that’s the kind of thing that gets you sued around here), but that on both sides of the aisle there’s a latent semi-bias against people who aren’t like you.
I do mostly agree with your theory about blacks and women becoming president, but I think a moderate Democrat that was either black or female would be able to win against a sufficiently bad Republican candidate (think a Republican Al Gore). When I look at the Republican bench, I did in another thread, I am not impressed with their female and black prospects for the presidency in the next decade. Still, I don’t think anyone saw GWB back in 1992 becoming much of anything save. I doubt the James Dobsons and Gary Bauers will get behind her mostly due to her pro-choice stance. They sure loved Ron Greer back in 1998, so I don’t think they’re anti-black people.
I think it could just as easily hurt her–she could come off as an egghead. That plus the fact that she’s a pro-choice black woman make her chances of being on the Republican Presidential ticket about as good as mine. (I do see her replacing Cheney in 2004, though.)
If elections are going to fall inside the margin of error, neither party is going to be willing to do anything to alienate their core voters. There are a lot of single-issue voters out there when it comes to abortion. And, much as we’d all like to think otherwise, a lot of people are not going to be willing to vote for a black woman whose sexual orientation is rumored to be in question, and at the risk of being taken the wrong way, most of those people vote Republican. (I’m not saying Republicans in general are racists, of course.)
If there’s a viable third-party candidate (say, Pat Buchanan–maybe he can hold on to his elderly Jewish constituency in Florida!), the Republicans could lose just as many votes off the right side as they gain in the middle.
Hillary, on the other hand, is probably a safe bet for the Dems. There is a lot of irrational hatred out there for Hillary (see Barking Spider’s post above, for instance), but how many of those people would vote Democratic anyway? (Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of rational reasons not to like Hillary, but the vitriol spewed toward her is way out of proportion.)
Between the two, if I could vote for Rice without voting for the Republican power structure, I’d do so in a second. As it is, I’d be torn.
If Colin Powell wanted to be President, he’d be President right now. Even so, he probably missed his chance.
Dr. J
Piffle. It’s too early to call the results of the Congressional elections this November, even. 2008 is fantasyland.
Note, just for thought, that Powell may look good precisely because he hasn’t ever been a real candidate. He’s never had his background explored to death by the media mice, and there have therefore been no “bombshell revelations”. On most issues that matter in campaigns, he has never had to come up with a coherent position statement, much less had it subjected to question by opponents. And, if he continues to be marginalized by this administration, he won’t even look good for much longer anyway.
But yes, there’s nothing worse that can be said or found out about Hillary, and she’s still in good shape politically. The people who hate her wouldn’t vote for a Democrat, anyway.
That said, my bet for 2008 would be on the re-election of President Gore.
Predicting the 2008 election is like trying to predict the weather in three weeks. Nobody can do it; it’s silly to even try.
- Who thought in 1962 that Richard Nixon could ever come back?
- Who thought in 1970 that Jimmy Carter was a good bet for 1976?
- Who thought in 1974 that Ronald Reagan was the leading man for 1980?
- Who thought in 1982 that George Bush was a serious candidate for 1988?
- Who thought in 1986 that Bill Clinton was the favourite for 1992?
- Who thought in 1994 that George W. Bush was a good candidate for 2000?
In every case, I doubt the eventual winner was the consensus prediction six years previous, and in a lot of cases probably wasn’t even on the radar screen. C’mon, guys, this is silly. The odds are that the candidates in 2008 will be two people who have not even been mentioned in this thread.
If we had a real democracy in Amerikkka, and not a corporate-rigged political system, Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke would be serving their second term as President and VP, and we would be looking forward to the start of the LaDuke administration in 2004.
We can continue to elect mediocre corporate puppets like the Clintons, the Bushes, Powell, ad nauseam. Or, we can finally decide we have had enough of their crap and start electing Green Party candidates instead.
Then thank god for corporations, because Ralph Nader would be a disaster. He knows nothing about anything other than his consumer crusades. His ideas about the military are laughable, he’s a terrible diplomat, and a wacked out socialist to boot.
Sorry, but you can’t blame corporate America for Ralph Nader not being elected. You can blame about 100 million Americans who have some good sense.
Yeah, that’s the answer dude. By the way. the country is spelled America, not Amerikka. Your reply is not only juvenile, but extremely naive.
IMO, Giuliani is a potential GOP candidate, but like others have mentioned, presidential politics move quickly. Candidate, oftentimes, appear out of nowhere. Even in a somewhat rigid political system, there is a tremendous flux. People who seem like shoo-ins at one time or another (Bradley, Kemp, Kennedy, McCain) disappear in primaries, and people from out of nowhere win their parties nomination. (Nixon, Carter, Clinton, etc…)
This is why we need to add that tinfoil hat smiley. Be sure to cast your vote!
How’s that different from what we’ve got now? 
I agree with pretty much everything in that post, except for the characterization of Bush Sr. It’s pretty much expected for a VP to be the party nominee 8 years after he’s first elected. Was Bush an exception? I had yet to exist back in '82 and I haven’t looked into it, but I’d presume since he had made a run in 1980 and age was made a nonissue by Reagan people would think he’d go for it in '88. I don’t think Hill or Condi will run for President in 2008, or ever for that matter. I just thought it would be a fun hypothetical matchup, and I doubt many of the people in this thread seriously thought it either. Heck, we don’t even know the Dem frontrunner in 2004.
Frankly, I don’t think I’d vote for Clinton OR Powell for the same reason I didn’t vote for Bush:
I wouldn’t hire someone with six years of mid-level experience to do MY job, (which certainly isn’t as important). Why should I ‘hire’ someone with just six years of mid-level experience to handle something as important as international treaties, etc.?
As for Rice, I don’t think the good old boys would let any wimmens folk in their club, much less a minority at that. And Guiliani I’m not sure is that right guy for the job, I’m still pissed at him for cleaning up Manhattan and forgetting the rest of the boroughs. He’s also a big 'ol hypocite who screamed loudest when they were investigating Clinton, all the while carrying on an affair himself.
The government we already have is a disaster. Ralph Nader, Winona LaDuke, and the Greens in general would finally give us a government that actually cares about the needs of people and the earth rather than one that caters to corporate greed.
How are Ralph’s/the Greens’ ideas about the military laughable? We need an alternative to the warmongering and outrageous defense spending that have been the policy of one Republicrat administration after another. Military “solutions” do not bring about peace and justice, except in the Orwellian “War is Peace” world of the Republicrats.
100 million Amerikans were, unfortunately, too scared and misled by Republicrat/corporate propaganda, and so they voted for one of the two Corporate Puppet tickets instead of for the Greens.
Meanwhile, the Greens have twice (1996 and 2000) ran a presidential ticket composed of an Arab-American (Nader) and a Native American woman (LaDuke), thus totally putting the Republicrats to shame for their pitiful lack of diversity in their presidential tickets. Only ONCE has either of the two major parties nominated anyone other than a white male to a presidential ticket, and that was almost 20 years ago (Geraldine Ferraro).
Ok, I’ll bite.
Our current President isn’t a “wacked out socialist”?
Ok, I’ll bite.
Our current President isn’t a “wacked out socialist”?