Not dissimilar to the purely partisan vote on Obamacare, a bill which had to be passed via reconciliation in a questionably-Constitutional manner.
Thank heaven liberals are willing to play dirty to pass their highly-flawed, unaffordable legislation! Thank ya jesus!!
What final step? Suicide?
You may have found its manner of passing distasteful (only being able to muster 59 votes in the Senate after Ted Kennedy’s death), but there was nothing Constitutionally questionable about it.
So you’re proposing, what, prying open the eyes of the Republican members Clockwork Orange-style? Because they’ve made it clear that they have no intention of reading bills otherwise. Oddly enough, the Democrats had no difficulty with reading the bills that were brought before them in the same time frame.
I agree with iiandyii about playing by the rules, but Obama pledged to be different. At no point has he even made an attempt to be different beyond rhetoric.
Since Obama couldn’t win by inspiration in 2012, he pursued a negative campaign, seeking to reduce voter turnout. If people wouldn’t vote for him, he’d at least make it so that they wouldn’t vote for the rich flip flopper either.
Damage Obama has done to his party- squandered the newfound trust. Bill Clinton took the first steps by doing something Democrats hadn’t done in a very long time: he had a successful Democratic Presidency that rebutted by example many of the standard critiques of Democrats: tax and spend, inefficient big government, didn’t share mainstream American values, want to take our guns yet soft on crime, etc. Obama has restored those stereotypes of Democrats.
Principles-NSA, Gitmo, getting us involved in foreign wars, government reform. Sure, there are lonely liberal voices out there treating Obama the same as GWB on these issues, but mostly Democrats either support the President or grin and bear it. On the latter issue, government reform, Democrats have pretty much forgotten about it, even on what used to be a signature liberal issue: ending corporate welfare.
How interesting. Do you have a cite for absolutely any of this? Obama’s 2012 strategy wasn’t about suppressing votes - it was getting as much of his 2008 coalition to vote as possible. I don’t think Obama has restored any of the stereotypes of Democrats you’ve brought up - taxes haven’t gone up, spending - after the initial spike from the stimulus - has subsided, along with deficits, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone use the term “soft on crime” since the 90s.
And all liberals I know call Obama out on the NSA/Gitmo issues. “It sucks that he is taking these actions, but is still better than the other guy” is not an abandonment of principles; it’s an acceptance of reality. And “not getting involved in foreign wars” isn’t really a principle for anybody but extreme pacifists. Mostly it’s a question of not getting involved in unnecessary wars, such as Iraq II. One can certainly see the very light involvement in the war on ISIS in a completely different light than GWB’s misguided adventure without sacrificing a principle.
Negative campaigns are not about depressing turnout, they’re about motivating voters to vote against the other guy. Negative campaigns are used because they work. Politics isn’t tiddlywinks. I want my candidate to highlight all the bad stuff that will happen if their opponent wins.
Ridiculous Halperinesque hackery. Not reflecting reality.
If he was trying to get his 2008 voters out, he failed. Good thing he wasn’t trying too hard. He knew he couldn’t run on hope and change, nor his record, so he knew he was dealing with a lower turnout environment and campaigned accordingly. If he was trying to get more people to vote against Romney, he failed in that too. 3 million fewer people voted “against” Romney than McCain and nearly 1 million more voted for Romney than for McCain.
That sounds like a litany of failure to me. Pretty surprising for a successful presidential reelection campaign, no? Simpler to assume that the campaign meant to see lower turnout. And sure enough, black voter turnout was more than white voter turnout. Not so much because blacks voted at historically high rates, but because white voters stayed home. Who would they vote for? Obama’s opponent was a rich flip flopper, “not one of us”.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/first-black-voter-turnout-rate-passes-whites
So, we could assume that the Obama campaign failed at its goal but won anyway through sheer happenstance, or that the campaign succeeded brilliantly at making white voters decide not to vote.
Anyway, regardless of whether this was the campaign’s intent, it disproves iiandyii’s argument that Republicans need to root for lower turnout. A higher turnout election might have pushed Romney over the top.
Near as I can tell, campaigns really only have one important metric and Obama is batting 1.000 in that one.
It was Obama all along that was suppressing votes! Damn, what a revelation! So, that’s why he had ACORN killed!
God are you kidding me here, adaher? Why do you constantly spew such vomit? Why can’t you check your goddamn facts before you post a goddamn factual assertion? Black turnout was higher in 2012 than in 2008. In fact, black turnout was higher than ever before (in recent history, at least – I couldn’t find older numbers past a few decades previous), and higher than white turnout. Hispanic turnout, while down slightly from 2008, was still up from 2004. Asian turnout was almost as high in 2012 as in 2008. And his margins among Hispanic and Asian voters were even better in 2012 than in 2008. Young people’s turnout was down a bit, but your sentence above is just a big ol’ pile of stupid nonsense crap, and you should be ashamed of posting it after you’ve been repeatedly lambasted for posting bad facts. And everything else you wrote follows from this false statement, so you should be ashamed of that too. Shame shame shame. You should be ashamed of yourself, and you should set a standard for yourself higher than nonsense crap falseness.
Obama absolutely turned out his voters, which include black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters. Young voters didn’t come out nearly as strong in 2008, but young voters were only a small part of his victory coalition – black, brown, and Asian voters were collectively more significant.
Shamefully wrong again, adaher.
No. You’re not moving the goalposts here. You said there was intent. Now back it up. What was the mechanism by which Obama’s campaign suppressed votes? How did it work? Where is your data?
This time you’re the one who’s all wet. Yes, black turnout increased. And he also lost 3 million young voters. The facts speak for themselves. He won in 2012 with a lower voter turnout than in either 2008 or 2004. His entire strategy was built around the expectation that he would have less support than in 2008, and he certainly did have less support overall.
A negative campaign that tried to portray Romney as unacceptable to the same working class white voters that Obama himself couldn’t win.
It worked. They stayed home.
Are you serious? Candidate A saying Candidate B is bad is vote suppression to you? The equivalent of scrubbing legitimate voters from voting rolls, requiring photo IDs, minimizing the number of polling locations in minority areas, and rolling back early voting programs? That’s ridiculous, and you know it. And everyone knows you know it.
I didn’t say they were equivalent, only that Obama’s strategy was built around hoping that fewer people would vote. Which was only brought up because iiandyii accused Republicans of having to root for lower voter turnout. In 2012, it was Democrats who rooted for lower turnout. They got it, and they won.
Of course it’s not the same thing as illegal voter suppression.
Yes, the facts speak for themselves, and both the facts and you contradict what you said earlier (including your statement in the last post about black turnout). Black turnout increased, and Hispanic and Asian voter support for Obama also increased. You said he failed to get out his 2008 supporters. That is false. He succeeded and improved portions of his supporter coalition, while another portion decreased. You said a false thing, and you refuse to admit it.
Higher black voter turnout than either, and higher Asian and Hispanic turnout than in 2004. Those are huge parts of Obama’s coalition. You fail and are wrong.
No, his entire strategy was built to focus and maximize turnout for minorities and female voters in close states like VA, FL, OH, etc., and it succeeded.
Negative campaigns are not attempts to suppress turnout. The Democrats still would have won had white turnout been as high in 2012 as 2008.