Correct, whereas “Obama is out to destroy America” is fearmongering.
From the Republican wire to your ear, eh? What does he have a mandate for?
The continuation of health care reform. Restoring the tax rate for the rich. The idea that government can help us. What is there a mandate not to do? Destroy Medicare.
You can hardly claim that there were no substantive policy differences in this campaign. Your side lost deal with it.
Excuses, excuses. Saying Obama ran by scaring people, and in some cases he did, doesn’t address why they believed what he had to say. So that’s a copout. And I think the OP is right about the way Republicans have described appealing to minority groups- although the political press does that, too. To hear pundits talk about it, men pick their candidates on the issues and women mostly pay attention to their demeanor and body language and a couple of gender-related issues.
The same goes for black and Latino and gay voters. All of those constituencies lean Democrat anyway, but throughout the campaign the Republican did almost everything humanly possible to alienate the living hell out of those groups. Any political campaign is going to turn off some people, but the more people you forcefully thrust aside, the more trouble you’re in- and let’s not forget that the Republican projections for the race all assumed that enthusiasm for Obama was down and that this would lead to lower turnout from minority voters.
Said Mr. Pot to Mr. Kettle.
Speaking of constituencies the GOP completely alienated, I read a blog post by Rany Jazayerli (baseball writer and doctor) about Muslim voters. It claimed that in 2000 over 80% of non-African Muslims voted for GWB. And in 2004 it was 4%. He didn’t cite this claim, and while it seems plausible it also seems an extremely large swing. Can anybody substantiate it?
The post is here: Rany on the Royals: The GOP And Me.
Right. Saying Obama is a factionalist for scaring people with what Republicans said ignores the fact that Republicans are responsible for saying those things in the first place. So who’s the real factionalist?
I was referring to the OP, not to any candidate. It is obvious that there is no party that is pro-rape, yet Maximom C refers to an issue that motivate women as “not being raped” as if there is a higher chance of being raped if republicans are elected. I have no problem with someone quoting another person accurately and if they want to argue an unborn baby deserves to die because her father’s crime that is a legitimate arguement. But if quoting someone accurately is so damning why bother making stuff up?
The OP mentions “That is to say: not being raped, deported, told you who can marry what operations you are allowed to have and not have are not, in and of themselves, issues connected to any minority group”
Not being raped is not a partisan issue. The only time in the last four years where rape has come up is the supreme court decision where the liberals on the court found that the death penalty for child rape is unconstitutional.
Deportations are a bipartisan issue since Obama deported a record number in 2011 and has consistently rejected the republican idea of securing the border and then granting amnesty.
No one is being told who they can marry. The issue of gay marriage is about whether the government should change the definition of marriage. If anyone wants to rent a hall and exchange rings with someone, no republican is going to stop them.
The only operation anyone is concerned with is abortion. The idea that republicans want any other operation banned is delusional.
That is the type of scaremongering I am talking about. It is usually done in the media by liberals than by the candidates themselves, except for the abortion issue which many democrat politician try to pretend is about access to healthcare instead of abortion.
It was already unconstitutional.
This is a nitpick. If the state has the power to recognize marriages and tells certain people it won’t recognize their marriages, those people are being told who they can marry.
Again. It’s about whether the government should change the definition of marriage again (Loving v. Virginia) to recognize the way society has changed. If this were just a matter of exchanging rings and didn’t involve very important legal and financial rights, you might have a point here, but it does. And I hate to tell you this, but it’s going to happen. Republicans are not gaining any voters on this issue.
That and mandatory ultrasounds.
Good thing I read the thread, because this is pretty much exactly what I was going to say.
It goes along with Rove’s recent meme-attempt of “Obama suppressed the vote”
What the fuck are you talking about? He can point to all the policies he ran on, because that’s what the electorate voted for. By your logic, no POTUS ever has a mandate to implement any policy.
Loving vs Virgnia did not change the definition of marriage, there were interracial marriages long before the US existed.
It seems odd when only 10% of states recognize gay “marriage” and referendums on gay “marriage” have gone 3 and 32 to say that society has changed already.
Ultrasounds are not an operation. The only reason ultrasounds are being prescribed is that states can not ban abortions. I hate to tell you this but abortion bans will happen, pretending that abortions are a medical issue is not going to confuse anyone with a brain.
You were talking about scare mongering in the context of motivating voters during the campaign. Now this is just my opinion, but I don’t think a message board OP, posted on November 8th, did much to sway the electorate.
There has been an unprecedented amount of negative ads this time around. The Wesleyan media project analysed all of Obama’s ads in September. They found 2.5% were positive about Obama, 33.7% were positive about Obama and negative about Romey and 63.8% were solely negative about Romney.
In contrast the last President who ran for re-election, Bush, ran 43% positive, 17% mixed, and 39.6% negative.
The policies he ran on was not being Mitt Romney. Not his mostly non-existent accomplishments.
Wow, this was an even goofier assertion than I thought. A candidate’s mandate depends entirely on the content of their political advertising?
I’d agree that that part of the OP was poorly stated. However, the point stands: Find me a Democrat that actually said “Republicans are pro-rape.” The issue was not rape itself, it was the idea that the government should be able to tell you you can’t have an abortion AFTER you are raped. That was not made up.
Again, the issue was not rape itself, which no politician was for, but the women’s choices in dealing with the aftermath that was partisan.
My impression has been that many of the laws passed in various parts of the country are opposed by Hispanics not so much because the government is deporting illegal immigrants, but because the government is hassling citizens on a daily basis, under the guise of hunting down illegal immigrants.
Marley covered this pretty well. Of course anybody can have any social ceremony they want; it’s the legal ones that are under discussion.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody has EVER alleged this. It’s just weird.
Uh…what?
Again…uh…what? Abortion is a medical procedure, is it not? I’m not sure what your point is.
But it said that some types of marriage was legal and Constitutionally protected, so states couldn’t ban it.
A few years ago zero states recognized gay marriage. Look at how the votes went last night and look at some polls about how younger people feel about gay rights. You don’t t need a weatherman, etc.
I agree they’re not, and the OP did use the word “operation” rather than, say, “medical procedure.” But I am seeing a trend here: “change the definition of marriage” means exactly what you want it to mean and cannot be taken any other way, “operation” means exactly what you want it to mean and nothing else. That’s not an argument. I could say Republicans are MMQWOIRQUWQR and define that term in such a way that it’s true, but nobody would give a crap because all I’ve done is create a premise and then defined the terms of the argument in such a way that no other conclusion is possible. I think the term for this is just assuming conclusion. If not, call it mental gerrymandering.
And with his refusal to explain his own positions and his reliance on mass disdain for the incumbent, Romney ran on not being Barack Obama (until the debates, when he ran on being Barack Obama). Much of the Republican rhetoric of the last four years has been an ideologically incomprehensible mishmash of opposition to anything Obama does. The OP used a lot of over-the-top rhetoric, but your interpretation of the election is simply fiction. I admit Obama didn’t offer a lot of second-term specifics and ran a pretty negative campaign, but voters know who he is and what he got done in the first four years (health care law, Bin Laden, the auto bailout, list goes on). They voted to give him another four years in office. A majority of voters wanted him and not Mitt Romney. This is an inescapable fact.
Can we just let puddleglum et al continue to believe that the voters were wrong, and that they were fooled by all of Obama’s “lies”?
I would also encourage Republicans to listen to those who say that the polls were wrong, or that Obama suppressed the vote, or that the Democrats somehow cheated to win.
Double down, Republicans! Get rid of those RINO’s in the party. Don’t give an inch!
My thought process wasn’t guided as much by the specific issues (rape, deportation) as much as the concept that some issues that seem to be limited to a few people actually are widely accepted. That is to say, no one wants to be raped and forced to carry the child to term. No one wants to be denied a job based on who their father was. No one wants to be deported because of a decision their parents made.
The right - and Polemic in this thread, I think - sees these as non-issues and political rhetoric related to them as “scare tactics.” I was trying to say that this is probably the wrong way to look at it. It’s not scare tactics to point out that Republicans are more likely to prevent women from obtaining abortions in cases of rape than democrats. Nor is it scare tactics to point out that Republicans are more likely to oppose the Dream Act than Democracts. Similarly, it’s not scare tactics to point out that Democracts are more likely to raise taxes tan Republicans. There’s a basis in reality for all of these concerns.
The label “scare tactics,” to me, reveals more about how little right-wingers think these should count in the National debate more than about whether they are real issues. There was another really good example on NPR this morning.
Mr. Vigurie was talking about how Mr. Romney wasn’t conservative enough, and in so doing he gets to discussing how the Republican party shouldn’t change their platform at all. He has a different suggestion for getting at demographics that Republicans are losing:
“And I think that Republicans don’t need to change their principles. They don’t need to change their philosophy. But they need to address how they are dealing with Hispanics, how their conversation is being heard. And in my opinion, the number one most effective way to reach minorities is to run minorities.”
If you wanted to be cynical, you would say that Mr. Viguire is suggesting Republicans pander to minorities by appointing token members of a group while ignoring the issues that are actually important to that group. I don’t think one should be quite that cynical. I think he’s doing the same thing Ann Romney was. He’s trying to say, look, our Republican platform is a model for success for minorities as well as old white men. You should vote for us because whether the economy is doing well and government is reigned in has more to do with your success than immigration policy does.
And that’s where I think a sort of “empathy-blindness” takes hold. A party full of old white men naturally sees the value in issues that old white men worry about on a day to day basis. It’s harder to see how issues that other kinds of people have to worry about each day are important. That’s true even though old white men really truly do share the same desires about being free from discrimination, imprisonment, etc.
In other words, I suggest that rather than insisting that young people / women / Hispanics simply need to see things from old white men’s point of view, the old white men would do better to try and see things from the point of view of young people / women / Hispanics. Meeting in the middle on issues people actually care about would do alot more good than just trying to refine the sales pitch.
Oh it has, substantially.
Before Nov 6th conservatives would sneer at ‘activist judges’ dictating legislation against the goodwill and desires of the righteous majority. The minority was dictating terms to the majority, they said. No longer. In the 3 states willing to pass legislation on gay marriage with the will of the majority behind it, it won in all three.
In the past marriage amendments were intentionally put on ballots, not necessarily to win, but to turn out conservative voters for the general election. On Nov 6th more people in Minnesota voted against restricting marriage to a man and a woman than even voted for either presidential candidate.
Anti-homosexuality will no longer be a war banner but a guaranteed land mine. I encourage conservatives to continue trumpeting it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the basis in reality is the fact that these are their stated policies. Republicans did a bunch of this in the last election: they wanted to ignore everything but the economy and they were trying to appeal to a moderate audience without moderating their policies, so they simply rejected almost all commentary on other issues. Romney was a moderate on abortion in Massachusetts and his stated policy as a candidate was that he would allow for abortion in cases of rape and incest and risk to the life of the mother, but a slew of other Republicans said they wanted a ban with no exceptions including Paul Ryan. And the president always gets to pick federal judges and then there’s the matter of Supreme Court nominations (four justices are 74 or older, including Ginsburg and Breyer). Obama has some chance to move the court to the left and Romney was almost guaranteed a chance to move it to the right. It’s not scare tactics to point that out, and it’s not scare tactics to talk about the ultrasound procedures that were passed or proposed in some states, or the widespread attempts to defund Planned Parenthood. That’s policy. It’s just policy they didn’t want people to focus on, so they complained about scare tactics. The right wing of the Republican Party also opposed immigration reform going back to George W. Bush. Bush and McCain both supported that, but the remaining Republicans called everything else amnesty and criticized Obama’s executive order earlier this year. You can use scare tactics to characterize a policy, but talking about an actual, stated policy is not a scare tactic.