If you really want to see what my attitude was, go back and read my posts. I’ve been beating the same drum from the day I joined here. I warned people exactly what the result of electing the orange-haired freak would be, and also said it would take decades to reverse the effects. (I was thinking primarily of SCOTUS when I said that…a lot of the rest can be reversed in a presidential term or two.) People thought I was being alarmist.
I also ‘did the legwork,’ donated time and money, and live in CA. (Which, btw, is a sham excuse.)
Sorry about the assumptions, but you spoke pretty clearly as if you were a millennial. I, on the other hand, am not. I’m a Boomer.
Except, you deride the Bernie crowd repeatedly. Consider, however, that Bernie appealed to the very voters who swung this election (poor white people facing economic “devastation”) and was virtually unbeatable according to the polls. Sure, the polls fell short of reality, but while Cheeto-in-Chief was within the margins for error against HRC, he was not within those margins against Bernie.
In short, the HRC voters gave us the Cheeto by successfully propping up a candidate who was reviled by the very people who mattered the most (in this case, scattered Rust Belt voters).
Are your ideological biases so extreme that you can reconcile the fact that I might be younger and just as politically active and even possibly moreso than you?
And being a Boomer is nothing to be proud of. The oldest of you were handed a dream of an economic situation - the rest of the world was still on the long road to recovering from being literally on fire - and yet here the world is fixing the mess that was made with it, as it will for generations to come. Stop deriding later generations for being upset over your repeated mistakes, and stop deriding them for not wanting to help you make more.
Simple, Gerrymander like a boss, put all the <insert hated party here> voters into one huge district, and then to top it all off, put only one polling place in it. Hope you’re lucky enough to be on the end of the mander that has a polling place, and hope there’s a good highway connecting you and it! Free and fair
Though, if you want to be one of the cool kids these days, what you have to then do is mock people who have that hardship by comparing it to your experience, wherein there’s a polling pace literally 2 blocks from your house. Lazy bums!
I didn’t necessarily like everything about Bill Clinton as a President, but he and his wife were purely slandered as evil incarnate by the right. Hillary was subjected to 25 years of continuous investigations by the right, which yielded ZERO charges.
I didn’t like Hillary either, but seriously, she is not nor was she ever the villain she has been painted as on the right. If she were a private citizen, she would have bankrupted every single one of those assholes with Defamation lawsuits. But because she was a public figure, she was fair game.
This is exactly the fantasy that Bernie voters console themselves with. The fact is that Bernie wouldn’t have won, polls or no polls. Trump and the Republican shit-flinging machine had never even touched him. They were too happy with him working against Hillary.
Not sure where that came from, but anything is possible. Believe it or not, my ego doesn’t depend on my being the most politically active person in the universe. As it happens, I am politically active, but I’m not measuring myself against you in some kind of epeen contest.
I was giving you an idea of my age and nothing more. But if it helps you to blame me for all the ills of the nation, go right ahead.
No, but I found Bernie’s campaign more than a little insulting.
[ul]
[li]Bitching about how the DNC “stole” the election for Clinton, ignoring the 3.7 MILLION more votes she got than Bernie did.[/li][li]Complaining about closed primaries as being exclusionary, even though similarly exclusionary caucuses were the only part of the campaign where Bernie actually shined.[/li][li]Claiming to be the torch bearer of the poor and working class despite the fact he won ONLY young whites while getting crushed by at least 20%+ among Blacks, seniors, 45-64 year olds, Democrats, the uneducated, and women.[/li][li]And don’t forget the frequent dismissal of many of these groups’ opinions. “I can’t believe so many women are voting for Hillary just because she’s a woman too.” As if their decision wasn’t made with due consideration.[/li][li]Bitch about Hillary being DINO and Bernie a “true liberal” when their voting record overlapped by like 90% or something like that IIRC.[/li][li]Their buying in to fake news and internet gossip just as bad as the worst Trump supporter. (Which many continue to do).[/li][/ul]
I like Bernie. His supporters, though, were insufferable.
I think you both have a point. Yes, the voting system is needlessly complicated and it does discourage people from voting. The irony is that for the left wing purists who hated HRC so much she probably would have done everything she could have to simplify voting, ensure voting rights, nominated federal judges who’d protect those rights, and basically fight every GOP move that tries to make voting more difficult. Unfortunately, the purists who just couldn’t vote for filthy rotten HRC are now going to find it even harder to have their voices heard.
But yes, to your point, it’s not that hard and it just takes some effort to figure it out. It takes effort to participate in a democracy. There are always people in a democracy who want don’t really want you to vote and they will do whatever possible to discourage you from doing so. It takes effort to get around those efforts and double down on your rights. We can cry foul and wish there were a better system all we want. But nobody’s going to give it to us.
Sorry but polls are not votes. Again, if you go back and look at polling data at various points you’d see all kinds of people becoming hypothetical presidents. The fact is that Bernie Sanders couldn’t win his own party’s nomination. Moreover, Bernie Sanders lost in states that were demographically diverse like California, New York, and Florida. He also lost most of the battleground states. There is absolutely nothing in terms of real, hard actual voting evidence to suggest Bernie Sanders would have out-competed Donald Trump in swing states like Ohio, North Carolina, or Florida, which have more often than not leaned to the right, not the left. You’re telling me that Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, is going to win in states with republican governors and republican legislatures? Please, please explain that one!
If you think there are unfair hurdles to voting, and you want that to change, you’re going to have to make sure that people like Trump don’t get elected, which means that you’re going to have to deal with some of some of those hurdles and vote for imperfect candidates.
The idea that someone who doesn’t just bend over and take whatever the Democrats want shove at them during a given cycle is not being an adult is completely absurd. Real adults are capable of long-term planning, and voters who do not automatically vote for ‘whoever the Democrats run this time’ force the Democrats to pay attention to voters instead of just running whoever’s done a bunch of favors for party members. The idea, which seems to be common on this board, that everyone owes the Democrats their vote simply doesn’t match reality; roughly 1/3 of the electorate votes ‘none of the above’ every election cycle, it’s really not ‘you must vote A or B and if you don’t vote for one you’re voting for the other’ - and campaigns work better when they realize that.
I sincerely regret voting for Hillary Clinton out of the ‘lesser of two evils’ philosophy because as far as I can tell from the aftermath she didn’t lose badly enough to motivate the Democrats to do anything differently next time.
Bend over and take? … the point is that someone is going to win the election and set policy for the next X years. If you don’t ensure the better choice gets in now, you are allowing the situation to get even worse. That’s the adult realization. There is no “none of the above” choice.
Real adults determine a plan of action which match reality, often add a dash of optimism & wishful thinking to their attitude, and then take steps to execute them. If you want a Leftist party in America, then work within the system and make the center-left party (one which exists in a system designed to create two opposing parties) more Leftist.
Doing anything else in the system we have in the US is self-defeating, no matter how well the rationale for it sounds. You want a strong Left party in America? Stop supporting third parties which have no chance to be effective, make the Dems more Leftist, and accept you won’t win all the battles.
If I were to operate on the principle of “I refuse to work within a system that doesn’t do what I want, when I want, and makes achieving things hard work” then why not just give up on the idea of America?
THAT’S what bothers you? Pretty trivial stuff. If you go on Ellen, you dance. It’s what you do.
Kerry’s a good guy. He’s a bit on the stiff side but I can’t think of any major disagreements I have with him.
I have to give that to LBJ. Civil Rights, Medicare.
So the slogan was a bit timid and the product of focus groups. So what?
Any others of my generation sick of Hillary, and sick of the current DNC? Any other young Democrats here who despise Hillary, and who loathed voting for her?
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She had a well thought out economic plan rather than make empty promises about bringing back coal mining jobs.
Rising income inequality is a tough issue. Taxing the rich is a good start. What would have the promise?
Seriously, you think the president has the power to address the high cost of urban living? You think she can undo the forces of supply and demand? If you can’t afford to live in the city, either move or get a better job.
Ask not what you can do for you country, ask what your country can do for you.
If FDR had been black, he wouldn’t have gotten done what he did either. A large part of the country wasn’t ready for a black president. You can hardly blame Obama for that.
My point was it was a symptom of her empty and very insecure pandering. It works for some politicians. On her it came off like an old person desperate for approval and to fit in with “the young people.”
You can be a good guy, which is he, and also be a poor Presidential candidate. Which he also was.
Would agree with that but for Vietnam.
It was another symptom of her bad campaign.
Raise the tax rates on the wealthy. Closing the loopholes would be a better start. Tax stock dividends and mergers. And yes, I do think a President could, if they were effective enough.
Never said I blamed Obama for the fact he got little done. I know very well he faced obstruction from day one. He did the best he could.
Tell me, did those real adults’ ‘long-term planning’ include enabling a President Trump? How far back is he going to set their personal political goals?
You can complain all you want, but you can’t refute the logic. There was clearly only one way to prevent that happening, and if someone didn’t do that, they enabled it tacitly at the very least. The rest is a distraction from that simple fact.
