@John Mace: The Hitler stuff was mentioned upthread. I’d heard the quote before and did not further research to see if the quote attributed to him was something that he’d actually said.
This has been said repeatedly already, but no. Voting is not so much a privilege but a responsibility that comes with being part of a society, a responsibility to something greater than yourself that includes many people who face real consequences of a vote. Your responsibility is not to reward a candidate who makes you feel good and proud and self-righteous, but to choose the candidate who you think will do the best job for all of We the People and the government we established to promote the general welfare etc. We don’t elect drinking buddies or preachers or cast members of “The View”; we elect public officials to whom we entrust the government.
You further have the responsibility to make that choice from among the real, non-frivolous options on the ballot, if you really see a difference that matters between the real, non-frivolous candidates, one of whom will actually be in charge as a result. If you didn’t see such a difference this time, then for shame; but maybe now you do.
I’m frankly amazed that this requires any explanation.
Well it requires explanation because it’s your opinion. A person’s vote or non-vote is 100% his or hers choice. Each person needs to decide what his interests are and vote accordingly. Why even have elections if there is only one right action?
Yes and every choice has consequences. You don’t get to have it both ways. One must take responsibility for one’s choices. I don’t recall anyone in this thread saying that people do not have the right to make their choice at the polls, but some people seem to want to make that choice and then refuse responsibility for it.
Why even have elections if they’re only popularity contests? If you have them, it’s for a purpose. If you think there’s another purpose than the one I just explained, then do kindly offer it up for us. Dismissing something you find uncomfortable as “opinion” helps nobody.
I was half-joking with the “mystery” comment. I kinda knew the thread had already been Godwinized, so consider that comment to be aimed at the original Godwinizer here.
And, frankly, the whole business about how someone should vote is a hijack of this thread, anyway. To the extent that we want to tie that DB, she’s made it perfectly clear that she thought folks should vote of HRC in the general. There is no debate about that. I don’t think she has much sympathy for the folks who felt torn about voting for HRC, given the alternative. And she is ever the party faithful. It’s hard to imagine her saying “go ahead and vote for Jill Stein if you want. No one is going to blame you afterwards.” She’s an in the trenches fighter for the Democrats and has been for decades.
Interesting. Are Clinton supporters taking responsibility for voting for her in the primary? Considering they voted for the candidate who ultimately lost the election. I also think it’s interesting that you deem all other candidates other than the one you think should have been elected as frivolous. Is our loyalty supposed to be to the candidate or to the party?I keep hearing (you haven’t said it…yet, I suppose) that voting third-party is throwing your vote away because they have no chance at winning. But isn’t that a self-fulfilling prophecy? How will they ever until enough people vote for them? If you think that third party candidate represents your ideals better than the main two candidates do, but you don’t vote for them because you think they have no chance of winning, well shouldn’t you accept responsibility for the maintaining the quagmire of a two-party system that limits all of our choices to the wealthiest, most powerful candidates? I’m guessing you don’t.
I think we’ve beat the horse dead and then some, so as a parting post, I’d just like to say that I always, always, always enjoy seeing Brazile on a political discussion panel. I don’t always agree with her, but I love her style and admire her tenacity. She has this unbelievable ability to meld the personalty of The Perfect Southern Lady with the fiercest pit bull you’ll ever have to face off against. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of her. At least I hope not.
I voted for the candidate that I felt had the best chance to win the general election which is what I felt was best for the country. She did ultimately lose, but that does not mean that Bernie would have won. I would have gladly voted for Bernie in the general election had he won, but he didn’t. So that was a moot point.
I think our loyalty should be to what’s best for the country.
I have not said that. However I do think that if you live in a swing state with close polling and you are thinking about voting 3rd party for ideological purity reasons, then you better consider the possible consequences of that decision and make sure you’re ok with it. I choose to pragmatically look at the choices in front of me and I go with the one that seems to be most likely to help move the country in the direction I think it ought to go. I’ll always take responsibility for that process.
I totally get what you’re saying though, I agree that the current electoral system that we have is far from perfect, and I’d be happy to see it changed to better reflect the population’s wishes, but not if taking those steps mean that we always lose in the near term. Then we just set ourselves further back. If a third party starts winning at a local level, then a state level, then a national level, then maybe we can actually see a third party president one day.
I believe there was a fairly clear indication that Clinton would not recover – nor did it appear to me that she was seeking to recover – Sanders voters for the general. I think it’s much more likely that Clinton voters would have moved to Sanders because he shared the same progressive ideals of Democrats; he just took it further by repudiating Wall St and corporate interests that strip middle class America of its wealth and power. The fact that she instead unapologetically cozied up to bankers is why she irretrievably lost Sanders voters.
I agree and in my opinion, voting for centrist Democrats is not what’s best for the country. It only serves to send the message that the only answer to the Republican’s march to ever more rightward extremes is to follow them to the right. It’s not okay with me that we’ve essentially become an oligarchy, but the solution is not to vote for oligarchs even when they are running against other plutocratic candidates. It’s to find and vote for candidates who reject that. Sanders was obviously the poster child for this, but to a lesser extent I thought Jill Stein was an adequate (not perfect) alternative vote to reject the effect of money in politics. Maybe I was wrong, but that was my perception and I voted with the same sense of loyalty to my country that you did. I can only speak for myself, but I’ll bet you’d hear the same from most voters who bucked the narrative that we owed our vote to whatever Democrat or Republican was fed to us.
I think it’s safe to say that we all consider the consequences of the 2016 election, but if we’re being honest that we all bear some responsibility collectively for accepting that our country is run by self-serving, incurious, unprincipled, and intransigent ideologues who refuse to or are incapable of finding compromise or creating coalitions that balance competing theories about what is best for our country. There were things I didn’t like about Obama; I didn’t feel he was as progressive as I would have liked. But I gotta hand it to the guy for reaching out and trying to find compromise across the aisle with people who were determined to block him at every turn. Obamacare has its flaws and it’s much less then what we should have, but it was achievable and it didn’t seem to matter that it was Romneycare before it was Obamacare. But I digress…
I understand your pragmatism, but I feel like I would be giving my vote away if I voted for the likely candidate, as opposed to the one I preferred. I know people who don’t vote because they feel their vote doesn’t matter. I’ve never felt that way even when my candidate loses because my vote is my voice and I’m entitled to speak it at the polls.
I don’t see any reason why one can’t vote third party at every level at which they are in play. They do win at local, state and national level. We’ve had third-party governors, senators, state legislators and local mayors. If they’re on the ballot, they are a legitimate choice. If you want more of the same, you have to vote for them. Change doesn’t happen when all we do is wish for it. Granted, it may be a long time coming, but I can’t see any potential regret in being forward thinking and doing my part to hasten the demise of the two-party system.
If I’m being honest, I was shocked that Trump won. I now realize that anything is possible. Given the growing factionalization of Republicans/conservatives, I really thought that enough of them had a severe enough distaste for Trump that they’d split and give more of their votes to Gary Johnson and McMullin. Yeah, I expected both of those candidates to do better than they did. I think a lot of people were afraid to vote their conscience because the Clinton hatred was so deeply ingrained and they couldn’t risk her winning. I could be wrong, though. But if I’m not, I sure hope they’ve thought long and hard about giving away their vote to the highest bidder. It only kind of reinforces for me what happens when you vote against your principles and I have no doubt there was a great deal of noses-holding in the polls.
Sorry for the hijack. I do appreciate the discussion, though.
:rolleyes: OK, then. Even less than seeing two patrician families trading the White House do people want to see the Bushes and the Clintons do it. Americans do not want to see one family of weaselly upper-class nitwits and one couple of jerkwad yuppie assholes trading the White House.
I know, right? I welcome the civil-rights element of the American political landscape, in fact I probably sympathize more with them than I do with the more conservative side. At the start I welcomed Dr. King as a voice for the left to contrast with President Kennedy and to move the overton window. If Jesse Jackson had won a Democratic Party nomination I would gladly have voted for him in that general election. But more than either the black or white side of the country I believe that national unity is the only way to keep the Russians from destroying this country. The Negroes need to recognize that even in 2017 they represent the minority of the nation. But for some reason the social justice crusaders believe that their interests should take precedence because… they are the loudest? they able going sink the polity unless they get their way? They want it the most? [/sardonic]
Sounds a little silly, doesn’t it? “Majority rule” x identity politics got us centuries of oppression of blacks, because they could never catch up in numbers. If we now act like some of us “are” progressives (ew, dirty) and some of us “are” (nice & shiny) moderates, then we have another identity to exclude from power, just like they did blacks before the 1960’s. The modern Democratic Party (since 1932) isn’t supposed to do that; it’s supposed to be a coalition to stand up for all the little guys, not just the largest group or the deepest inside.
The QUILTBAG are a tiny minority and easy to mock; we stand up for them not because we are them, but because we try to care about our fellow citizens, fellow human beings, fellow beings even. Same for blacks, or people on dialysis, or Arab-Americans.
It’s actually vital to the political viability of the Democratic Party that we find neglected causes to stand up for; whether they represent small groups of persons, or just aspects of our existence that have been ignored by those in power.
Bernie wasn’t even the “progressive” candidate for some strange race of “progressives.” He was an American, representing the actual mainstream of the populace–mostly working class and poor, mostly white, mostly in regions of the country and sectors of the economy going through a generation-long economic depression in all but name. If he was out of the mainstream of the Democratic Party in the age of the Clintons, is the fault his, or the party’s?
OK, what were the concrete effects of this undue influence over it’s day-to-day operations during the primaries? What specific things would have played out differently if rather than “undue” influence, she just had the standard influence that comes with being the generally preferred candidate of most of the people in the DNC, and a long time champion fund raiser of the Democratic party.
You will note that Kennedy was elected president rather than Martin Luther King. Why? Because the majority of Democrats voted for him. And that the African Americans got their civil rights by working with non-blacks within the Democratic party. They didn’t insist that the Democrats become the Afro-national party or else they would vote for Nixon. Progressive views were/are taken seriously by the party. The different factions are trying to work together, but as it happened your candidate lost this time around. Better luck next time. No snark, I mean it.
Your saying that I view progressives as “Ew Dirty” and moderates as “nice and shiny” indicates that you have absolutely no idea where I am coming from. In fact it seems we generally agree on most things, I just have a mirror image of your view of the situation.
You seem to think that the Moderates hate the progressives and want to see a party that only allows a narrow set of views and that they hate progressives and will do all they can to shut them out and shut them down. And who hate Bernie Sanders with the heat of a thousand suns for having the temerity to challenge Clinton the rightful heir. While the progressives just want everyone to love each other.
The problem with this view is that every moderate on this thread has said repeatedly that if Bernie was the nominee they would have voted for him. Not in the holding their nose, lesser of two evils, only to keep Trump away, but with whole-hearted support for a candidate who while he may not be our favorite is still a good choice. The thing we object to is the constant haranguing from the progressives that it is unfair that their candidate didn’t win, and that anyone who isn’t a progressive is just as evil as the Republicans. It is the mirror image of the tea party, that had a test for party purity and none who fall short need apply. Its the kind of divisive thinking which got us into the gridlock partisanship that resulted in Trump.
I never claimed to want it both ways. I’m of the opinion that if we live in a democracy where practically anyone can vote then acknowledging the fact that a large proportion of the voters vote for emotional, stupid, random, etc reasons is a feature of that system. If we can and must tolerate that sort of nonsense we can tolerate people voting for people we don’t like or has no chance of winning.
Furthermore, I don’t like arrogance of pretending that I know what is in everyone else’s best interest. So I’m not about to tell everybody how they should vote or shame them for voting differently than me.
Even my own kids when they get to voting age I’m going to emphasize that point to. Their vote is theirs. We’ll chat about politics and issues but I’m not going to give them grief for exercising their right as they wish.
We are at a ridiculous point in our country with regards to people and their ability to stomach disagreement. It’s truly sad.
So, you expect each person in the nation to research the issues and come up with a decision matrix for each issue and a candidate’s stance on such? No. That isn’t how people operate. I bet near half the time people vote for (R) or (D) merely because of the (R) and (D) which is a marketing/branding challenge for the (R)'s and (D)'s.
Very good post. However, to get a viable third party nationally I think we’d have to change the way we count votes.
There’s actually very little mystery there; the connection is clear. Both parties are utterly corrupted by corporate influence via campaign contributions. The Trump administration makes it laughably obvious by putting their corporate overlords directly into office (Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO as Secretary of State? A dozen Goldman Sachs executives in his cabinet? Wtf.)
But the Democrats are doing their best to catch up in the oligarchy / fascism game, removing the few rules that are in place governing how much money they’ll accept from corporate donors. As you’ve pointed out, Donna Brazile was very much a part of the in-group, and in favor of raising obscene amounts of corporate money. I think her main objection to the underhanded dealings was the *outcome, and I’m relatively sure if Trump hadn’t won her book exposing it would never have materialized.
DNC Rolls Back Ban on Money From Federal LobbyistsDNC Votes Down Ban on Corporate PAC Money
This was the portion of your commentary that I originally (and still do) agree with. Other democrats can certainly take Hillary Clinton and the Democrats to task for at least violating the spirit of fair competition within the party and creating the appearance of impropriety. But in reality, Clinton’s intra-party competitors weren’t going to win anyway. So while I think the agreement was probably not a wise idea in terms of how it could give ammunition to Hillary’s critics and reinforce the idea that she’s benefiting from machine politics, the reality is her machine was probably going to defeat the likes of O’Malley and Webb, agreement or no agreement. She had already made a lot of inroads in terms of finances before that agreement and her name-brand recognition was going to push them out of the race regardless.
Biden, as I’ve already said, might have been a completely different matter, but he didn’t run. And I doubt that a sitting vice president in an administration that has remained very popular with a cross-section of Democratic voters was going to be intimidated by Hillary’s money. As I said previously, I think we can assume he chose not to run because his heart just wasn’t into it.
Bernie’s strategy of being ‘different’ and not part of the Democratic party’s apparatus was an advantage initially in that it exposed Hillary’s weakness, which was that she was part of the establishment party system. Unfortunately, that was about as far as his campaign was able to go with that advantage. He didn’t lay the groundwork far enough in advance with people who weren’t already familiar with him. That’s why I say he ran an insurgency, not a serious presidential campaign. He did probably start a movement to tilt the Democratic party in a different direction and to reevaluate its occasional tendency to be “GOP-lite” at the expense of the interests of regular voters which is a positive legacy, IMO.
Obama just didn’t have the votes to support what he had wanted to do. One reason is that people like Max Baucus felt like he didn’t have the votes to vote for a progressive bill and remain a Senator. To make matters worse, despite his best efforts to please optimistic progressives while convincing his conservative critics that he wasn’t a socialist dictator, Obama lost control of congress in 2010, again in 2012, and again in 2014.
The reality that Bill Clinton found out in 1994 and Obama found out in 2010 is the same reality that Bernie or a true progressive would have experienced now had he/she won in 2016. A true progressive would be confronted with trying to accomplish the most ambitiously progressive agenda in years against the most obstructionist congress in years. I have a bad feeling I know who voters would hold responsible for failure to move forward on legislation. It might be congress, but the perception among voters is that the president should just wave a magic wand and get it all done. It doesn’t work that way.
One criticism I hear of Obama is that he backed away from campaign finance reform – damn right he did. Why? What Supreme Court case in 2010 fundamentally changed the political campaign law landscape? The Citizens United case was decided on by right wing ideologues on the bench who decided in their infinite wisdom that money is political speech and shouldn’t be regulated. This would have given the party of the rich an incredible fundraising advantage. Was Obama supposed to let Democrats fall on their own swords? We can thank both Bushes for our new oligarch/plutocratic reality – or more specifically, the voters who voted for them and didn’t vote against them.
We focus a lot of discussions on political horse trading once they get elected, and it’s understandable, but it’s voters who end up voting or not voting. A loaded judiciary is the result of voting behavior. So is Steve Bannon’s fascist Republican party. These outcomes aren’t stellar objects that fall out of the sky; they’re the result of our collective behavior. Voting isn’t just an individual right; it’s a individual and collective responsibility to remain informed and vote for the person who’s either going to do the most good, or if nothing else, the least harm.
OK. It certainly seems like some posters here (not you) keep coming back with: What was wrong other than HRC got a few debate questions early on? The debate questions aren’t the issue.
Sorry, but that’s the kind of dangerous thinking that created Her Inevitableness in the first place. ***No one should have been thinking that in September of 2015. * ** Remember, people were saying that in 2007, too, but it didn’t play out like that, did it? And like I said earlier, what it looks like time is she wanted to do everything she could to not have to deal with a “pesky Obama problem” in 2016.
One other thing, that I think might address a few other people’s questions, too: When I walk into the room and see someone with their hand in the cookie jar, I don’t automatically assume I caught them on their first reach. Besides, just having their hand in the cookie jar is bad enough.
I’ll let you have the last word. I wanted to reply since you took the time to reply to me, but I really am tired of flogging this poor, expired horse. It is an ex-horse!
I don’t expect people to always act responsibly, certainly. That doesn’t mean it isn’t their responsibility, only that they’re shirking it.
Do you accept that citizenship in a democratic republic entails serious responsibilities, or is it only about rights?
Or it could be she is a slimy politician like all the rest based on: Travelgate, pay for influence at the State Department (Clinton Foundation), the fact she carpetbagged to NY to become a Senator with no other political office (didn’t pay her dues).
See it is responses like this that show why the Dems don’t get why they lost in 2016. They honestly believe Hillary had no flaws so it’s the voters that are stupid (or deplorable) for not liking her.
Keep it up Dems and we’ll see who you run against us in 2020. Maybe Charles Manson. After all he did organize a shelter for homeless youths, showed himself to be a competent strategist and did not directly kill anyone. Why wouldn’t someone vote for him?