I guess everyone has their trigger point. Most Republicans (not all of course) would feel pretty uncomfortable voting for David Duke. But codes and dog whistles work just fine. For myself, I get a little nervous when hard working folk get dissed.
Try2B: Economists tend to be pretty cognizant of political realities. Recall that Dick Armey and (more optimistically) George Shultz were both economists. Brat was reportedly a popular professor (indicating he has requisite gregariousness) and while his papers weren’t especially earth shattering, the joining of religion and economics should play pretty well among his constituency. I’m not saying that Brat will zoom directly to the A-list. But he seems to me like a promising rookie for the GOP.
And ducking the questions was the right thing to do. He needs to assemble his talking points for the general election. His 23 year old campaign manager wisely told a reporter that… he wasn’t going to comment until their team got some PR help. The national GOP obviously wasn’t going to help them a week ago. But they will now.
Brat appeared to champion Protestantism as a key to economic growth: “Give me a country in 1600 that had a Protestant led contest for religious and political power and I will show you a country that is rich today”. Max Weber made a similar point in less sweeping terms and more subtly 100 years ago. Modern economists roll their eyes and point to Asia, parts of which have grown rather fast without discernible Protestant influence. Catholic countries such as France and Italy have higher GDP per capita than Protestant UK. Now sure, Brat is presumably aware of this and it doesn’t contradict his narrow point. I’m just saying that this sort of pandering suggests that a career switch on his part might not have been a bad idea, though I hasten to add that he seems to have had a pretty good life up to now. Interesting guy.
[hijack]The US has a winner take all voting system. So when a third party enters on the left, it splits the left vote and hands victory to the right. And visa versa. You need some kind of proportional representation system, where say 1/3 of votes translates into some number of seats, in order to maintain a multi-party system. Find a district where the Dems or the Reps have less than 20% support, and you might make a case for a Libertarian or Green candidate. Or support Fairvote, as Brainglutton keeps telling us to.
Personally, I’d like to end the primary system and adopt proportional or semi-proportional representation, backed by approval voting. I think it would improve the marketplace of ideas and pose less of a risk of legislative/economic sabotage and gridlock. Smoke filled rooms aren’t a big deal when you have a choice of 8 brands of cigars. [/hijack]
There isn’t any evidence you won’t explain away with some shitty justification. Either you’ll shift the goal posts from “progressive” to “Democratic politician”, or you’ll just ignore things outright. But God forbid some random Republican from Nowhere, USA say something. Why, y’all will be all over that in a heartbeat.
Okay.
ahem
I’ll start with something simple. Even though I’ve done this before, here are some race based comments made by Democrats.
Joe Biden claimed Republicans wanted to put [Blacks] in chains while speaking to a heavily minority crowd. I guess in your mind that’s okay. Why, just imagine what would happen in a Republican Vice President made a similar remark to a mostly White crowd?
DWS claimed Republicans wanted to return to the age of Jim Crow (laws). Again, I guess that’s A-Okay, as well.
Andre Carson (member of the CBC) claimed some members in Congress would like to see Blacks hanging from a tree. Again, no complaints.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who is perplexed. To characterize strong language about voter suppression laws and parallels drawn to Jim Crow as the same as racism is bizarre. Of course OMG hasn’t really made any explicit characterizations, he’s just presented them as examples in response to LHOD’s original request: “If, however, your point is that the Democratic Party coddles racists and misogynists to the same degree that the Republican Party does, then by all means keep going. This time, though, give some cites that don’t go back to cranks…”
I’m thinking that he’s saying that calling a Voter Suppression Law the same as Jim Crow is vitriol. Which is interesting, sort of.
Anyway, ISTM that OMG’s posts generally reflect racial concerns and occasionally questions about the African American experience. I don’t see much evidence for knowledge of the latter, which fits oddly with his username.
No, y’all got it wrong; he’s not offering them as examples of racism, he’s offering them as examples of “race based comments”, which is somehow bad, I guess, even tho I’m not seeing it.
If a Republican Vice Presidential candidate said republicans wanted to put Blacks in chains, I expect he or she would be hailed for refreshing honesty.
That’s the irony of it all. Brat didn’t really win because of his stand on immigration, he won because of anti-establishment sentiment. But now that the votes have been counted, his response to any meaningful, relevant questions is, “Before I answer, you’ll have to wait until I can get my story straight with the establishment!” We’ll have to see how things play out and how populist this guy really is, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see Brat become another GOP drone.
The dems ought to put up a fight for this seat. Even if the district is the kind of place where a “-D” automatically gets a guy branded as a “liberal” with all the baggage that goes along with that, Brat is going to be in a compromising situation no matter what he does, and there will be a lot of hay for his opponent to make.
To recap, here’s what we’re looking for. Goalposts will stay still:
“If, however, your point is that the Democratic Party coddles racists and misogynists to the same degree that the Republican Party does…”
As we should, and as we should be all over any sexist/racist claptrap that Democrats say. But that’s moving the goalposts: picking on individual racists is one thing, pointing out an institution’s coddling of racists is what we’re talking about.
We’re not talking about race based comments. We’re talking about racist comments.
What would happen if a Republican said, “We want to put black people in chains” while speaking to a white crowd? She’d get in trouble, of course. If you can’t see how this analogy is fundamentally idiotic, lemme know.
This is not a racist claim. See the goalpost above.
This is not a racist claim. See the goalpost above.
It’s as if I asked you to play tennis with me, and you blew a spit bubble and then sneered at me, “Return that serve!” I can’t actually return a serve you don’t make, y’know.
Waitaminnit…MfM suggests that OMG might think the challenge is to find an example of high-ranking Democrats speaking of race-related issues with vitriol. If so, OMG might actually think he met the challenge. THAT’S NOT THE CHALLENGE!
Cantor’s district has 758,000 constituents. 36,000 of them -or 5%- voted for David Brat. Was it a hard fought campaign? Not really. When Cantor lost, he was in Washington, DC meeting with lobbyists. He thought he was untouchable. This guy was a Virginia delegate who couldn’t be bothered to fly or drive to his district from DC on election night.
So forget about immigration reform or Brat’s phony attacks on the sorts of corporate masters that he will surely be courting over the next 2 years. Just remember the fundamentals. You have to campaign during the primary and get out the vote if you want to keep your seat.
36,000 votes can’t be meaningfully extrapolated into any sort of national mood, at least in a campaign with a scrappy underdog and a snoozing incumbent.
With that in mind, the Mississippi Senate primary should be interesting. The challenger is crazy and morally challenged, the incumbent tired and uninspiring, but nobody is taking the race for granted.
Ok, I went a little beyond the vid. Click it yourself if you want. While I’m at it, what’s the point of internet vids anyway? All of that could have fit in a blog post.
ETA: I’d like at least one more party to vote for too.
[/QUOTE]
[hijack]The US has a winner take all voting system. So when a third party enters on the left, it splits the left vote and hands victory to the right. And visa versa. You need some kind of proportional representation system, where say 1/3 of votes translates into some number of seats, in order to maintain a multi-party system.
[/QUOTE]
Just blaming it on first-post-the-post isn’t an adequate explanation.
Canada and the UK both use FPTP, and both have a multi-party system. There’s normally two dominant major parties and then smaller parties, but it is a multi-party system, not the duopoly that is found in the US.
One reason that may favour the duopoly in the US is that I gather from other posters here on the SDMB that the two major parties are so entrenched that they are legally grandfathered on ballot access, primaries, and so on; that “any party which got X large % of the vote in the last election [i.e. the Republicans and the Democrats]” is automatically carried forward, but any other third party needs to file a large number of signatures to get on the ballot.
That’s not the case in Canada, and I think not the case in the UK. No party is grandfathered onto the ballot, and all parties must meet the same test to get on the ballot for each election.
Another thing that I’ve wondered about is your primary system, which is typically expensive for a candidate. We don’t have anything like that in Canada. Political parties are much more like private organizations, and select their candidates through nomination meetings; still can be expensive, but nothing like the average primary contest. (I realise that you can win a primary without spending a lot of money; this thread shows that very point; but it appears to be an exception.)
Northern Piper - It is indeed complicated. I had understood from this message board that most districts in the UK were dominated by 2 parties - it’s just the dominant ones aren’t identical nationwide.
I believe that parties are permitted to choose their candidates via convention: the primary is optional. Also, many ballots regularly list candidates from the Greens, the Peace and Freedom Party, the Libertarian Party, the Natural Law Party, the Constitution Party and other exercises in pointlessness. Marvel at the number of parties offering candidates for the US Congress in California in 2008 for example.
There’s no doubt that FPTP favors a two party system. I mean after all, the SDP has been an also-ran in the UK for quite some time, while there are many more viable parties on the Continent. The mathematics of voting splitting are pretty brutal. I agree though that my characterization could use some modification, though I haven’t quite figured out how to take the UK and Canada into account.
Calling people racist, even if they’re not racist, is not a racist thing to do. It might be obnoxious, or stupid, but it’s not racist. Coded language is often racist. The Southern Strategy was explicitly designed to politically exploit the racism of southern white voters.
I’ve been trying to devise a platform for a 3rd party that would take votes equally from both parties, but the exercise only reveals just how polarized our parties are. That approach would result in a party that only schizos would vote for (insofar as the platform is even relevant to Americans anymore).
I wonder if the major parties in the UK are not so polarized and this is partly why there are more than two viable parties. [/hijack]
Meh. Not convinced. 36,000 voters might be 5 percent of Cantor’s electorate, but it’s still and awful lot of people that Brat persuaded to vote for him … and which Cantor did not, with all his economic clout. Brat largely campaigned on dislike of moneyed corporate interests in politics, a very popular theme with the American people. Americans are sick of seeing their politicians selling their votes like so many canned hams. That’s why Brat won, he campaigned on the one issue that almost every incumbent in Congress is vulnerable on … and Cantor particularly.
I agree with this. The fiasco in 2000 scared a lot of progressives from voting Green again. But you know what? If Gore had come to an accommodation with Nader, we might have avoided that unpleasantness.
And I voted for Kerry in 2004, and what did it get us? Nada. Kerry didn’t even challenge the apparent voter fraud in Ohio.
Looks like I’m voting for leftist parties from here on. I’m afraid the party of Clinton is going to have to make some concessions in a Green or social democrat direction to get my vote.
I think I always vaguely visualize Clarence Thomas when I see an OMGABC post. But yeah, it’s not like there aren’t notorious angry black conservatives in public life.
I don’t know how elections work in the UK, but the main reason why we don’t have more than two parties here is that the party that gets the most votes wins, even without a majority.
So if you have Ralph Nader winning 5% of the vote, while the two major parties each get 47%, what we get is an extremely close election between the two major parties, rather than an easy 47+5 > 47 win for a Dem/Green coalition, after some negotiations between the Dems and Nader.