Please, Lord, let it be Newt. I will eat tofu. All whale products, right out! I will maintain a respectful demeanor when someone tells me they’re Wiccan. I will quit smoking, and this time I mean it! Tobacco, of course, baby with the bathwater, and all that…
And, John-boy, Guilliani is toast. Rudy is doody. If Bernie Kerik is any indication of his judgement and wisdom, he is a maroon. And unless he flip-flops massively on the gay and abortion issues, he will lose the knuckle-walking Trog base.
Cheney is the logical choice.
Whoever they pick, we are doomed, DOOMED by our own incompetence.
Heck, even if Clinton wins, it’ll backfire on the Dems for sure.
Northeasterner? Hillary isn’t a New Yorker, she’s a carpetbagger. So forget that. Who’s leading the Republican polls? Rudy? Not just Northeast, but New York City. Thrice married, gay loving, well, hero until you look deeper. That will make the religious right rush to the polls.
McCain is already melting down. Romney? Northeastern also. A Mormon flip flopper. Yeah, Newt would be a good candidate - for the Democrats. Brownback is more mainstream these days, but he’s a nobody. Who else do they got? Whoever is the Republican candidate has got to be able to deal with the more and more scandals that will be out by election time. Either they repudiate Shrub, and lose the 25% diehards who still like him, or support him, and lose everyone else.
How many of you pessimists thought the Democrats were going to lose it last November, by the way?
Not really. Neither side likes her, so it doesn’t much matter whether her party is in power of the Legislative branch or not if she took power. She’d still have to fight over everything.
Bush’s scary part was in using the single party force to sledehammer through anything he wanted and being able to force his party to stick with him via the polarization. I.e. “If you’re not a God-fearin Republican then you’re a terrorist through and through!” and being able to sell that idea through the public.
Frankly, the amount that cheating could skew the vote is so minimal that pretty much the fact that it came to that just shows the meh-ness of both candidates. And there’s no way to know that it’s not a simple case that the Republicans cheated more skillfully.
Gore and Kerry were both dogs. Bush was also a dog. We’ve not had a real choice for two elections in a row. Whoever won didn’t really matter so far as the public cared.
Consider this: If 2008 comes down to Clinton vs. Giuliani, the religious-right voters will be able to stomach neither and stay home; or, better still, they’ll run a third-party candidate who will spoil Giuliani’s chances. The left wing of the electorate, OTOH, has learned its lesson from the Nader campaigns and will unite behind the Dem nominee, any Dem nominee.
And Clinton has one advantage over Kerry in 2004: She doesn’t have to tell the voters who she is. They don’t all like her (I don’t, goddam DINO, for whom I will vote without hesitation), but they all know her.
When you start trotting out proof and not hearsay and wild chains of coincidence.
And, hey, John Mace, thanks for the ringing endorsement there.
As for all of you who keep saying that Rudy can’t win because he’ll be unacceptable to the religious right, if you’re talking about winning the Republican nomination then you may very well be correct, although I think that the left has a real tendency to greatly overstate the influence that the RR actually has, but in the general election? I disagree. They may not like Rudy all that much, but if you think they’ll vote for Hillary or Obama instead of holding their noses and pulling the lever for Giuliani, or even that they’ll stay home and by that inaction allow one of those two Democrats to win, you’re nuts.
Here’s the thing though, the Republicans don’t have any solid candidates either.
Rudy? Not gonna happen. Rudy may be what New York needed after Democratic misrule, but he’s an authoritarian, and he’s WEIRD. Middle America isn’t going to vote for Rudy, nevermind his 9/11 actions.
Romney? Mormon. That’s gonna cost him. That’s 10 times worse than Catholic.
McCain? Mmmmaybe. But he’s not doing so hot.
Newt? Come on. Newt isn’t running. I admit a certain fondness for Newt because he was a guy who actually cared about ideas. Not that he had good ideas or anything, but in our current dark ages he passed for an intellectual politician. But that doesn’t mean I think he’d make a good president, nor that I think he has a chance in hell to be president. He’s yesterday’s diapers.
It’s a funny race, the first time since 1952 (Eisenhower vs Stevenson) where a former president or vice-president isn’t one of the nominees. In every other race in the modern era the presumptive nominee of one of the major parties was already known by now, and the other party’s primary fight was all about whether the nominee could beat the already annointed incumbent.
So we’ve got these funny rock paper scissors comparisons.
But I agree that the Democrats have a huge built-in advantage in 2008, regardless of their nominee, because even though no figure from the current Bush administration is running all Republicans are going to be tied to the Iraq war. And I also gotta say, if you are running in a statistical dead heat to George Freaking Bush that a few thousand stolen votes in a few states can keep you from winning, then you pretty much deserve to lose. If you really got 50.01% of the vote to Bush’s 49.99%, then fuck you.
Geez. So much hand-wringing from my fellow Dems already. Relax! Nobody really cares about this election yet but the candidates and the donors!
The way I see it, you have got to be blind to see that Republicans are in disarray over their candidates right now. Guiliani has so far gotten a free pass on his family values bona fides, McCain is halfway around the bend and starting to look more and more like Bob Dole with more interest in getting in front of TV cameras, the righty Republican base likes Romney about as much as the lefty Democratic base likes Clinton. And at the moment, the Republicans who’ve announced still think the Iraq war is pretty much the greatest thing that ever happened to Freedom.
In this kind of election, neither side is going to get the perfect candidate. The Blue Side just needs a candidate just a wee bit better than the Red one, and I think that is a perfectly reasonable expectation at this point.
You can make up these "but"s until you’re blue in the face. There IS no experienced black Senator running. (In fact, there aren’t any other black Senators at all.) There is no female non-Northeastern Senator running. If you want to recruit Barbara Boxer, go ahead. These are the candidates available at the moment. There’s a decent spread, and Democrats certainly seem happier with their options than Republicans do, and I think that’s a good sign. Remember the famous Republican fundraising edge of '00 - '04? The top two Democrats brought in more money this quarter than all of the Republican candidates combined. Whining like this is premature and annoying.
Personally I don’t get a shit who the Republicans run, I’m not a republican. I do care that my party nominate someone who can actually win a national election. Neither Clinton nor Obama will do that.
If Clinton and Obama make peace and form a Clinton/Obama ticket, they’ll lose any chance of support from racist whites, but most of those would have voted Pub anyway. OTOH, they’ll get the vote of every eligible African-American but Alan Keyes. You’ll see an inner-city voter-registration drive like you’ve never seen before.
Exactly. And for that matter, you can talk about “Someday there will be” but until a black man or a woman actually run for office, it won’t ever happen. Too often I see variations on “Oh sure, a woman will be president someday, but that day’s not today, so why bother trying?” Even if neither Obama nor Clinton win the primary or the general election, the fact that they are running at all and seem to have a better than slim chance (hell, they’re the front-runners) is a step in the right direction.
Here’s just one example of many. And no one inthesethreads could come up with any evidence that individual “voter fraud” is a real, widespread problem worthy of concern. See this recent editorial:
Republican voter intimidation, OTOH, is a real problem, or has been recently.
I think it’s crazy to say that Obama can’t win. The man is amazing. Have you heard him speak?! The word “orator” will soon be in use again.
He’s charismatic. He’s good-looking and masculine. He’s credible on the Iraq war. However much people call him “inexperienced,” he doesn’t have the callow vibe that Edwards certainly had in '04.
He walks and talks like a winner; that counts for a lot! And the reasons that right-leaning folks won’t vote for him? Because he’s super liberal? Not really, no “worse” than the average Dem. Racism? Could be a factor, I admit.
Here’s the question: If people aren’t going to vote for an “inexperienced black man,” then why does Obama have $25M in contributions right now?
These are the candidates available at the moment. There’s a decent spread, and Democrats certainly seem happier with their options than Republicans do, and I think that’s a good sign. Remember the famous Republican fundraising edge of '00 - '04? The top two Democrats brought in more money this quarter than all of the Republican candidates combined. Whining like this is premature and annoying.