And I’m saying that what you’re saying is a pile of the choicest horse manure. Can you, by comparison with any reasonable person who would have been considered a centrist before the Republicans went batshit, show me a Democrat who’s likely to run for president who is NOT a moderate? Even Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed socialist, has never advocated for anything close to as nutbar as anything that’s standard Republican party platform now. Which is still not as far right as the GOP candidates are going to have to go to secure an actual nomination from their base voters.
THERE IS NO EFFECTIVE AMERICAN LEFT ANYMORE! Nobody with any actual chance of winning a nomination in the Democratic party is actually a leftist. Even Bernie knows he has no chance…he’s only in this to get his slightly-left-of-center views heard and maybe pull Corporate Clinton a bit to the left. A bit.
I mean, have we gotten to the point finally where “Communist” means that you support a city-financed fire company, a city-financed police force and libraries? Is that Communism now?
Well, you’ve out-CAPITALIZED me, out-INSULTED me, and used waaaay more words than I did, so your opinion MUST BE right!
I take it, then, I will NOT have your vote in this upcoming election, so I should halt the presses that were in the middle of printing up my campaign buttons?
I wouldn’t want you to GET a prick.
At no point in anything I’ve posted in response to you have I insulted you. I have insulted your opinion and your posts, both of which are legitimate and accepted in this forum. I have refrained from getting personal in all aspects here. And I notice that you have no response to my request for examples of any Democratic extremists who are running or likely to run for president in this cycle who are being taken even 1/10 as seriously as the Republicans are taking their clown car.
Whether it’s accepted on this forum or not, it’s poor debating skills. I’m not here, on this forum, to engage in that; there’s plenty of other forums where one can further hone their poor debating skills, if one so desires.
For the third time, IMHO it does not matter who throws their hat - or their garter - into the ring; whomever WINS their party’s final nomination WILL BE the person WHO WILL adopt their Party’s furthest-from-the-middle stance. If the Rep says “white”, the Dem will say “black”; if the Dem says “up”, the Rep will say “down” and so on and so on and so on.
It’s what ensures we all talk a good game, but nothing ever actually gets done, like resolving the Social Security debacle, like coming up with an effective immigration policy/program, AND finding a universal healthcare coverage plan that actually works in theory AND in its (literal) application.
Almost eight years ago, we were gonna Change the Way Business is Done in Washington, 'member? A year into it, our fearless leader conceded he had no idea how impossible that would be, so we ALL got back on the same, tired treadmill of Nothing Changes except for the color of the tie our POTUS wears for the cameras, while we all screamed 'til we were blue - or red - in the face that it’s the other party’s fault.
Nothing CAN change when everything stays the same.
An unwillingness to recognize that about 99% of the obstruction has come from one party is not a very good debating tactic, either. If you seriously don’t want to debate realities in favor of debating according to the peculiar delusions of the GOP, that’s fine and we have nothing else to talk to each other about. Have a nice life.
Provide a citation to a legitimate source for your presented-as-fact “about 99% of the obstruction has come from one party” and we’ll have “a debate”.
Failure to provide said citation from a legitimate source and we’re simply engaging in an emotional, knee-jerking bitchfest, which is something the Conservatives typically do when blaming all things on our current non-American, Communist-in-Socialist’s-Clothing POTUS.
Though female, I’m not real fond of bitchfests; I prefer debates involving logic and factual information - or, at the very least, informed/educated opinions.
Thanks for the wishes (permission?) to “have a nice life”, though; I believe I’ll continue TO do so.
It looks like you’ll fit in here: requests for citations warms the cockles of every Doper’s heart. You might get dinged for using scare quotes every now and then, but that’s a habit that’s easily broken.
I believe jayjay misrepresents the dynamic. Republican are sleaze innovators, but Democrats will rationally follow their lead when the table are turned. Let’s look at some of the evidence.
First we have a confession by Mitch McConnell that his party follows a policy of obstructionism. Before Obama even took the oath of office, Republican leaders met and decided they would oppose the President at every turn. McConnell’s insight was that bipartisanship disproportionately benefited the party in power. So rational minorities, according to this view, should obstruct.
Cite: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/mitch_mcconnell_the_most_hones.html
It’s not a long article. Here are two key quotes by McConnell, said at different times: [INDENT]…the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. [/INDENT] McConnell meant it. His goals were not one policy or another. The chief goal of the Senate Minority Leader of the time was destruction of the opposing party’s Presidency. Also: [INDENT]We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals, because we thought – correctly, I think – that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. [/INDENT] In other words bipartisanship and compromise are for suckers. It got to the point where, yes, Mitch McConnell filibustered a bill that he had sponsored. That takes obstruction to new levels of artistry.
Judicial confirmations provide another example. During the Obama Presidency Republicans instituted a new unwritten rule: all nominations would require 60 votes. The founding fathers never ever intended the Senate to operate on super-majority rules. Yet that became routine during the 2008-2014 era. See chart in preceding link.
If you prefer statistics, you can look at cloture votes. They tend to rise when the Republicans are the minority party in the Senate. But when the GOP loses control, cloture votes don’t decline back to old levels. It’s a one way ratchet.
Be sure to check out the chart: Pushback on False Equivalence and the Filibuster - The Atlantic Cloture votes are the way filibusters are invoked, so that’s pretty strong evidence.
ETA:
Reporters like to be evenhanded, so they don’t like pointing things like this out. Even to the point where academics who do write about this find themselves ignored on this topic, though not others. Ref: Mann and Ornstein It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.
That was a little disjointed, so let me summarize the lines of evidence.
McConnell’s candor,
Statistical evidence
and
Academic research by a Republican and a Democrat at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute that concluded the following:
[INDENT]The second is that fact that, however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nopartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier–ideologically exptreme; contemptious of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts; evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges. [/INDENT]
Then there’s the counterpoint, Bob Woodward’s The Price of Politics, which chronicles how Republicans again and again sought to work with the President, only for him to decide that HE was the arbiter of what constituted a compromise and they should just shut up and vote for his “bipartisan” bills.
I said conservative who’d vote for the centrist candidate.
I’m one of the sort of emerging political demographic who’s socially liberal, but more fiscally conservative and who prefers a more muscular foreign policy than what the Democrats typically aim toward.
That said, I don’t really like the “base” of either party. On one side, you have paranoid, ignorant and reactionary loons whose goals seem to be to regress the country by 50 years on most social and environmental issues because Jesus said so(or so they think), and on the other you have a bunch of people who basically think that the government is, and worse, should be the primary mover for change in the society, and that these changes should be imposed on the citizenry because they’re “right” and they’re what the Europeans do, not because they’re what the people desire, or even realistic or sensible.
I have a problem with both parties for that in general - they’re both taking a moral stance on various things and trying to impose them outside of the will of the people, or with the scantiest of mandates. One side is trying to derive their moral legitimacy from a really conservative stream of Christianity (Evangelical/Baptist), and the other is essentially waving their hands and saying “We’re right!” without even grounding it in much beyond a sort of basic do-gooderism mentality.
So screw them all; I tend to vote for whoever’s the least offensive, or barring that, who I feel will allow me to keep my money in my pocket and stay out of my life as much as possible.
Just a note to point out that while the poll itself is straightforward, the implications and practical applicability are not.
In general, people who are themselves more strongly liberal/conservative tend to rate the likelihood of a strong liberal/conservative getting elected as much higher than do other people. This will tend to influence their view in any actual situation, in spite of whatever their response is to the theoretical poll.
You must have missed the part where the Republicans went extreme right and the DLC types followed them like little lost puppies. Hillary Clinton is a fucking HAWK who loves Wall Street money. Obama is a Reagan Republican. If the Democrats were ever to seriously move to the left, your head would explode.
Thank you ALL for the warm welcome to the site, either directly by saying so or indirectly by paying so much particular attention to my little posts within this thread, where I - too- express MY opinion…like everyone else is/has been doing.
Thank you all for the tutelage in Who Really is Who/What in American Politics. Of course, TO digest each of your versions as The Truth Surpassing All Other Truths on the matter, I’d have to completely disavow my first-hand knowledge and experience with it throughout my almost 37 years OF participating in it.
That, or I’d have to suffer a severe-enough bump on my head which rendered me incapable of remembering any of it.
The latter is more likely to occur than the former, so I suppose it’s best that we all find that compromise position and simply agree to disagree…since there ain’t a single one of us who’s gonna change SOP in Washington.
I’m liberal-to-moderate, and voted (with the vast majority, so far) for the first option. Governing in the U.S., when it is done at all, is largely done from the middle. I want a candidate who shares most of my views, can win and then can get stuff done.
I don’t really have anything to cite except my own voting habits and perception. I’ve always skewed conservative… in fact, when my high school senior class gave awards to their own members for each person’s noteworthy trait, I got “Most Conservative.” Admittedly, I grew up in California, but I still had to beat out 300 other students for that title.
So when the Republican Party can make me so disgusted with their antics that I vote for Obama in protest, they’ve done something seriously, seriously wrong. As far as I’m concerned, the Tea Party is the biggest threat to America’s future.
Check out It’s Even Worse than It Looks, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. Mann is a think-tanker with the Brookings Institution (centrist/nonpartisan), Ornstein is with the American Enterprise Institute (conservative), and both agree that the political gridlock in recent years is almost entirely the fault of obstructionist Republican ideologues.
By me, personally? I’ll take someone who’s “liberal” on social policies and “conservative” on fiscal matters. Seems it’s an impossible dream.
Interesting. Ditto, here. Though I suspect had I been the first one to say it, I’d be found completely not rightfor stating such. Odd, since I AM just a newbie, here.