For any of you who were holding out for a Clinton nod on the vice presidency, I’m sure the announcement of Sen Joe Biden stung a little bit, but she did get a headliner’s slot at the convention. Last night she asked you to examine your reasons for supporting her: did you do it just for her, or did you do it for the greater good of America? Sen Clinton made it pretty clear, I thought – she’s not on the ticket, and she would regard it as a tragedy if your bitterness over her primary loss hurt the Democrats’ chances of furthering her life’s work.
And yet, Laurie Long is quoted in an Agence France Press article as saying
His past? Some kind of militant? Okay, from where I stand that sounds like dog-whistle language for “I am terrified of brown people”. What an irrational fear! Nobody spends time worrying that Joe Lieberman is actually in the Mossad, do they? Well, okay, that would actually explain a lot, so bad example.
But seriously – if you were a Hillary supporter and have any plans to (a) vote McCain, or (b) sit this one out, and you feel like sharing your reasons, I’d like to hear them. I’d also like to try to convince you to consider her wishes as she expressed them last night, and think about voting for Obama.
Your mainly PUMA clientele probably don’t come around these boards too much. And from what I know about true PUMAs they are either stealth republicans or thinking that the DNC made Clinton say those things. I don’t believe true democrats were members of PUMA, and further I don’t believe true democrats would ever, EVER vote for a republican after the 8 years we have had…hurt feelings or not.
EDIT:
I should mention on edit that I don’t believe all Hillary fans were PUMAs. I was just using them as an example.
I saw a die-hard Hillary supporter on Larry King last night who said she was going to vote for McCain. She was asked why she would vote for someone who did not share Hillary’s values or positions on the issues, she said it was because Obama “didn’t court me”. So for her, it is ego, pure and simple, and I suspect that is the reason for many of the PUMA stink. Their feelings were hurt, and there will be no make-up sex unless they get flowers and candy. Petulant children.
I wonder how many egoites there really are? Percentage wise, all those Hillary supporters who are dems will vote Obama. The ones he won’t win over, I don’t believe he ever would have.
I am not and never have been a Hillary Clinton supporter (although I would have voted for her if she had won the primary). On another board I belong to, though, there are a bunch of Hillary supporters and I haven’t seen one comment from any of them that they were swayed by the speech last night. What they’re saying is that Hillary “drank the kool-aid”, that she did what she had to do (implying that she was forced to say what she did), that “the Republicans are closer to what the Democrats should be” (whatever that means), and they’re all still saying that they’re either not going to vote or that they’re going to vote for McCain.
They basically think the Democratic party has been hijacked by a small group of people who handpicked Obama, have used illegal means to designate him as the party’s nominee, and who are forcing Hillary and other “righteous” Democrats to follow along. They think everything out of Obama’s mouth is a lie and they do seem to be personally afraid of him. It’s all very conspiracy-minded.
This is a very small group of people on that board - most of the people who were Hillary supporters during the primary threw their weight behind Obama as soon as it was clear he’d be the party’s nominee.
Huh. Skip the first couple words in your top paragraph there and I thought you were completely insane.
I think this is just another “everything is positive for Republicans and will be spun negatively for Democrats”. Remember back in the day of “I’ll vote for Satan before I’ll vote for that librul-in-NRA’s-clothing McCain people”? Did they all suddenly get better, or once the story was over the media just moved on?
The more I read about them, the more willing I am to attribute PUMA’s stance to simple racism. HRC people designed the process that he used so well to get the nomination–if she had won, I think he could have made a legitimate claim that she’d stacked the deck so that she’d win, but the other way around? Please.
PUMA people were simply never going to vote for Hillary’s opponent–“We stole this fair and square, but somehow we lost anyway–WTF? It must be because he’s a black man, like all that other affirmative action crap that’s gone on for years.” They’re evil-minded lunatics, lacking any sense of proportion, having a very narrow (and inappropriately personal) sense of entitlement to a woman candidate, and I suspect they’re single interest-group supporters who have no interest in the broad Democratic platform–just their own issues which are a fraction of the Democratic interests as a whole.
In fact, it may be narrow to dismiss them as simply racist. They’re racist in the sense that they’re indifferent to the legitimate grievances of black people who’ve been systematically excluded from the electoral process (which is ironic, since that is their own grievance, somewhat less justified, applied to women), but that is only a small part of their problem with Obama.
I fully understand your sarcasm here, and I tend to sort of agree with you.
But isn’t one of Obama’s strengths supposed to be that he can and will work with his opponents, that he is a unifier, that he will bring people together in a way that other politicians are unable to? And yet, here we have an important constituency for him – one that agrees with him on 90% of the issues – who, by their own accounts, feels disrespected/neglected/insulted by him and his campaign.
Successfully dealing with unreasonable people is part of the job of President. Most of Congress, much of the nation, various other heads of state and others are easily described as “Petulant Children” at times. If Obama is unable to persuade Hillary voters to support him, what gives anyone confidence that he will be more successful in dealing with the “unreasonable children” he will encounter in office; talking Iran into abandoning its nuclear program, persuading conservative Republicans in congress to work with him on legislation, convincing the populace to accept things they otherwise might not like?
I wonder what “courting” Obama has to do to win them over. He’s campaigned with Hillary, asked for their support, and holds the right positions. What does it take? Groveling?
ETA: Great speech. I really liked the Twin Citie line.
I’ve talked to a couple. Those couple that I’ve talked to refused to go into any detail.
I don’t think it’s so much racism as it is seeing sexism in so many places. Some people see evil everywhere, some people see Jesus everywhere, some people see racism everywhere, and some people see sexism everywhere. Look, I get it. You want to see a woman president. I understand that it means a lot to you and it meant a lot to you, having a very very strong candidate that could have finally done it. She didn’t. She ran into another person making history. She didn’t have the votes, it’s as simple as that. Obama, to his credit, didn’t play the Race Card, but Hillary’s supporters are playing the Gender Card. It may suck, and it may hurt, but vote with your brain, not your emotion. Voting for McCain is voting away from your interests. Not voting isn’t a happy medium because you’re still penalizing the party that believes in the same things you do.
There’s no reason to think that he - or anyone CAN, if the people in question actually are unreasonable. The simple fact of the matter is, if people are unreasonable enough, then it doesn’t matter how persuasive you are. It’s not a President’s job to convince such people of anything any more than it’s his job to fly by flapping his arms.
Now, as President he can always just send the military over to bomb or shoot people who refuse to listen if he really wants to. Since force isn’t allowed in the case of elections, there simply isn’t anything Obama can do with people this unreasonable. And I think he’s being wildly optimistic if he really thinks he can work with the Republicans, for that matter; they define “working with” as “complete submission to Republican demands”.
I thought Clinton’s speech was good and she said what needed saying as regards it being time to back the Democrats and get the White House.
That said I really wish her (as well as others) would stop pulling their punches. I believe the disaster that is Bush and that McCain looks to extend needs to be made crystal clear. Something along the lines of:
“President Bush and his cronies have been a trainwreck for this country. Their policies have been an unmitigated disaster by nearly every measure and provably so. That bears repeating…an unmitigated disaster! The US is a shadow of its former self under their leadership and we simply cannot afford another four years of this which, against all sense and reason, is precisely what McCain wants. If ever there was a time for Democrats to stand united and work together to regain the White House this is the time! The alternative simply does not bear thinking about.”
Or something along those lines…still waiting to hear back on my application for speech writer.
It’s my opinion that these militant PUMAs aren’t acting out on their own. They’re being put up to this to stir shit-- by either the Pubs or the Clintons. These people are doing the dirty work of really hurting the Obama campaign. Obviously, the Pubs want to hurt the Obama campaign. But I think the Clintons might too. They might be saying all the right things up on stage and to the media right now, but I’m not convinced they’ve forgotten the nastiness of the primaries. These PUMAs might be their surrogates who say what they (the Clintons) really feel, hoping it’ll cost Obama the election that they felt should’ve been theirs, and setting themselves up for a 2012 run again.
Anyone capable of being reached was reached by that speech. All the rest are off the reservation. I just don’t think there are very many of them, and they are happily marginalizing themselves whilst they think they are on a recruitment drive. Let’s see what Obama says in his speech, but as long as he does not actively insult Hillary, I think things are as good as they will be.
I don’t agree with this. I simply don’t give the Clinton’s that much power and influence among such a diverse populace. To be honest, the Clinton’s had the best people they could find try to get her nominated. It didn’t work. They flat lost. And that has a lot of people up in arms, but it also has a lot of people scratching their heads. Obama out played the Clinton’s in almost every market except the blue collar vote. He worked the congressional district maps like a master and his best move was ransacking the potomac primaries. Clinton watched the ball from the outfield fly over her head and out of the stadium after those primaries. It was down hill from there.
The stepping down of her campaign manager, loaning herself money, subverting Obama with small tidbits of race remarks…nothing went right for the Clinton campaign after that.
Those Puma types and stealth pubbies are going to either stay home or vote McCain, Obama is still playing the electoral map game and playing it well, if he wins over Colorado and maybe a few other purple states, PA, OH he’s our next president.
He’s got to show his face in PA, OH, FL, MI and really appeal to those voters.
To me, I do not understand what would make someone vote republican this year. They destroyed so much in the last 8 years, the people who do not want to see that are, in my opinion, not living in reality.
So, if a candidate in the general election can only muster 51% of the voters to support him, how can he be expected to lead? Is that a fair extension of your argument?
Furts argument doesn’t hold up really…Obama has convinced the majority of HRC voters to back him. The minority puma types don’t need persueding. And Obama can deal with heads of state and Washington folks…we’re not talking about them, we’re talking about your factory worker who wore an HRC pin for almost a year, gave some of her financial savings to Clinton, and believes the email crap forwarded to her.
No, I think I finally figured out what the problem with Obama is last night.
He looks so damned young.
That’s where the “too skinny” thing came from. Because he’s tall and slim, he looks almost gangling. He’s built like a very young man. He looks young and fresh and while that’s extremely attractive, it’s also a bit scary to a lot of people. If he’d been the exact same age, but a bit greyer, a bit heavier, maybe wearing glasses, I think people would be less concerned.
I really don’t think race is playing much of a role here. I think the number of disgruntled Hillary supporters is negligible, and will decrease even more once attention is no longer being paid to them. But Mr. and Mrs. Joe Q. Public look at Obama and say “This kid looks great, but is he really old enough, experienced enough to do the job?” and then they constantly hear McCain’s buffoons telling him “No, he’s not.”
It’s ironic. Obama’s agruably greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.
I see Obama’s greatest strength as being his intelligence and courage to talk about the real way things work. Not his age. I’d call his age an extra added bonus. IMHO of course.
