http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=n00009638
Take a look at the top contributors to Obama. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley. Does that look like a bunch of people looking out for the little guy?
Actually R sounds like the smart option when the Ds are trying to drive off a cliff. The problem is that some people tend confuse motion with progress. I’m ready for a little gridlock myself.
Um… those are pretty much the top contributors to every presidential campaign since before anyone here was born. Did you have some point you were attempting to make?
Although hey, I don’t know when you were born. Judging by the comment above, you may well be one of those little old people who can’t tell the brake from the gas, and feels like they’re flying at 13mph.
You’ve got me there. Oh, to be young and ignorant like you again. 
Well, I’m not young, but I still have all my faculties. I have not, for instance, completely forgotten the past decade.
I live in a Republican Swamp… a rural county where the Republicans outnumber the Democrats 2 to 1. Often there are NO Democrats running for office in any local races.
In essence on many races I have no vote. There are several candidates running in the Republican or Conservative primaries, that then run unopposed in the general election.
Although I generally side with the Democrats, I have voted for Republicans either because the Republican was a good choice, or because the Democrat running was such a terrible choice.
Touche’
Can you remember all the way back to 2003 when the Bush administration tried to rein in Freddie and Fannie and the Democrats in congress like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd said the regulations weren’t necessary and the Bush administration was trying to keep poor people from getting affordable housing?
Exactly.
I vote straight Democratic. Among elected officials, interparty variance in positions on political issues has pretty much swamped intraparty variance. The likelihood of a Dem candidate for anything from state legislature on up being less compatible with my values than a Republican candidate for that office is essentially nil.
I’m old enough to remember Rockefeller Republicans and segregationist Democrats. There was a time when it made sense to vote the person, rather than the party. That time is long gone. If you buy into what Republicans are generally selling, you should vote a straight GOP ticket. If you buy into what the Dems are pushing, you should vote a straight Dem ticket. End of story.
I always look up the ballot ahead of time and research each candidate and review their platform and I will generally choose the one that I agree with most. This seems to more often than not result in me voting third party.
The only time I won’t vote for the one I agree with most is if I feel we’re not enough in agreement, as in, if I only agree with roughly 60% of what that person says, or they have a particular opinion on something I very strongly disagree with, I will instead conscientiously object by voting a write-in. I know that isn’t meaningfully different from not voting, but for me, it’s the principle of the matter.
And, honestly, to anyone who will only vote for a candidate who has a chance of winning, IOW either the Democrat or Republican in 99% of cases, even if there is potentially someone out there you agree with more, you’re everything that’s wrong with the system. I have no problem if someone votes Republican or Democrat if they honestly believe they’re the best candidate, but I know a huge number of people who admit they like a third party candidate better but are afraid of the other major party candidate winning more. If only everyone stuck to their convictions…
I do. I remember the ENTIRE decade, as I previously stated. Cherry picking doesn’t impress me. After all, I could just as easily blame the administration for not noticing AIG, which is the organization that truly started flinging shit at the fan.
If everyone followed your example, then we’d get a 200-million-way tie between write-in candidates. Now, what would be really nice would be a voting system which made better use of the information provided by the voters, so that it’d be possible for a voter to vote third party without throwing his vote away, and many of us do, in fact, agitate for such a system, but it’s very tough to get it into place (since the people currently in power got in power using the current system).
How would that work?
We are discussing how our elected officials behave. You are trying to change the subject by bringing up AIG. AIG were greedy morons for insuring risks they didn’t understand, but we are discussing the behavior of elected officials. They are the ones that created the shit in the first place.
I would like to have a system, where I could vote against a candidate instead of for one. An antivote would subtract one from the total and would benefit all the candidates running against him. A third party candidate could win by being less offensive than his opponents. If all candidates had negative vote totals, then the candidate with the lowest negative number would win and I suspect we wouldn’t hear much ‘mandate’ talk.
I’m not changing the subject, you’re cherry picking. The elected officials in question went after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and ignored AIG and any number of other publicly held firms that were engaging in far more egregious financial fuckery. They created the shit because they were allowed to.
So in 2003, instead of regulating Fannie and Freddie they should have been investigating AIG for things they didn’t do until 2005?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/the-cdos-that-destroyed-a_b_499875.html