But even there, the evidence is questionable. McCain won the nomination from a field of candidates that included Brownback, Giuliani, Huckabee, Hunter, Keyes, Paul, Tancredo, and Thompson. There were plenty of conservative candidates available. But Republican voters chose McCain in the primaries.
Maybe I’m not the only Republican who thinks the party has to pull back from the right.
Don’t forget the election of Scott Brown, Mark Kirk, and other moderate Republicans recently.
And of course don’t forget those predicting Obama’s demise are super dead head right wingers.
I listen to a station that features Neal Boortz, who styles himself a libertarian independent but is actually pretty much a mouthpiece for the Republican Party like most conservative radio hosts. The comments from listeners and Boortz and his staff seem almost to assume that Obama has lost the election. They really think they are gonna win it no matter what. Strikes me as a very insular POV, and something I think will play well for the Democrats if they have the sense to exploit it. But the Dems are terrible at campaigning, and I am having trouble bleieving they will, though I still think the Presidency is Obama’s to lose.
I didn’t read the thread on purpose before replying because I didn’t want other opinions to sway my take.
First, the Pubs can easily blow this election. The mainstream media (whatever that is defined as these days) really wants to push Palin. She’s in my face much more than I want her to be, and there is a good reason for that. She would really give Obama a real chance to win the election.
If Palin wins the election, I can’t imagine who I’d vote for. I’d probably stay home.
Second, Obama isn’t completely to blame for the economy. The deregulation of the investment banking world caused the cowboy-itis on Wall St. to reach a fever pitch, giving hugh bonuses to anyone that could come up with a way to separate you from your money, invest in anything, and get a huge bonus for it.
This is not to say Obama is completely off the hook. He’s had 3 years, and unemployment is going in the wrong direction. Still. The rate has to be 20%, plus or minus a few percent. I know it will never be admitted, but there are a lot of voters that are out of work who will vote against him.
Finally, I think he has really missed the boat with the moderate voters and college students who rallied around him as part of “Change”. There has been very little change with regards to who **really **runs this country, and there won’t be in the next election. But the fact that we are still in Afghanistan, Iraq and also have prisoners at Gitmo sinks him for me. He has absolutely no credibility on these issues, and even if he wanted to do it, he doesn’t have the power to get it done.
His administration is credited for getting rid of Osama, and we will be reminded of this during next years election cycle. But will that be enough? I doubt it.
I campaigned for Obama when he won. Two years later, the people I worked with mostly stayed home. They thought their work was done. But seeing the Republican efforts to derail every program the prez tries to pass. has re- energized them. They may be listening to the news and believe Obama is somewhat responsible for the lack of jobs. But they know damn well the Repub policies will make things a hell of a lot worse.
Obama is supposedly going to prosecute some of the bankers and ratings agency thieves that corrupted the home industry. That would get a lot of people on board. perhaps not the wealthy and their sycophants, but many logical and reasonable people will be pleased.
It was a reference to the large number of threads about Republican candidates and the knowledge that most SDMB posters have about Republicans.
Tell me about your list… I’m probably already on it actually.
That seeming imbalance is going to continue through the primaries, there being no Democratic contest next year to discuss.
I am looking forward to voting against Obama in a primary. It would be nice to have an actual Democrat running for President one of these days.
What is an “actual Democrat” and do you really think the voters want one to be their president?
An actual Democrat is a Democrat who stands up for the poor and the middle class, understands that the unchecked capitalism tends to move us toward oligarchy, and generally wants to keep our society moving towards democracy and away from oligarchy.
The voters would of course want such a man to be president, except for the very rich who care only about themselves, and frankly, to hell with them. But there are many voters who lack my understanding of these issues. Hence, politics.
So we have poor, middle class and very rich and only the last group are anti-Democrat. Wow…you guys could win every election if you could just explain things properly.
Too bad you are so good at understanding things and most everyone else isn’t.
Well, it’s certainly true that the electorate as a whole is pretty dumb.
I’m getting tired of these “Obama is really a Republican” claims, though. They’re nearly as annoying as the claim that George W. Bush/George H.W. Bush/Ronald Reagan/Richard Nixon/every Republican president ever wasn’t a real Republican and hence isn’t representative of GOP fiscal restraint.
You know, if Obama really is Carter, then he’s definitely finished because he’s not eligible for a third term. 
My reasons for thinking Obama is not really a Democrat:
Took him FOREVER to figure out that JOBS and the ECONOMY were the key issues people cared about, while progressives were literally HOWLING about it! If he had sound Democratic instincts he would have been on those issues as his top concerns from Day One of his administration. Instead he got distracted by health care (an important issue to be sure, but hardly as critical as the others).
His administration has not found a SINGLE figure to prosecute for all the fraud and so forth committed by the financial industry that brought our economy down in the first place. I suspect he has been getting bad advice from Tim Geithner, if in fact it is not Geithner who gives the President his marching orders on things financial. I think he has been entirely bought out by Wall Street. Very Republican!
His administration has made little or no effort to create new financial regulations that will prevent a recurrence of the mistakes that led to the economic crash, which, given the greed that prevails in the financial industry and the fact that the same old people are in charge (see: no prosecutions) means that another financial meltdown is inevitable. Once again, very bought out, very Republican.
I used to think that Obama was just a terrible negotiator, it seems that in every policy contest with the Republicans Obama’s strategy has been to start by offering them almost everything they wanted. Now I think Obama’s heart just isn’t in it, the reason he folds to the Republicans so fast is that he pretty much agrees with their view. A real Democrat would bargain a lot harder.
I started out thinking Obama was a real Democrat, but his actions have dissuaded me. However, that said, he is not as bad as the Republican candidates, who must appease a frightening crew of bat-shit looney idiots, some of who appear to genuinely match their constituents’ bat-shit looniness. So I will vote for ANY decent progressive against Obama in the primaries, he needs to understand he is losing his base. And then I will vote for him against the Republican candidate because those fuckers are crazy, corrupt and in some cases, just freaking evil (did you HEAR them cheering for Perry executing people wholesale in the recent debate?).
Tragic, if you ask me. Especially in 2000 and 2004. The nations’ voters made terrible mistakes then.
Being a blue dog moderate/conservative-wing Democrat is not the same as being a Republican. It’s disappointing, true, especially when he ran on a platform of “change”, but it’s not at all the same thing.
I guess you must have forgotten about this. And reforming the US healthcare system is arguably much more critical than jobs or the economy.
The US does pretty well relative to the rest of the developed world on jobs and economic growth and does piss-poor relative to the rest of the developed world on healthcare.
Is there any evidence of fraud, as opposed to simple incompetence? More specifically, is there any evidence of criminal fraud?
Perhaps you missed this one too.
Kinda like Bill Clinton, you mean? Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, welfare retrenchment, financial services deregulation, farm deregulation…
Both sides complain that every President ever isn’t a “real” conservative or a “real” liberal. Don’t you get it? You can’t have the kind of President you want, any more than the wingnuts can have the one they want.
More to the point, even if you do get the kind of President you want, he’s not going to have the kind of Congress you want. So you can either complain about all the stuff you wanted and didn’t get or you can be happy about the stuff you did get: reform of the federal sentencing guidelines to reduce the disparity between crack and powder cocaine, the Matthew Shepard Act, the end of DADT, the first year-on-year reduction in the federal prison population, student loan reform, increased funding for the EPA…
You live in a country where democracy means a choice of two. If you want a choice of three or four or eight- and hence a choice who actually represents your views- you’d better move, because our system doesn’t allow for it.
There’s quite a lot of evidence of fraud. The problem is that most of it was perfectly legal, if morally dubious. The system is flawed.
Part of the problem, I imagine, is the ENORMOUS volume of documents one would have to sift through in order to establish fraud, even “morally dubious” fraud. And in light of double jeopardy, you have to do it right the first time. No second bites at the apple. You sure as hell don’t want a repeat of the 60 Minutes GWB/Texas Air National Guard fiasco.
So, you want all your ducks in a row; ergo, you have to have the documentation that shows criminal fraud (boy, I’d hate to be the DOJ flunky who has to handle that discovery process. Ugh).
Bump. Ahhh, good old-fashioned SDMB nostalgia.