People want entertainment.
Isn’t democracy grand?
Not just losing. Getting creamed. Kasich’s 5 poll average has never broken 10%.
I noted in 2008 that in order to be nominated by the GOP you have to either be crazy or simulate crazy. But I thought that Kasich could provide a reasonable simulation of the same. I think he still could. But the GOP electorate has moved on into a darker space.
Don’t blame Trump. 60-65% of the 2016 polling has consistently gone to outsiders, folks who have no business even appearing on the debate stage. See my thread. Trump may have ridden the whirlwind, but he didn’t create it by himself.
ETA: Go back to Goldwater. Buckley thought he was a lightweight. But electable. It was at that moment that conservatives decided that the central criteria for a Presidential candidate was celebrity, not statesmanship. And today it’s difficult to conceive of the era that preceded us.
Don’t blame democracy in general. Blame a 2 stage electoral process, with first stage voting subjected to 50 different voter qualification rules. No other country in the world has a primary system, and it was never designed to be this way. It just happened.
Another weakness is our first past the post method of balloting. But admittedly that’s shared by plenty of nations.
My takeaway is that the Republican primary electorate lacks sound judgment. They had plenty of qualified candidates this season all of whom were shot down. See my previous post.
Parliamentary systems have a primary system, it just occurs at the Party level, when they vote for their Party leader.
So I did. (ETA: link removed because this isn’t the Marketplace :smack: dunno what I was thinking; sorry.)
If anyone wants the image to pass around, here it is.
Please… 1/2 the population has an IQ of 100 or less. Of course charisma and promises that can’t be kept or will never work as advertised are sufficient to gain power. It has nothing to do with parties having primaries.
Well, we know why he thinks his penis is big.
That just might be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read. Well done!
Didn’t watch a second of it and feel I got all the essential details in ten minutes of reading this thread and laughing my ass off. Thank you, Dopers!
Geez. Now I know why he flipped out about being called a, “short-fingered vulgarian.” It wasn’t clear to me before now, but apparently he was afraid people would think he had a little pee-pee.
I remember when I was young and I thought brilliant people ran the world. Those were good times.
Well that’s where the cross-country comparisons come in. Are there authoritarian thugs in other democracies? Sure. And they typically receive well under 10% of the vote.
Admittedly you can point to Silvio Berlusconi, but I’d want to read a solid treatment about the comparison before moving to judgment. And Berlusconi is atypical, while Italy has generally had a dysfunctional political system, one I wouldn’t want to emulate. (Super-proportionate PR is better than strict PR.)
It’s not exactly the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Yep, think of the Republican voter as a devoted consumer of professional wrestling, and who sees nothing wrong with choosing the President of the United States using the same criteria.
I have to disagree partly, the primary system that we have now is relatively new. It used to be much more insular and favoring of candidates that met 'The Party" line. In that world, Trump and Cruz wouldn’t have even got a sniff and Jeb would be the presumptive candidate, Better that way? Don’t know; doubt we’ll ever go back to it.
Off topic a bit, I do have to grin at the '1/2 the population" remark. Given that the overall voting on the Republican side is overwhelmingly white, the argument in Great Debates about if one ‘race’ is smarter than the other may have a new data point…;)
And that’s as far as I’m going in an Elections thread…
And that, boys and girls, is how Dwayne Elizando Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho was elected president of the United States.
I watch the local CBS affiliate in the morning, dressing for work. Generally their coverage of national & international news is sketchy–but we hear about the latest local murders & car crashes. All I really need is the weather, so it’s no problem.
Anyway, they’ve figured out how to cover the Republican Debates. They run a few snippets of the best zingers. Then a bit from the most recent Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert. Cut to studio & nervous laughter. (The Democratic Debates are just not as funny.)
An excellent blow-by-blow, that. And I must add another observation. I didn’t see the original broadcast so I was flipping through the debate on the Fox News website last night, where it’s a smallish image on the web page, and I was watching it on a tablet at the time, so we’re talking a really small image here, of relatively low resolution. But when the maggot-like mutant white blob made its appearance, crawling out of Cruz’s mouth and perching on his lip to take a look around, it was not subtle. The streaming image was small and I wasn’t looking for it, but you couldn’t miss it.
The only thing that could have made the Mutant White Blob’s grand entrance more obvious would have been a 21-trumpet fanfare. It was truly the highlight of the evening. I’m uncertain about exactly how it disappeared, because I don’t think the camera was on him at the time, so it’s not clear if it got snagged by his lightning-quick reptilian tongue or whether perhaps it took flight and escaped. Either way, I was sorry to see it go.
I also note the remarkable length of Megyn’s fake eyelashes. It would be interesting to know if they’re actually longer than Trump’s grotesquely short fingers, a fact which, if it could be established, might be used in future debates against both of them. Since there weren’t actually any policy discussions that I could discern, I had to content myself with these sorts of observations.
And apparently the thing that upsets him most about Flint’s poisoned water is that the Dems have ‘politicized’ it.
Well, young Marco, politics is the means by which a democracy resolves its differences.
It would be great if there was no need of that here - if we ALL agreed that poisoning a city’s drinking water, and refusing to do anything about it for a year or two despite knowing it was happening, is bad, and that the people responsible should be wearing orange for a goodly number of years.
But as your own remarks demonstrate, there IS no such consensus, so the Dems are doing what’s called for in a democracy: they are making it a political issue.
Deal with it, you wretched little twerp.
Don’t forget that it was a failure at both the state and federal levels. In the same way that a chocolate chip cookie contains both sugar and Vitamin A.
I can only say that last night’s appalling spectacle, together with the previous ‘debate’, are among the most disgustingly cynical public displays since the days of the House Un-American Activities Committee. I have to think (or at least hope) that eventually they will end up being taught in University political science courses, on the subject of how to effectively marginalize one’s own party.
Better even than learning about the close relationship between finger and penis sizes was, after two hours of firing base personal insults and repeated accusations of lies, crimes and misdemeanors, the candidates pledging to support whoever won the nomination. Well, supposedly that’s what happened; I’d already watching long before, to prevent myself from taking an axe to the TV.
I’ve seen far more than I need of these flaming assholes. With the possible exception of Kasich, I wouldn’t elect any of this lot for dogcatcher.
I’d weep for the country, if I didn’t think to some extent we are getting what we deserve.