I assume I should be due a real refund of real money in the near future seeing as a resident of non-real Virginia shouldn’t have to pay real taxes to support the real government and provide real services to all the real people.
Since it’s being projected to go for Obama, it doesn’t exist.
Actually, this has been Obama’s draw ever since he jumped onto the national stage. The money line from his speech in the 2004 Democratic convention was, “I don’t see a red America or a blue America, there is the UNITED States of America.”
That resonated so well it gave him the idea that he could run for the president using that as his theme.
The Republicans have obliged by making the theme he was running against overt rather than merely hinted at - making it that much easier to target and denounce.
Why it hasn’t occured to Rupublicans that insulting 3/4 of the population isn’t a great way to get elected - I’ve got nothing…
Sure steal away. Leave my typos intact - I gotta keep true yo my Dopername.
That approach has worked for a long time. Just like the RIAA’s approach of calling most of its customer base “thieves” and lawyering up against children and the elderly has worked - after a fashion - for a several years now.
Then one day you wake up and you need help - but you’ve already driven away anyone who might help you. Some people only learn that lesson when it’s too late.
You’ve got to do better, then.
Nevermind 
No, 3/4 is too high. The golden number is you want to get 51% of the country scared of and angry at the other 49%. That’s the winning formula.
lumpen
It’s always amusing to me how a politician who has lived in the WDC area for the past 25 years or more can claim to be a small-town kinda guy. Yes, I’m including Biden in this. Our own Sens and Rep from AK do this all the time, claiming to be “real” Alaskans, while being completely out of touch with their constituency after 20-30 years in WDC. For John McCain to be condemning “east coast liberals” and city folk as being not true Americans is just plain ludicrous, since he is, after all these years, one of them (not a liberal, but you know what I mean). It’s hypocrisy, it’s demagoguery, and it’s dishonest.
Even though for his entire career in the Senate, Biden has taken the train home to Wilmington, Del., every night?
You mean he’s a Georgetown Republican?
I’ve spent much of my life living in the most populated city in the country (I think that’s true) and if I ran for national office, I would speak about the folks from the neighborhood I grew up in–in Bensonhurst, an Italian-Jewish lower middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, where people know their neighbors and yadda yadda yadda. It’s not a very hard rhetorical trick to pull off.
Biden did come through my neighborhood more than once. I commented on the first time I saw him on these boards once. But he did actually visit where i lived on other times.
That’s the same Wilmington that’s home to much of the credit card industry and is the largest city in the state of Delaware, right? It’s not a small town. Biden talks about being from Scranton a lot, but he’s going on 66 and his family moved away from there when he was 10.
I grew up in Newark, about 12 miles from Wilmington. I can tell you that Wilmington was a wasteland until the late 80’s. sure it was bigger than a “small town”" but it was also a dump. It started becoming a “city” in the late 80’s early 90’s. Trust me, before that period it was a pretty cruddy place. It probably still is, I haven’t been there for years…but they have new buildings now!
Yes. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in WDC, so pardon this for sounding like a lecture, but the place has a culture of its own. It’s inbred and narrowly focused on issues that often never make it outside the Beltway. But it gets inside your head very quickly, and for politicians the lure and exercise of power is like crack cocaine. Pretending to have current small-town values after being exposed to that place for all those years is disingenuous at best.
Yes, I have.
I suspect what you really mean is that travelling in powerful circles might have this effect.
It is, of course, errant nonsense to propose that the mere geographical boundaries of the District of Columbia and its suburbs have some kind of supernatural power. I know plenty of people – in fact, the entirety of my own social circle – who have, without extensive effort, escaped from becoming perverted power-mad zombies.
This is based on an assumption that “small-town values” are somehow quantifiably distinct from something else, “inside-the-Beltway values,” perhaps? Again, though, that’s attributing magical circle properties to mere physical location. Whatever effect that power might have on a person’s character, I see no evidence that geographical position is a deciding factor.
However, I am skeptical about this modified proposition as well. I don’t think people are fundamentally changed by residing in Washington. Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich … so far as I can tell, these people are only a few examples of people whose behaviour while within the jurisdictional boundaries of Washington seem to perfectly reflect their own personal character, not some magically transmogrified beast.
Rather, I would tink that, as in any situation in which one has the means to do exactly what one wants (Wall Street? Hollywood?), being in a position of power merely acts a catalyst for a person to manifest one’s own true character.
Maybe it was a dump 15 or 20 years ago, but I still don’t think Wilmington qualifies as the kind of “small town America” the politicians talk about. I don’t know what kind of person responds to this Norman Rockwell crap, or really believes that small towns are more American than the places where more Americans live - but either way, when Biden pushes the Scranton connection, for example, he IS doing what ChefGuy said he’s doing.
I don’t know, man, that [del]giant phallus[/del] Washington Monument is kind of hypnot…
BRAIIIIIINS!
You make it sound like everyone here is a politician or obsessed with politics. That’s really not true. Politicos are a really tiny segment of the population. Government workers go to their cubicles and work just like anyone else, for the most part. Military folks are fairly common here, as well. People not from here tend to overdramatize the culture here. For the most part, it’s a metropolitan area much like many others. I think people tend to have a similar type of impression of L.A., thinking it’s all movie stars and entertainment types there.
I grew up in Dardanelle, Arkansas, which had a population of just over 3000 when I was there. I didn’t put my personality, values and attitude in cold storage when I moved here 19 years ago, nor do I have anything to do with actual politics other than voting and attending a public speech or two.
Not my intention at all. Off and on, I lived there for 2-3 years and loved it. My point was that when you spend a large amount of your time living in a large city and when you travel in the circles that McCain, Biden and other longtime pols travel in, trying to pass yourself off as someone in touch with “small town America” is largely nonsense. Politicians are not government workers going to their cubicles. While you may come from a small town and have some romanticized notion of what that life entailed, 20 years in politics will distance you significantly from what that life was really like and probable bear no relation to what it’s like today.
What’s really silly is this whole notion that somehow “small town values” are somehow holier (or even more preferable) than anybody else’s values, or that somehow somebody living in Wasilla is more American that somebody living in NYC.