TeaElle hits the bulls-eye! Great post!
“I’m not Bush” is only good enough on the SDMB. The real world is quite different. Johnny, Lad: You’re gonna’ have to state your case or lose the race.
Umm, Fear Itself, it seems to me that your arguement is now “Popular vote doesn’t matter, really, Kerry is ahead in the swing states, so he’ll take the election in the electorial college”. All of this is well and good, and if that’s how it plays out, then Kerry will be the next president. When Bush won that way in '00, liberals cried foul. Should Kerry win that way, I am sure they will dance in the streets. Does this strike you as hypocritical, or not?
Oh, I forgot. The general condesention of the Left towards anyone who doesn’t march in lockstep with them is kinda off putting to moderates too.
I hate Bush, but let’s face the facts: Kerry is a pathetically weak candidate. He has no platform other than, “Bush sucks.”
The man doesn’t have clue about how he should run his campaign. There is a huge pool of conservatives who are pissed off at Bush. If Kerry worked hard to portray himself as a likeable moderate, who wouldn’t be beholden to the left wing of his party, then he would be mopping the floor with Bush by now. Instead, we have no reason to believe that the man is anything other than what he appears to be: a wealthy liberal aristocrat, a thinner version of Ted Kennedy.
Also, people want to know what Kerry is going to do about health care, and the fact that many Americans just can’t afford it anymore. We want to know what he is going to do to save the manufacturing sector, so we don’t become a nation of Walmart employees. All we’ve gotten so far is the usual rhetoric that doesn’t really tell us anything. Granted, Bush hasn’t given us many answers either, but we know what his game is, whereas Kerry is just a big unknown. It gets back to that “Devil you know” situation that was mentioned earlier.
Basically, Bush is getting support again because Kerry has somehow managed to avoid looking like a credible alternative.
laughs
You should be. (And that’s from a moderate who plans on voting for Kerry)
Well, I’m by God “skeered” I’m “skeered sheetless” is what I am! Even if the polls showed Kerry up by 20 points everywhere, I’d still worry!
Look what happened last time! GeeDubya barely pulled out a technical win, and proceeded to rule just as if he won by some major percentage. No matter what squeeky thin margin of victory, if he gets “elected” he will rule as if he was the beneficiary of a landslide, and unshakeable mandate to plunge the counry into whatever damnfool idea he gets next!
So, you’re making an argument about what liberals might do, if Kerry wins the electoral college but not the popular vote? And you’re asserting that this would be hypocritical if in fact it occurred? How does this relate to anything that Fear Itself said? All it does is demonstrate your petty need to bash liberals at every opportunity.
First of all, most “liberals” cried foul about the fact that the 2000 election was decided by irregularities in Florida, and by the Supreme Court. The electoral college was not the main issue for most liberals.
And your response to Fear Itself is completely beside the point. Whether people like the electoral college or not is immaterial—the fact remains that the electoral college is going to decide the election, not the popular vote. Fear Itself made not a single comment about whether the electoral college is a good system; he simply pointed out (quite correctly) that whether you win a state by a 1% margin or a 25% margin, you still get the same number of electoral college votes. He also pointed out, again correctly, that because of the overwhelming lead held by one or the other candidate in most states, the election will be decided by the results in a few battleground states. Do you dispute any of this?
I know you love digging around for perceived hypocrisy by liberals, especially so you can portray yourself as the arbiter of moderate rationality, but it does you little credit when you interpret people’s post disingenuously and try to pretend that they’re saying something they’re not, or take one post and hold it up as some sort of exemplar of liberal attitudes.
Your criticism of Fear Itself’s post also completely omitted the most crucial point he was trying to make, which was that your OP demonstrated a complete ignorance of the regional subtleties and nuances that can often be hidden by overall figures. While you foam at the mouth about possible future liberal hypocrisy, you ignore the fact that the aggregate national poll figures are not the most important in this race. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Bush will win in those battleground states—if i were a betting man, i’d probably have money on him right now—but to take the national aggregate figures and ignore the state-by-state distribution of percentages is rather ostrich-like behavior, given the way the American political system works.
I think that maybe you, Airman Doors, and Liberal should form your own little club. You all claim you’re going to vote for Kerry, and yet each of you takes every possible opportunity to bash Kerry in particular, and liberals in general. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with criticizing the person that you intend to vote for, but one expects that you would at least do it honestly rather than take constant petty pot-shots and then hide behind the your alleged intention to vote for Kerry in an attempt to deflect criticism for your disingenuous rantings and paint yourself as a moderate.
None of this is to deny that Kerry is running a poor race. He is. And, much as i hate Bush, i don’t think that simply arguing “I’m not Bush” is an acceptable direction for the Kerry campaign to take. It’s silly and unproductive. He should have a strong platform of clearly enunciated policies.
Yep, and it can sit there right underneath Al Gore’s 2000 campaign.
I don’t agree that Kerry should go into detail about his plans. One of the few clever things he’s done is bury details about his plans so deep in his website that you have to dig and dig to find them. The problem is that if you’re going to make plans for other people, you’d damn better make plans that they like. And everybody thinks his own plan is better than everybody else’s. Everybody knows that these pre-election plans are bullshit anyway. Once you’re in office, you have a Congress, a judiciary and a fidgity electorate to deal with. Besides, the plans are of interest only to those who already trust him. They are as likely to alienate as to sway undecideds. No, leave the plan details buried where they belong.
What he should do, in my opinion, is hit Bush head-on with the things that people who don’t support him care about — those broad-brush things that push Republican buttons: freedom, patriotism, liberation, and yes, God. I like RickJay’s approach (except that I’d can the jobs thing — that’s skirting too close to unions which, to Republicans, is on the doorstep of the People’s Republic of America). Kerry brought up these things in his acceptance speech, but in an apologetic manner. It came across more like “It’s not true that I hate America” than “I love America”. Almost nobody who supports Kerry now will switch to Bush unless Kerry says something like we should ship blacks back to Africa. He needs to appeal to people outside his own choir.
Thats the strange thing about this, say what you will , but the gore/lieberman campaign was never really all that fired up. But as someone else pointed out , they did have 4 years to prepare for this.
Makes me wonder if they should have kept Dean , at least the man had passion , even if he did make people cringe. Kerry seems to have made the ticket based on a focus group vision that he had all the right boxes checked off and the least likely to offend people.
Its still 60 days till the big day , and Kerry may yet win, but its beginning to look like sports casters who talk about a mathimatical possibility rather than a clear cut margin of victory.
Declan
You’re joking, right? Had Bush won, say, Florida by a clear and convincing majority, still losing the popular vote but taking the electoral college, while Gore voters may not have been happy about it there would quite likely have been very little crying of foul. It wasn’t the loss in the EC while winning the popular vote that led to liberals crying foul. It was the shenanigans in the aftermath of the Florida vote that led to it.
You know this, but I guess taking the shot was more important for some reason.
Um, excuse me, but large numbers of Americans are stupid and have short memories and are gullible. If 100 is the mean IQ there have to be a lot of people on the left side of that bell curve. Hell, even on this very board (which I believe has most of its membership on the right side of the curve) gullibility and short memories pop up with some frequency. Look at the people lauding Cheney for his statement about leaving same-sex marriage to the states when a month earlier he said the opposite. Yet he was praised long and loud by people who should’ve known better.
When I say that a lot of Americans are gullible and stupid, it’s not meant as a put-down. It’s just a statement of what is.
I didn’t believe the polls while Kerry had a slight lead, and I don’t belive them now.
Most polls are asking people who ** voted in the last election. ** I think a lot of people who have never voted in their life are going to show up this time. And the vast majority of those new, first time voters are not going to be voting for Dumya.
Plus…it is the beginning of September. We have two more months, we have the debates and we still have a seething hatred of Dumya by a large group of people in the Democrats favor. The polls are showing less support for Nader, and that should give a hint. People are going to take this election seriously…and as others have pointed out…the fact that 40% more people are going to vote for Dumya in Salt Lake City, Utah is not going to make a difference in the final result.
Not to rain on your little follow-me-around-and-insult-me-parade, but please, tell me the alternate way to interpite what Fear Itself actually said:
Followed by:
And:
So, Doctor, tell me, how am I to interpite that except a statement that Kerry will win in the electorial college, discounting the popular vote. I am honestly curious, the statement seems straightforeward to me, how did i misconstrue it?
Wasn’t it? If Florida had been a footnote because Gore won, oh, say, his home state, would “liberals” still be focused upon it 4 years later? Everything objective I have seen leads me to believe that Bush won the damn state, hysteria and bombast notwithstanding.
No, I don’t dispute any of this, but maybe you better read my response to your first quoted box of text.
I love to point out conservative hypocracy as well. You do me a grave disservice by projecting your own bias onto me. Go back and reread the post I made that you responded to, then tell me: Was I confrontational? No. Was I angry or rude? No. All I did was ask a simple question about hypocracy.
What’s that? I simply asked a question. My OP was designed with a great deal of thought NOT to be inflamitory.
“Foam at the mouth”. Again with the predjudiced remarks. A few days ago I called Kerry “very liberal”, and you jumped all over me for it. It was a bullshit call. I know that Kerry is far from liberal in most of the world, and by the dictionary definition of the word. In Canada, Australia, almost anywhere in Europe, in many other places, he would be a solid right winger, but we are discussing the election in America, and here he’s very liberal. You know this ( or you should, you’re smart as all hell with a doctorate from a fine University), why do you attack me for no reason. “Foam at the mouth”? I haven’t foamed at all in this thread, AND YOU DAMN WELL KNOW IT.
I ignore nothing, I simply posted the result of the latest polls. For discussion.
That’s an interesting point. I can not speak for those others, but here’s one for you to consider:
Maybe I am disgusted by the choice I have made. I am voting for Kerry, yes, but i am not happy about it in any way, shape or form. My disgust is for a party that has been handed a golden opportunity to change things, and all they are doing is stepping on their own crank with golf shoes on. The lesser of two evils is still evil. Try and remember that I don’t have to be happy about voting for evil. Where have i ever hid my disgust for Kerry? If there is one thing i am it is honest, and I am not trying to “paint” myself as a moderate, i am a moderate. I am the voter who would be happy to vote for a candidate other than Bush, but have been given very little reason to do so. The fact that i am anyway speaks volumes about how bad Bush is, and little about Kerry. I’ve had to go through tremendous mental gymnastics just to live with my choice of candidate, your dismissing it like this is insulting and rude.
So what’s your point, you agree with me? You’ve taken a pretty adversarial tact if that’s what you’re saying.
Bush will probably win, simply because God wants to torture me.
You all will get screwed too, but it’s really only about me. Sorry you had to get caught in the crossfire. 
I’m not scared either. I think it’s hilarious! Before the Democratic convention, the conservative talking heads were saying the Kerry would get a HUGE bump in the polls, so when he only got a couple/few point (no, I’m not going to look up cites), they were going on about how Democrats must be wringing their hands and how it proved that Kerry was a weak candidate.
Before the Republikan Konvention, they all said that Bush wouldn’t have any bump in the polls, so people shouldn’t expect it. Now these cooked-up numbers are so huge, they’re practically creaming in their jeans about it. Idiots.
Things will even out, real poll numbers will come out (not that I’ll pay much attention to them, polls bore me), and conservatives will get more and more worried about the coming bitchslap.
double-checking that this is the Pit, yep Fuck you. This is a fucking stupid thing to say. Kerry and Co. may have some hopeful, pie-in-the-sky ideas about what they want to do, but their main, first job is to fix the mess that the neocons have left. They don’t have to lie about anything. Bushco has given them plenty of truth to tell.
Amazing that some people prefer a known liar who is running the country into the ground ahead of a good, decent man who wants to fix what’s broken and do the best he can for the American people.
In the end, we never got to find out. The fucking partisan Supreme Court betrayed the country, committed treason, and installed King George.
Publicans don’t care about that because their guy won, but their nonchalance doesn’t change the fact that the highest court in the land fucked over democracy.
Nah, not at all! He’s really doing what’s best for you but you don’t recognize it because it isn’t what you want…kind of like when a child wants to go swimming during an electrical storm and his parents won’t let him.
:: sits back, awaits deluge of indignant verbosity from the left ::
That’s easy to explain: You are mildly retarded.
Terry McAuliffe Post-DNC Kerry bounce forecast: 8-12%
Actual Post-DNC Kerry bounce: -2%
Damn that ultra-conservative Terry ‘mustachio-twisting-villian’ McAuliffe!!!
Not true. There were numerous post-election recounts performed by the media and other groups - Bush ended up leading in all of them.
When does 2 out of 5, but not *any * of the full-state recount scenarios, count as “all of them”, flickster? Did you actually read the media-consortium report?