Please explain to a limey how on earth Kerry can win the election...

Great Debates
1

Firstly, if you don’t like Bush and want to vent/display your liberal credentials please go to one of the thousand and one “Bush is a wanker” threads, thanks.

What I am after is an explanation to a non-American of how Kerry could stand a chance in November. I am reasonably aware of the way you go about electing your President (although that business with the chads left me bamboozled) but I do stand to be enlightened.

From this side of the Atlantic wee get two different positions.

The first is that Bush is so hopeless and the Iraq war so deeply unpopular that all Kerry has to do is stand and that there will be such an outpouring of “anyone but Bush” emotion that he will be swept into power.

My gut feeling is that this is leftie wishful thinking. They used to say the same about Thatcher and she won three times on the trot (thank god!). Firstly half the blowhard Michael More/Hollywood types don’t actually get off their arses and go and vote.

Secondly this impression is built around the same coterie of bien pensant types reading each other’s articles, attending each other’s parties etc so they think that their opinions are representative. Is there any truth in this? (It’s what happens in England – we call them the “chattering classes”)

The other impression we get is that Kerry is a god-awful candidate. He is a wimp (a purple heart makes you a war hero? How the fuck does that work? You snag a nail in Vietnam and you get a medal? ) Who has at best greatly exaggerated the short military service he had, and he is a hopeless communicator who is completely out of touch with anyone other than his own upper class elite and doesn’t stand for anything other than the most opportunistic position, not that any of this harmed our own Dear Leader…

Bear in mind that this impression is gained from Britain’s predominantly leftish media eg BBC who are DESPERATE for Kerry to win. Is this a fair summary of Kerry?

So if either of the two propositions above is true, how can Kerry possibly win?

2

Glad to see you here in GD, owl.

I’ll let our dear cousins answer the main body of your post, but just a minor apparent contradiction:

Are you suggesting that the BBC are impressing the candidate they are desperate to win as God-awful? For what it’s worth, I think the Beeb have been pretty even-handed.

3

Also, your first proposition was essentially “Kerry will win because Bush is hopeless”. You then ask “If this proposition is true, how can Kerry possibly win?”.

Care to elaborate?

4

The hopes for a Kerry win are pretty much predicated on the fact the the U.S. is currently pretty evenly divided on a range of issues–much more evenly divided than in most previous elections. Combine this with the electoral college that allows even a minority candidate to win the election if he strategically wins the proper number of states, (all but two, I believe are winner-take-all in the EC), and you find the people who hope that Kerry’s inept campaign style is offset by Bush’s foot-in-mouth disease or that a growing number or transport tubes (current administration name for body bags) or another dip in the economy will push enough voters in enough key states to vote for Kerry.

I have never understood those people who thought that Kerry was a shoo-in. This was going to be a tough battle regardless who one.

At this point, Kerry’s best hopes are some really bad news from Iraq and the economy along with an ability to avoid Gore’s pratfalls in the debates.

5

Sorry. it is abit confusing. What I meant to say is DEPITE the best efforts of the BBC etc to put Kerry forward as a decent winnable proposition he still comes over as a complete waste of space, at least he does to me.

And the two propositions - “anyone but bush” and “kerry is useless” are impressions I have gained from the British media.

I don’t believe the first and it does seem that the second is true. Was there really no better candidate available?

6

How can Kerry get anything out of Iraq? it’s my understanding that he voted for the war.

How can he attack Bush on Iraq without apparently attacking the US forces in the region?

Won’t he also look “weak on terror”?

Our Leader of the opposition is in exactly the same position and is making a royal mess of it too.

7

Kerry bubbled to the top on account of the primary process. It used to be that party candidates competed for the nomination through caucuses, and then held a showdown at the convention. But after 1969, the primaries took over because of findings by the McGovern-Fraser Commission. Now, the convention is nothing more than a week-long pep rally and coronation. Because of the localization of primaries, the most malleable candidate with the biggest bankroll stands the best chance. You preach one message in New Hampshire and another in South Carolina. By the time you reach Super Tuesday, you already have a momentum. In other words, a candidate does not have to have broad popular appeal to win the nomination. He merely needs to please what you call his chattering class. For the Democratic Party, with its extremes of special interests from feminazi hand-stabbers to PETA tree-huggers, bland works best.

8

Why should I bother to answer you when you construct a thread that decries name calling against Bush, then you engage in the same name-calling and baseless accusations against Kerry? It is clear you don’t want to debate on level ground, and this is just a thinly veiled rant from a conservative who wants to score some cheap points without having to answer any criticism.

Oh yeah, Bush is a wanker.

9

So Kerry got through as the “least bad” candidate?

Don’t the people who vote/select the candidate do it with an eye on who can actually win an election rather than who can most appease their own core support?

It took Britain’s Labour party 17 years to realise that allowing the party members to choose policy meant absolute certain defeat. Unilateral Disarmament was always a good one, so was high-tax. The labour party manifesto from that time was once discribed by one of it’s own leading politicians as “the longest suicide note in history”

Once they let rather more sensible people choose the candidiates etc then they won. They got rid of Kinnock (Welsh, Ginger, pissed) and got Blair, (vile but electable) and hoop-la! they win two elections on the trot and are almost certainly going to win number three very soon (unfortunatelY)

10

I also find that both candidates are hopleless right-wingers, despite the BBC’s reluctance to put the boot into either of them - the Beeb has always been quite careful what it says during a foreign election, especially a US one.

Sadly, I also happen to believe that the President who loses a truth-telling contest with Saddam Hussein will be re-elected, condemning our cousins to a second term of third world politics.

11

Does the phrase “fear of the unknown” mean anything to you?
People know Bush is fucked up. But they believe him when he say’s that he will fight. Most people would rather the fight NOT be on US soil. With Kerry they don’t have that belief. They don’t know what he is or would do if out to the test. Will the war return to the US if Kerry is elected? Don’t know= fear, therefore Bush will win.

12

Firstly, old bean, it hasn’t mattered what englishmen think of American politicians since 1776. This thread is purely a genuine enquiry.

I wasn’t intending to insult Kerry, I was trying to say that the way that he has been portayed over here is as a fantastically useless political candidate.

For Instance: He has a war record ( BTW the stuff about purple hearts being a joke medal is held by EVERY country outside the USA). Bush swerved the draft, yet Kerry is the one who is losing out on the question of military service. How does that happen to a competent candidate?

FWIW I think GWB isn’t all that either, but since you threw all that tea in the sea, my opinion doesn’t actually matter.

13

Yes, to some degree. At least, they try to do that, but the voters in primaries are fellow chatterers. There is a quite different mindset between middle-spectrum Democrats and middle-spectrum Republicans. For the Democrats, the most important thing is to avoid offending anyone; for the Republicans, the most important thing is to take the reins and lead. Democratis buzz phrases are “help the poor”, “punish the rich”, and “protect the earth”. Republican buzz phrases are “help the corporations”, “punish the immoral”, and “protect America”. You can see in Kerry’s and Bush’s convention speeches attempts to appeal to each other’s constituency.

14

So who actually picks the candidates? Party memebers?

I have heard the phrase “registered democrat/Republican” is that them?

Also will Nader take sufficient votes off Kerry to harm him? Is there a right wing equivelent of Nader (a la Perot?)

15

IMNSHO, the democrats don’t want to win this election. This is not a good time to be president and they are more than happy to sit back and let Bush try to fix the mess. They aren’t willing to take the risk, and are betting that Bush will really fuck things up. They hope that will swing voters in their favor for the next election, when they are likely to nominate :::shudder::: hillary. Politics here is like chess, everybody is looking ahead to the next move and both sides are willing to sacrifice a few pawns to capture the king. Sadly, it’s all about winning the game.

16

But that’s insane. Why wouldn’t they want to win? If Bush wins there’s always the possibility that he makes a real go of it and sets up a republican succession so that Hilary* or whoever doesn’t stand a chance.

Conversely if they win they can blame anything that goes wrong on Bush, even if it isn’t his fault. Here in sunny blighty we’ve had a labour government for the last seven years (seven LONG years!) and they are still getting away with blaming the Tories for everything – so it’s a ploy that does work.

*Hilary? Really? Surely not? isn’t she very unpopular?

17

A subset of party members called “delegates”. Delegates are electors normally determined by results of primaries.

Voters at large register as Democrat or Republican (or in some states, Independent, Libertarian, and a couple others). Some primaries permit votes only from people registered with the primary’s party.

Nader could take enough votes off Kerry to harm him, at least theoretically. People say that the Libertarians tend to take votes from Republicans, although the assertion is not well documented. Personally, I normally vote Libertarian whenever possible. Otherwise, I vote Democrat on a social office like Sheriff or Judge, but Republican on a fiscal office like Auditor or Treasurer.

18

Hillary cannot run against Kerry if he’s elected. I mean, legally she can, but it would be political suicide. She needs Bush to win if she is to run for '08. She is popular among leftists and authoritatians, and unpopular among rightists and libertarians.

19

In theory, here’s how it works.

Starting in January, primaries are held in each state of the union. In the primaries, selected voters vote for delegates to go off to the national convention and vote for a specific candidate. You may punch the chad on your ballot for “John Kerry”, but what you’re really elected are delegates who have specifically pleged to vote for John Kerry at the convention- just as, during the November elections, you’re not actually voting for George Bush or John Kerry, but rather for electors who will go cast your state’s electoral votes for the candidate. But that’s just a technicality- there has never yet been a situation where the electors or delegates went against their constituents’ wishes in any way that mattered. (Keep in mind that delegates and electors are party officials being rewarded for service, and if they screw the party, they’re throwing away years of work and will never be allowed to do serious work for the party again.)

I say “selected” voters for this reason: in most states, primaries are “closed”, which means that registered members of the party are the only ones allowed to vote for the delegates. If you’re a Democrat voting in a primary, you get to vote for Kerry, Dean, Sharpton, etc., but can’t vote for who ends up on the Republican ticket as well. But some states have “open” primaries, which means that anyone can show up and vote for a delegate, though you still only get one vote- so you can be a registered Democrat, but still come to the polls and vote for Bush as the Republican candidate, but you don’t then also get to vote on who the Democratic nominee is.

Each state gets a number of delegates based upon weird alchemical formulae involving the number of electoral votes, how often the state has voted for that party in the past, who is actually running the convention and which candidate they want to favor, and whether Mars is in retrograde. These numbers are determined by the parties themselves, and it’s an interesting note that for a lot of the last thirty years, someone sitting on the board that determined the upcoming primary system and delegate allocation thereof ended up being the next Presidential candidate of the party (McGovern, Carter, and Dukakis, I believe, all served on those boards in the few years before they “came out of nowhere” to win the nomination).

In fact, it’s hard to say who really chooses the nominee. Because of the staggered primary system (i.e., a succession of primaries lasting several months rather than one single national primary), New Hampshire- which always has the first primary- has a massive impact on which candidates are considered “viable”. While technically Democrats in Maryland have as much of a vote as anyone, because our primary is so late in the season, the victor has usually been pre-determined by the time it gets around to us.

Yep. By registering with the party, you get the opportunity to vote in that party’s primary (again, assuming that the primary is closed, which most are.)

Debatable. I’ve seen polls stating that a lot of Nader voters are actually disaffected Republicans, which surprises me given what Nader stands for. (Even as a disaffected Republican, Kerry is much closer to anything I’d like to see in the White House than Nader, and Republicans who plan to vote for Nader haven’t read many of his policy outlines.)

Given how close the election is likely to be, any votes off of Kerry will harm him. Hell, given the margins in Florida, the International Workers of the World Party destroyed Gore’s chances with their nearly 1,000 votes.

Not that’s running. Pat Buchanan is probably the closest thing to one right now- farther to the right on social issues than Bush, a proponent of economic populism to drag away disaffected Reagan Democrats, and the only candidate still running around on a fully isolationist platform. But after he destroyed the American Party (or whatever Perot’s personal party was called) in a disastrous candidacy in 2000, he’s not in the running this year.

20

The Democrats definitely want to win this election. Heck, they want to win every election. What it comes down to is a question of how much of their resources- money, volunteer time, favors, etc.- they’re willing to use up in order to win the election.

I see absolutely no evidence that the Democrats aren’t going as all-out as they can this time around. They may be going around in circles or spinning their wheels with a lack of direction, but that doesn’t mean they’re not trying.

Hillary, like Bush, is a very polarizing figure. She is very unpopular. She is also highly popular- as opposed to Kerry, who is a little popular, and mostly ‘meh’.