Interesting more Obama-supporters percentage-wise are saying the country is doomed if Romney wins that vice versa.
There are more Obama supporters here than Romney supporters.
I was not among those who said Romney would be very harmful to the country, but I believe he is much more likely to be harmful than Obama. Most of what he accomplishes will be bad – I just don’t think he’ll accomplish much, and that will be a good thing considering the alternative.
So? He did mention precentages not a raw number. More than 50% of Obama supporters who voted think the sky will fall if Romey is elected vs about a third of Romey supporters feeling the same about Obama.
Hard to say Obama would really hurt the country. We have had him for four years, and even if you don’t always agree with him, you’d have to admit he isn’t screwing things up. The extent Romney would hurt us is still an unknown.
I hate to be so negative, but if Romney governs like he is campaigning, he can certainly extend the economic misery another 4 years and that really can do irreparable damage. The only way to balance the budget without cutting the military and without raising taxes would be essentially end all government welfare programs including SS and medicare. And even that might not be enough because tax receipts will nosedive. Of course, with congress and the courts fighting him doggedly, Obama might also fail abjectly. Well, my children and grandchildren are dual citizens so they can always move up here to the frozen north.
It’s a weird trope for left leaning people, I’ve noticed. I don’t really have any strong opinions about politics, but I go to school with a lot of people that do. Stephen Harper, the Canadian PM, is–like a great deal of Canadian conservatives, IMO–pretty moderate by conservative standard, American GOP’ers. Yet from the conversations and Facebook posts you read, you’d think we were being ruled by General Franco.
From a mile high glance, as a non-American, Romney seems as bland as pablum, and governed liberal Massachusetts, of all places. He’s a fantastically wealthy guy running against a sufficiently wealthy guy, and he did an OK job running the winter Olympics. Even that right-wing demagogue Jimmy Carter said that Romney was an OK guy for POTUS.
I think it’s a race between a moderate conservative and a moderate liberal who broke a huge race barrier. But, the American electoral cycle being such good theatre as it is, it plays out in people’s minds as a re-enactment of 300, with their guy being Leonidas and the other party’s guy being eight-foot-tall-metro Xerxes.
“I don’t like Romney …” is rather not equivalent to “I am an Obama supporter”. Effectively, yes, but some/many people really detest Willard (that was one scary bio-pic) while also being very disenchanted with Barack (me, in part, because his name has come to obscure the word I used to describe Jethro Tull’s music).
The reason is that there are more moderates here. Some lean one way or the other, but we definitely have a dearth of people who genuinely believe that Obama is a Muslim/Socialist/Communist/Fascist/Racist/Warmist/Antichrist.
Hence, the belief that Obama will ruin the country is relatively low on the SDMB.
I don’t hate Obama for who he is but still think he underqualified for his position to this day. 90% of what I expect all government to do is just based on economic strategy both long-term and short-term and I believe Romney would do a better job at it. I don’t care about all the fluff issues every else gets excited over because the media tells them to. I just want to make sure the nation is financially stable over the next many generations. That is the absolute most important thing even for social issues.
Maybe I misunderstood him. I thought he was saying that of the people in this thread who were attacking the opposition something like 90% were Obama supporters attacking Romney vs 10% Romney supporters attacking Obama.
I must say I am just SHOCKED at the poll results! SHOCKED, I say! 
“party pooper”
Indignation ain’t worth spit if you can’t have some righteous to go with it.
I meant what elfkin477 was saying although the trend seems to be gone now.
We may not be able to destroy the planet, but we may be able to destroy its ability to sustain us and our civilization. AGW is much more dire threat than the Civil War was, and another 4 years of the GOP in charge means another 4 years of once again doing nothing while our planet continues to sizzle. While I am not confident that the Dems will do much either, to be honest, there still is a chance they can and will (assuming of course Congress swings their way too and the filibuster is defanged sufficiently).
I voted, “I DON’T favor Romney; if elected he’ll damage the country but it can be reversed 4 years later.” American democracy is pretty robust - we can take a crappy President now and then. We survived Buchanan, Grant, Harding, Nixon and GWB; we can survive Romney, if it should come to that.
Bingo. We act as if presidential elections are cataclysmic events, which is unfortunate, because it keeps us fixated on the issue of the week, and not on long-term trends. If we elect Romney, the existing gulf between rich and poor will just get wider – not enough to tip us suddenly into banana republic-dom, but the trend is not a good one for the Republic. And if Obama is reelected, the gulf will get wider, but at a slower rate, perhaps.
You need to keep a sense of perspective, and keep your expectations low, whichever side you’re on.
The Republicans are more extreme and active than the Democrats. The parties are not mirror images of each other; the Democrats are mostly spineless, passive moderate right wingers; the Republicans are dominated by rabid right wing extremists.
The Democrats aren’t likely to destroy the country regardless of their beliefs; they aren’t likely to do much of anything. They are too weak, too spineless to serve as much more than a speedbump against the Republicans; and not even much of one.
I guess I’m an optimist–it could be fixed. Now, whether it will be is a big problem, as my favored party is also the one with the least amount of drive.
Voted “I DON’T favor Romney, but if he’s elected, I won’t be happy but we’ll all get through it.” I’ve got no love for Romney, in fact I don’t like the guy at all, but he is not quite as bad as the terrible ideas he pretends to believe strongly in. Ultimately I think he’s an opportunist and a pragmatist so he will govern from the position of least resistance rather than to the extreme right.
Once he is in office the rest of the GOP will probably quiet down as Romney now holds the president trump card and the extreme wings like the tea party will find that the rich people money that keeps them afloat dry up. Romney will have the rich folks’ backs, so there is no need to spend money on phony populism that might undermine him. Without worrying about his right flank Romney can ease up on social issues and avoid big fights there than might hurt him. Neither he nor the class who fund him care enough about these issues to waste political and real capital on when they control the Whitehouse. Ever notice that Republicans only seem to care about the budget when they don’t control the executive branch? Yeah, there is a reason for that.
On foreign issues, I think he will be bland and avoid unnecessary confrontation. I don’t think he has some grand vision of the world that he will try to make reality like Bush, so I’m not too worried. He can’t seem to come up with any real believable opposition to Obama’s foreign policy which makes me think he doesn’t really have any. Its all style (if you can call what he does style, which is a stretch) and no substance whatsoever. My only fear is that he will think he needs to back Israel so much that it emboldens them enough to attack Iran, which would be a disaster. Other than we will be fine, although I don’t expect anything great.
All that said, I’m really pulling for Obama to win. I think he is a better President than Romney can be.