Look at the 6th poll on this page: 70% of Americans think the government needs to do more than it is now concerning Global Warming. 70%! That’s pretty darn mainstream. I don’t know what that number was in 2000 (when Bush first ran), but I’d bet it was closer to 10 or 20%. Republicans will have to learn to face up to Global Warming, or they will cease to exist as a major party.
You think he isn’t? I know what he said, but all his environmentally damaging actions were spun as actions to support the environment. There are lots of ways politicians can play to the polls while still keeping their anti-green business supporters happy. Do a study. Say the hydrogen economy will fix everything. Support environmentalism, but say that it can’t cost any jobs, and not try to find ways in which it would increase the number of jobs.
If Bush really had a conversion, I think we would know it.
All I’m saying is I’m not going to base my vote on something a politician said in the past about Global Warming. This is an evolving issue, and people are slowly but surely getting on board. When it comes time to vote, and when I want to evaluate their stance on Global Warming, I’ll look at the platform they are proposing. I’m confident in my ability to see thru bullshit if that’s what’s being presented. Then I’ll tick that item off, and move onto the next. But I’m not going to base my vote on any one issue. (Except maybe Iraq. Anyone who won’t pledge to start getting us out as soon as they’re in office… fuggetaboutit!)
First, the only reason he’s “no longer in the denial camp” is because he’s busy fighting a delaying action. It’s been clear that he and his ilk have been doing that for quite some time.
As for your last point, are you not planning on voting, then?
-Joe
Just like most of them. The only candidates that don’t have legal backgrounds are McCain, Huckabee, and Richardson.
To his credit, you probably picked the wrong day to muse in that direction about his intentions for the rest of his term:
I’m not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with John, but your first cite doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that he’s serious. Call a meeting to set goals when there are already plenty of goals. Eliminating tariffs sounds good - are there any, and is that a big issue? And will the goals coming out of this meeting be any more aggressive than the feeble US goals already set, and what happens if they’re not met? The German proposal sounds good as a start. No wonder it was rejected - it would require real action.
Sounds like about the number of people who, when polled, think that there’s too much pork in Washington. Doesn’t seem to have slowed it down much. And the people who hate ‘pork’ love it when their own politicians bring home the bacon.
It’s easy to say you support efforts to combat global warming (or cut spending) when the question comes with no personal cost attached to it.
Re-run the poll and ask people if they are willing to pay an extra $1,000/yr for energy to combat global warming, and see what kind of result you get.
On an episode of ‘Bullshit’ a while ago, Pollster Frank Luntz indicated how this works very clearly. He said, “Here, I’ll go out and poll people and get you two result sets - one completely the opposite of the other.” He found an issue - that the government should increase social spending for illegal immigrants to allow their children to get medical care and an education.
To the first group of people, he asked, “Do you think that the children of immigrants should be denied health care?” Overwhelming NO. “Do you think the children of immigrants should be denied an education?” Overwhelming NO.
Then he asked the second group of people, “Do you support bill HRwhatever, that seeks to give more government money to illegal immigrants for social programs?” This time, almost no one thought the bill was a good idea. The moral: Tie the question to individuals (poor children of immigrants), but phrase it in a way that doesn’t directly imply costs to the person being questioned, and you’ll get them to respond in your favor. Make the question less personal and more general, and make sure you show the costs involved, and you’ll get the other answer. Standard partisan pollster trickery.
Tying this back to Thompson… So far, Thompson is a bit of a cipher. So polls that put him up against known candidates with known positions should be viewed with skepticism. Thompson’s support so far could be not so much a vote FOR him, as AGAINST the specific individuals whose positions are more well-known. If he enters the race he’ll have to start speaking to large audiences, and he’ll be widely reviewed and commented on. Then we’ll see where his popularity lands.
John, I believe you have totally missed the point here.
If you put a sign in your front yard, it wouldn’t be much of an indicator of anything widespread, perhaps. But would it be an accurate reflection of your thinking? I’d sure hope so.
Does this blog represent the National Review, at the comparatively sane end of the right-wing noise machine, or not?
They’re putting signs in their yard. The signs reflect where they are.
Bush has never been in the global warming denial camp, not even while running in 2000. His game - successful for years - was to co-opt the issue by simply being that anomaly, a Republican who recognized that it was real. And occasionally pushing for strictly voluntary measures to control carbon emissions.
The right-wing nutters are ignoring it; they’re in a different reality from the rest of us, one where “Algore” (one word, for inscrutable reasons - they have their own language out there, talking about things like ‘dhimmitude’, whatever that is) is still a big joke. The problem is, the primary candidates need their votes.
The reality is, the GOP Presidential candidates are whipsawed. They have to be in one reality to win the nomination, and in another to win the election. There was a time when that might have worked. But now, every televised utterance is saved, and the best-of video of the kowtowing to the base in primary season becomes the devastating YouTube of the candidate in general election season.
Well, you have a very interesting opinion, RTF.
Sam: I don’t disagree with anything you said. But the point is whether or not this is going to a big issue, and I think it is. And the fun part is when we start talking about what we’re going to do and how much it’s going to cost. And then you have to get something through Congress… which could take freakin’ forever-- that will be even more difficult than what we’re seeing with the immigration bill.
Perhaps, but the poll at least proves that at least 70% of the people acknowledge GW is a problem; and if a candidate denies its existence, it won’t help his chances with them.
This is an excellent point, and I think it’s going to be a big problem for both sides. It’s always been the case that to win the nomination, candidates would go through the primary states and swing way over to the left/right to gain the support of their base. And not just that, but they would make ridiculous regional promises in various states, which would sometimes be in direct conflict with the promises they made in other states. But early in the primary seasons the full attention of the media wouldn’t be on them, and they could get away with that, then ignore everything they said once they won the nomination and frantically scramble back to the center for the general election.
But now, everything is on the record, and the publicity a statement gets has little to do with who’s paying attention at the time, and everything to do with how far away from the mainstream it is, or how inconsistent it is with you the candidate’s national message. Say something stupid or extreme, and it’s all over the blogosphere the next day, and then driven into the mainstream media a few days after that. I think that hurt Kerry in 2004. Bush didn’t have the problem, because he didn’t have to campaign for the nomination.
But now, candidates on both sides have to fight hard for the nomination, and they have to do it in an environment where pandering to the base can hurt them big time with the general public. That’s going to make this election season very interesting.
Tying this back to Fred Thompson, it seems he’s either smart enough to dodge this problem, or his advisers are. He says that if he runs, he won’t be doing the traditional style of campaign. Rather, he’s going to use the internet to go straight to the people and try to build support in the primaries by showing that he has major support across the country. Expect to see lots of Thompson videos on youtube and on blogs, and lots of grassroots organizing through thet net. It’s an interesting strategy, and it just might work.
Here’s an example. When Michael Moore attacked Thompson for smoking Cuban cigars and challenged him to a debate, Thompson issued a response via YouTube.
John: It’ll be interesting on both sides to watch the candidates walk the global warming tightrope. Will any of them be willing to talk about specific policies that would make a serious dent in global warming, while acknowledging the cost? Or will it be all mom-and-apple-pie nonsense, with everyone supporting the concept of ‘doing something’ about global warming, but always in ways that make it seem like it’ll be cheap and easy?
Maybe that’ll work this time, but it didn’t for Dean in 2004.
It could have worked for Dean. But I think Dean was more an example of the problem RTFirefly was talking about. Dean’s “yeargh!” that was so endlessly mocked in the media would never have seen the light of day 8 years ago. It was a moment of over-the-top exuberance in front of an audience of screaming supporters. People who were there said that it didn’t come across as nearly as crazy as it looked on TV. But that one moment of unpresidential demeanor started a rapid slide in irrelevance when it bounced all over the internet.
I think it’s likely that somewhere along the way we’ll get to watch a candidate self-implode due to the internet factor. Maybe more than one. And it could be a Republican or Democrat. It doesn’t even have to be a partisan issue. If a camera catches on of them picking his nose, or scratching his butt, or saying something stupid in an unguarded moment, or tripping over something in a spectacular way, it could end a candidacy as it gets repeated, photoshopped, captioned, and essentially blown way out of proportion.
Look what happened to Gerald Ford - he got tagged as a klutz because cameras happened to catch him in a couple of stumbles in a short period of time. It didn’t matter that he was maybe the most gifted athlete to be president in decades - there was footage of him looking clumsy, and it picked up by Saturday Night Live and mocked, and the characterization stood. Now there are cameras everywhere, and a zillion blogs just waiting to grab the next juicy sound bite or video clip and run with it.
Of course, eventually, after enough exposure, the voters might get jaded about such things and stop caring about them.
Yeh. Just let one of the Dems come out and endorse that we join the Kyoto Treaty, and see how well (s)he does in the general. The only way to cut back on carbon emissions with existing technology is to slow down economic growth. Russia has done great in meeting its Kyoto goals… because so many of the former Soviet Republics have economies in the dumper.
I have to say, if this is an example of what we can expect from Thompson, I’m not impressed. This is exactly the sort of boorish nonsense that raises my hackles: a PROUD non-response to any substantive question about healthcare, and then responding to something Moore never claimed in the first place (that Cuba and Castro are all awesome). I’m not a huge fan of Moore, and while this video probably scored him a lot of points with the “be a big dick to those people we think are dicks!” crowd, it came across to me as a tendency to indulge a little more in self-righteous arrogance that might play well as a character on a show, but isn’t going to fly as a candidate, especially in the primaries against people like Guiliani.
It was like a Sistah Souljah moment… except if Pat Buchanan went after Sistah Souljah. i.e., pointless self-aggrandizement.
Again, given that Thompson’s chief selling point to me at least is that he can come across as self-confident (i.e. non-wishy washy) AND intelligently open to debate (sort of like a old galoot conservative law prof who challenges everybody on everything but at least respects the debate in an academic sense), him playing way too far into the “look what a boor I can be” is not a good sign.
That’s what I heard just today. I really hate to hear that because I know that he knows better and is just playing to the more ignorant elements of the extreme Right.
Fred Thompson was a very savvy local attorney, a Watergate counsel, and a Senator popular even with Democrats. I just hate to see him sell himself out as another Bill Frist. I guess he will have his plaid shirt and his pickup truck out next. Betcha!
This man is no country yokel!
I tend to agree with you, and I didn’t really care for the video, but it wasn’t entirely without content. His point about Nicolás Guillén Landrián was dead on. Landrián should be someone who a person like Moore should champion. He was an award-winning satirical filmmaker like Moore, only he chose the wrong person to make fun of. You can say anything about George Bush and be safe. Say the same things about Castro, and you wind up in a mental institution getting electro-shock therapy repeatedly to remind you who’s in charge.
So it’s kind of sickening to watch Moore kiss up to the man who did that to a fellow filmmaker.
Well, I haven’t seen the film, and I’m open to the possibility that it exists (since I don’t have a high opinion of the depths of Moore’s leftism), but I’ve so far seen no evidence that Moore kissed up to Castro om a way that would justify someone lecturing him about Castro being a dictator. If anything, the tone of his commentary has been “why is it that these backwards places can provide medical care to all, but we can’t manage it in the richest nation in the world even for those people we keep calling our super duper heroes” If he had praised Castro on human rights the way Mother Teresa praised dictators giving her money, that WOULD be a fair point. But Thompson never provided any evidence of that. As such, his finger wag simply wasn’t particularly justified or on point.