To expound further on Carson, while there’s no rationale for him to be President, there’s plenty of rationale for him to RUN for President. If he at least demonstrates a lot of support, which is likely, then he’ll either be able to run for Senate or governor of Michigan, or just get a plum Fox News show. He only just retired from his profession a short time ago and he doesn’t seem like the type to just want to sit around. That would go against the way he’s lived his life since he was about 8 years old. So one way or another, politics is probably going to be his thing for the next 20 years or so. And while I would be willing to bet against him being President, I wouldn’t bet against him being a success on some level at politics. For all the dumb things he’s said, he’s new at this, and frankly he’s not saying anything unusual that you wouldn’t hear in your average fundie church. He just has to figure out that what sells in his church won’t fly among the majority of Americans.
Well, you keep saying this. Can you document that Obama’s voting record was appreciably worse than the typical Illinois state representative?
IOW, cite, please.
Hey, I coulda written that!
The problem is, it’s a very personal rationale. So you’re OK with people having bullshit Presidential candidacies in order to further their chance of either winning lesser office, or getting into the wingnut welfare racket? Because basically the idea of people running for President primarily for personal gain or advancement seems to me like the antithesis of patriotism.
This might be true for some backwoods hick who’s never seen a city. For someone who’s had a career in high-level medicine in a cosmopolitan city at a hospital that’s world-renowned with all the diversity of co-workers that implies, it’s short-bus special.
Since D’Anconia has kept harping on Obama’s being nothing but a community organizer, I should note here in the thread that he was a community organizer from 1985 to 1988. He was a state legislator from 1997 to 2004, inclusive.
D’Anconia, I think that if you’re going to slice and dice the record of a public figure, rather than taking the thing as a whole, the onus is on you to demonstrate that what someone did for 3 years, ending over 20 years before becoming President, is more significant than what someone did for 8 years, ending 4 years before becoming President. Makes about as much sense as someone judging my decades-long career in mathematics and statistics by my four years of undergrad.
And really, the only alternative to that is to conclude that whatever his excellence as a neurosurgeon, it doesn’t carry over to anything.
Bobby Fischer was an astoundingly great chessplayer, back in the day. Not just best in the world, but best in the world with room to spare. (It’s safe to say that about a guy who had a streak of 5 wins and 3 draws against the reigning world champ, Boris Spassky, in the match where he took Spassky’s crown.) And world-class chessplayers are smart. But would you have wanted Fischer running anything in civic life? I rather doubt it.
John Robert Bolton is running? OK, this must be nipped in the bud. I refuse to deal with the chaos of worrying what a higher profile for that mustachioed crank will do to the prices of Marada the She-Wolf and Classic X-Men.
Well, he didn’t make one for* you.*
I voted *against *Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. Obama benefited from that.
I’m not happy about the assassination program, but other than that (gee, other than the probably still illegal atrocities, whoo!) he does seem like a reasonable and less corrupt chief executive. I’m sorry the GOP didn’t nominate John McCain during an election cycle a GOP candidate could have won; he might have been an OK President, even if his nominees drew from a *party *I don’t respect.
Tell me again, who was the GOP candidate for Senator in Illinois in 2004?
Look, Obama did jump the line a bit, but he really did work on developing some foreign policy chops in the time he was in the Senate. Not entirely unlike what Ronald Reagan did in the 1970’s.
No Michelle Bachmann? So much for that political career.
How about Mitch Daniels? What happened to him? Oh, yeah, he’s a useless corrupt sack of old buttons who can’t be trusted to serve the interests of his own constituents.
Man, remember when parties had deep benches?
No need to worry, he’s a legend only in his own mind. But if his mustache ever got loose on its own, it might take down a city, like an escapee from one of the movies mentioned in the opening number of Rocky Horror.
And now Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are making noises about running for the GOP nomination. (ETA: Not that I take either of them seriously. Palin’s not interested in anything that looks like work, and even putting on a decent show of running for President is work. And Trump…does anybody take him seriously about anything?)
I continue to repurpose the Mal Reynolds line, “Well, who in the damn galaxy ain’t?”
He voted “Present” something like 132 times. The present vote was designed to give politicians cover, without having to be on record for or against a certain position.
In fact, in a sex-crimes bill, he was the only legislator, in either body, to vote that way. Everyone else unanimously approved the bill, 58-0-1 and 112-0.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/20/us/politics/20obama.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
So, he took 4000 votes and voted *present *132 times. How many did typical Democrats in his body vote for.
A third of a percent. Nice smoking gun you’ve got there.
Care to retract your position?
None, on the sex crimes bill already cited. And there were others, also cited, that he was the only present vote, or one of two present votes, in the whole chamber.
3.3%, not a third of a percent. Do you care to retract?
I’ll retract the third of a percent. That said, do you retract your assertion that he does it commonly? Or do you think 3.3 percent is common? Please comment on the substance, not a silly miscalculation.
Also, if I weren’t mobile, I’d have checked my math. 
ETA: I asked how common it is to vote present. You haven’t shown that. Can you please cite it for Democrats in that body over the same period of time? One or two specific issues where he’s the only one doesn’t mean anything, unless that never happens otherwise. (even then, one or two votes that make no sense to you, doesn’t mean much in general).
No, I don’t think he does it commonly, since he’s no longer in the Illinois Senate.
Anyway, there are several examples where he was the only one, or only one of two, to vote present on a bill.
Oh yeah? Well, Jeb Bush spend two years in diapers! Do we really want to elect a diaper-wearer to the Presidency? What’s he going to do, poop his pants in the Oval Office whenever a crisis comes up?
Or maybe, just maybe, we can’t take just one aspect of a candidate’s history as an overall indication of the candidate’s qualifications. Nah, that’s crazy talk.
On the topic of Huckabee, those pardons are rather embarrassing, but he can explain them as being the result of an overabundance of Christian mercy. And I’m pretty sure that he’d even be telling the truth. He should play well with the Christian fundamentalist portion of the party, which is after all a pretty big chunk of the base. It’ll only really hurt him with the law-and-order, tough-on-crime segment, and given how much Republicans have been slashing police budgets, I can’t see that that’s a very powerful segment of the party right now.
Audacity of Hope page 130.
How can he, or posters here, justify his 132 “present” votes, based on his own criterion?