My understanding is that even Hillary is getting more voters than all the Republican voters combined. I’m sure that’s partially a function ofr the Dem primaries still being a contest but I believe the disparity in turnout has been that way since Iowa.
I read she had received more votes than McCain, but not more than the entire Republican field (but I suppose that might be the case.)
Really? Democrats are always trying to show that they have “family values,” because Republicans have been taunting them with it for years. I’m not saying he isn’t sincere (and I kind of agree with him). Just that it’s not new.
The notion that Democrats every argued against parenting is ludicrous.
Democrats favor spawning, but actual parenting will cut into time better spent applying for food stamps, free day care, etc.
I doubt that. I couldn’t find any national numbers, but it’s wasn’t true in CA, where I suspect the skew towards Democrats is greater than the national average. Nor was it true in NH, or VA (just two other states I checked at random).
If anyone has vote totals for all the primaries combined, then we can check and see.
Obama’s campaign has certainly affected black turnout. Going from memory from yesterday’s paper so my numbers may be off a bit, but black turnout in South Carolina was up something like 113%. In Georgia, black turnout was up 80%.
Turnout is also up sharply among young voters. And they are voting for Obama by wide margins. Turnout among voters age 18-29 was up more than 300% in South Carolina, and those voters chose Obama 68% to 23%.
I don’t think you can count on those voters turning out for Hillary.
On the other hand, I think an Obama candidacy could potentially turn some red states blue.
Don’t it turn my red state blue!
And driving the Cadillac that you bought with your food stamps. (Thank you, Mr. Reagan.)
Good morning! It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and someone has put out a yard sign. Who could it be? Our new recruit, Bricker, might enjoy this story. 
While I’ve been particularly fearful that the OP’s position has some credence, I don’t think things will pan out that way. I think that even if Clinton is the nominee, there will be enough time to have a good discussion of the relevant positions of the two candidates that even people who are now threatening to take their ball and go home (that is, people who would vote for Obama 1st and McCain 2nd) will have to consider what they are actually voting for. A thorough accounting of what McCain really stands for and what a crooked talker he really is will help to soothe the hurt feelings of Obama supporters if Clinton wins the election.
McCain clearly made a conscious decision to become George Bush’s bitch after getting bitch slapped by him in 2000, and the voters will hold him to account for that. If you flip flop in your bed, you’ve got to lie in the knotted sheets.
Obama is NOT a centrist. Not even close. He has an extremely liberal voting record. And he has several economic advisors, and they run the gamut from centrist to left wing.
I understand Obama’s campaign is going to try to make him look centrist, but we should buy that label no more so than we should accept that Romney is a conservative despite his record, just because he now says so.
You judge people by what they do when they are in a position to make choices. Obama consistently chooses the most liberal option. He’s a liberal. You can argue that liberal isn’t a bad thing, but you can’t claim he’s a centrist.
As for Obama being a centrist because he worked with Tom Coburn, well… George Bush worked with Teddy Kennedy. Does that make him a liberal?
You keep asserting this without any evidence and without bothering to respond to the people who rebut you. If you want to participate in Great Debates, you’ve got to, you know, debate.
If we are to look at votes, are we allowed to look at the justifications for those votes? I suspect that the only way you could make your case is by interpreting complex votes without reference to Obama’s reasoning behind those votes. If we look at that reasoning–as we must since almost no Senate vote is on a single issue with a single possible liberal reason to support that issue–I think you find that he is pretty centrist.
Similarly, you can’t just look at how he’s been rated by some groups. You’ve got to dig into the details. I’ve yet to find such a rating that doesn’t have an idiotic methodology. Consider the National Journal rating. It is based on,* inter alia*, his vote for an independent ethics oversight office, screening all cargo containers that come into the US to prevent terrorism, implementing the 9/11 Commission Report suggestions, not exempting tax cuts from the budget rules that every bill must follow, raising the cigarettes tax to pay for SCHIP, not repealing the inheritance tax, approving the budget for FY 2008, blocking people with conflicts of interest from serving on the FDA drug advisory panels, requiring studies of global warming…I’ll go on if you like. About half of the votes are liberal at all, unless only liberals want to protect us from terrorism and enforce fiscal discipline.
So lay it out for us. We’ve heard your opinion on trade policy in the other thread, but I think you’ve conceded there that your beef is the lack of Obama’s record on trade rather than with his stated positions. So what are the others issues on which he is an uber-liberal?
What is the point of having a Primary if parties ‘shoot themselves in the foot’ if the projected front runner doesn’t win? There will be almost a negligible effect from the people that cross the aisle in spite if their candidate doesn’t win. No matter what, the other Democratic nominee will share more of your values than McCain.
People over think this way too much.
Depends. If Hillary wins fair and square, you may be right. But if she is handed the nomination in spite of having fewer elected delegates, there will be trouble.
And the problem won’t be people crossing the aisle to vote McCain, but rather disillusioned Democrats just staying at home and not voting at all.
Even worse than the loss of this one election is the risk of alienating an entire generation of young voters who seem eager to vote Democratic, but who may be lost forever to cynicism if they perceive that the will of the voters has been thwarted by party insiders.
So, Obama may have had, um, conservative reasons for voting liberal positions almost every instance? As noted here:
Interesting. His motives were non-liberal, eh, in voting 65 out of 66 times for liberal positions? Stop it, please. If you like his positions–and that’s fine, of course–then you embrace a liberal ideology. Why is it important to you that he be labeled a centrist if you agree with his positions?
What’s the matter with the notion that the liberal position is the centrist position? Left of center can be the extremists.
If you’re not even going to read or respond to my debunking of the NJ article, why should I spend time replying to you? Out of the goodness of my heart, I’ll give you another chance.
I take two positions. First, what is classified as liberal is often not liberal, either because it is centrist, or because it just doesn’t fit on the conventional spectrum. Wanting to inspect cargo containers for terrorist materials is neither liberal nor conservative. Wanting ethics oversight is neither liberal nor conservative. Second, in order to characterize Obama as uber-liberal, one must take his trade votes, for example, as evidence of protectionism. You would have to do this in spite of his justifications for these votes which are not protectionist at all.
It is important to me that he be represented accurately. He isn’t a partisan ideologue. Characterizing him as such is inaccurate.
I am compelled to demur. For this current administration, ethical oversight is a Trotskyist position, out there in ultra-uber-lefty territory.
Out of the goodness of my heart, I’ll point out that I don’t care about his justifications for liberal votes. In fact, I’m not saying I even disagree with them–they are good or bad votes, depending upon your position on the results they produced.
But if one votes for a liberal position 65 out of 66 times, one leans liberal. That person is as close to an ideologue as such a measure can define. I have no problem with the general liberal / conservative definitions this article assigns, and I have no reason to believe they designed it specifically to make Obama, the Great Centrist, look liberal; it was the same yardstick applied to all legislators. Conversely, if one votes the conservative position 99% of the time, one leans conservative. In either instance, rhetoric aside, one is inarguably NOT centrist, however much you’d prefer that it be otherwise.