The most obvious thing is the appointment of Supreme Court justices. It’s pretty clear where Republican appointees end up on the issue vs Democrat appointees. If you don’t see a sharp difference there, you haven’t been paying attention.
Just keep the goddam things, they mean that much to you! I cannot see throwing an entire modestly progressive agenda into the wood chipper just to pick a fight with ballistic fetishists. At this point in time, any gun control legislation, or even a hint thereof, is a political suicide note. Might as well wrap the keys to the White House in gift paper and have them delivered to whichever of Mitt’s houses seems most appropriate.
I certainly respect other views on this, there are other cases to be made. But for me, a fight you can’t win that costs you everything else is a fight to avoid.
I think he means it’s odd that Romney didn’t personally know any women he wanted to hire, which it is. Odder still is that he was apparently making up the whole thing about “seeking out qualified women”.
If their debate answers existed in a vacuum, I’d agree with you. Romney’s already happily signed an assault weapons ban, though, and didn’t claim it was a mistake or his position has changed or anything.
Look, I think the whole “pay gap” thing is largely a misunderstanding or lack of understanding of a variety of factors that affect how much men and women get paid.
My larger point was that if the democrats are always clamoring for people to vote their economic interests, that’s clearly not Obama for me.
Democrats aren’t clamoring for people to vote their economic interests. They clamor for folks to vote for fair economic policies. Obviously the argument in favor of women’s issues isn’t, “this is only something women should support.” Nor is that the argument in favor of extending unemployment benefits, veterans’ benefits, or any other program that benefits a subset of our population. The central arguments revolve around basic ethical principles.
Frankly, the brand of identity politics you’re espousing is pretty depressing.
I thought that it was Republicans that espoused voting purely on economic self interest and valued selfishness.
While the democrats espouse “herd benefit”
This is not meant to be a value judgement by the way - but broadly from this campaign I thought the basis of R was that “when I do well, I contribute to the economy and pull everyone else up” while for D it is “when the economy and the people around me are doing well, they will pull me along”
Not to mention that he sounded like he’s patting himself on the back for discovering 1960s stereotypes of working women in 2003, after having been CEO of Bain for 15 years.
There is some truth to this, but I have to say that it’s badly-phrased.
The Republican Ideal is that as the rich get richer, they spend money and invest in businesses they don’t own and, maybe, pay a few taxes here and there, and everyone gets something out of that. If the economy is bad, give more to the rich and let the economy disburse it to the rest of the country in a fair, free-market fashion. They view social safety nets as being counter-productive as they claim they engender dependency on the government, yet being dependent on your employer for basic healthcare is how the free market is supposed to work.
The Democratic Ideal is that the government spreads wealth around because when you trust the rich to do that, you end up with the Reagan Eighties when the wealth disparity (the gap between how much the rich have and how much everyone else has) grows massively, showing that the Republican Ideal is not how it works in the [del]Reality-Based Community[/del] real world. So you institute a system of progressive taxation to fund social safety nets which help the people who end up out of work when the economy gets bad. That way, everyone contributes to their society, the society that enabled them to prosper in the first place, and everyone benefits.
It wasn’t the topic of this thread. If you want to discuss it in detail, start another one and I’ll jump in when I have time.
Sure they do. Have you ever heard of “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Democrats love that book. It’s all about “Those poor Kansasans (Kansans? Kansasians? Kansasites?) are getting duped by the Republicans on guns and abortion. If they’d just vote for what’s good for them economically (my party), then Democrats would rule politics.”
That’s what Obama’s campaign is all about: “I gave you guys x, y, and z. Romney wants to take away your government goodies, don’t vote for him.”
Y’know, I don’t honestly have a problem with people voting for their own personal self-interest or people voting for the good of everyone. It’s better if everyone does the latter, of course, but if we had that across the board, we wouldn’t even need government at all. So we create a system, democracy, that allows for people being selfish, and still works.
But when people vote in ways that aren’t good for everyone, and also aren’t even good for themselves, that does serious damage. When we see people acting that way, we try to get them to switch to one of the views above. Either one would do, really, but the self-interest one seems like it ought to be an easier sell, so that’s what we emphasize.
It’s because the anti-gun control folks REALLY need to feel that their sky-is-falling fears of President Obama planing to confiscate their guns are validated, and President Obama didn’t even do a SINGLE thing to validate them.