It all comes down to how you define a “dramatic” change. You offer up the suggestion that a dramatic change would render Dennis the K a viable candidate. For my two bits, that would be more like a “radical” shift. Of course, neither your definition nor mine is falsifiable, there is no proof possible.
But I will at least offer to support mine (and BG’s) with historical fact, whereas you simply support your bald-faced assertion with another bald-faced assertion. Before the last election, who suggested that the Dems would take both the House and the Senate? I daresay not you, nor I, however hopeful I might have been, nor many of the punditti who grace our airwaves. What is proveable is that they did, defying expectations and conventional wisdom.
I would be quite willing to accept “dramatic” as a descriptor for that event, seeing as it was surprising and unexpected, by and large.
Not that bad, considering the long-standing American predilection for ticket-splitting, The 2001-2006 years have reminded quite a few people of the value of that. Every vote for a Democrat in Congress creates some pressure in a majority-independent voter’s mind to go with the Republican for President.
Consider that the 27% or so who by now have proven that they’ll go with *any * Republican for President are over half the required total. Then add the ability of several of their candidates to plausibly run as a *true * Republican, a capable leader, someone different from Bush, and his chances will be pretty good. So what about the other personal-life stuff that hasn’t been widely publicized yet? It’s all rationalizable away.
But first tell me if we’ll be out of Iraq by Election Day. If that’s *an * issue then, it’ll be *the * issue.
True dat. And mostly by doing things you defended at the time.
Their primary means of discrediting themselves has been in not fighting as hard to end the war as their supporters hoped, and in general showing that the backbone transplant is still a work in progress.
But they were elected to stand up to Bush and the GOP, so it’s not like their limited efficacy is going to cause people to jump back to the GOP. It’s like if you buy soap to get rid of dirt, and it doesn’t get you very clean: are you going to buy dirt, or are you going to try to get better-quality soap?
People want this war over, and supporting the GOP will do just the opposite.
Other than the drop in approval, I’m trying to figure out just what this description has to do with reality.
The problem for the GOP here is what the people want, which is somewhat to the left of what the Democratic Party is yet willing to stand for. So the question for most Americans isn’t which party to support, but how to get the Dems to do the things they ought to be doing.
And if Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Sam Walton’s progeny drop by sometime this year to sign over their combined wealth to me, I’ll host the biggest Dopefest there ever was, and pay everyone’s airfare.
Here’s the polls. Do they show that in general, without cherry-picking? I see one question on one poll whose responses would support that claim, but it sure looks like an outlier compared to everything else.
In what sense don’t the Republicans still own this war? The Dems have yet to force a single change of note in Iraq policy.
Everyone knows whose war this is. Everyone knows who’s keeping us there, against the will of the American people. People may be unhappy that the Dems haven’t been able to change that, but people know that the reason the Dems haven’t been able to change that is Bush and the GOP.
So far, every poll I’ve seen has shown Bloomberg to either pull from both sides about equally, or pull more from the GOP. Here’s the latest one, from NBC/WSJ.
That would certainly seal the deal for a Dem win, but that’s nothing more than another pony.
I think others have been over this ground in the past, but the real question about Giuliani isn’t whether he can take NY into the GOP column (you’re right, he can’t), but can he win NJ (or possibly CT) for the GOP?
Rudy plays much stronger in the NYC suburbs than in NYC proper, and NJ and CT have the suburbs without the city.
True dat.
And the Romney flipflop problem is all too real.
His natural constituency in 2000 was nonfundie Republicans and independents. They’re mostly against the war now, so he’s SOL there. And the base is still suspicious of him.
I would, in all seriousness, write a check for $10,000 to Newt’s exploratory committee or whatever, if doing so would magically 100% guarantee that Newt would be the GOP Presidential nominee next year.
But he’s another pony. Zero chance to win the nomination.
When did Brownback and Tancredo pull themselves into a hypothetical middle tier? Go to pollingreport.com. Other than Rudy, Fred, Mitt, McCain, and Newt, no GOP candidate or prospect has more than occasionally exceeded 2% in the polls.
There’s the tier, or tiers, with Rudy, Fred, Mitt, and McCain, and then there’s the white-noise boys.
I see Fred doing just the opposite of what you expect, i.e. nothing spectacular either way. He doesn’t have the fire in him to take the field by storm; if he did, it would have already started happening. Instead, his fundraising has been disappointing, his campaign’s going through shakeups even before it officially begins, and his announcement date got pushed back from July 4 to mid-September.
His support will slowly decline as people see more of him and realize there’s no ‘there’ there. But only slowly, because the rest of the field’s so pathetic. If you’re dissatisfied with Candidate X, for any value of X, where do you go?
Publicly?
What - you mean saying he wouldn’t nuke bin Laden’s hideout?
Yep, some gaffe.
I keep hearing stuff like this, which I find totally off the wall, around here. So I thought it deserved a thread of its own.
No, the American political center-of-gravity has not moved radically left, just a bit to the left of HRC, which is really not very far left at all. E.g., I think most Americans would rather have a Canadian-style single-payer health care system than the “managed care” system (still allowing a huge role and huge profits for private insurance companies) that Hillary pushed in 1993. OTOH, almost nobody would find a British-style national health system (doctors employed by the state) appealing.
There are many reasons why Giuliani can’t win, but this is the big one: The latest Pew Poll shows that 41% of Republican voters (and GOP-leaning Independents) are aware that Rudy is pro-choice. It’s 47% among self-described conservatives, and 58% among those who have supposedly given the candidates a lot of thought. His already shaky position in the horse race has to be considered with that in mind.
Between that, his collection of ex-wives, and his inadequate hatred of the queers, I just don’t see the evangelicals getting off their couches to vote for Rudy. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a third party nutjob come along to siphon off the values voters if he gets the nom. Some people here have argued that he’ll take enough voters out of the middle to make up the difference, but I just don’t see it.
Please. I’ve opposed plenty of stuff the Republicans have done. In fact, I’ve opposed most of it. Go back in the archives and look. I’ve been complaining for years that the current Republican leadership is bereft of ideas, that they’re corrupt, big-spending, unprincipled yahoos. The only things they tend to take a stand on are the things I don’t agree with, such as preventing abortions and stem cell research. I thought they were whacked over the Terry Schiavo thing. I heartily opposed the rapid increase in earmarks and unfunded liabilities under the Republican Congress.
No, they’re discrediting themselves by promising good government reforms, and completely reneging on them. Now that they are in power, they are opposing earmark reform, ‘open government’ reforms, and they are abusing the rules of the government worse than the Republicans did. The Republicans got hurt by having several members get caught in scandals. Now Democrats like John Murtha are in the spotlight - and not looking good.
They’re also hurting themselves by doing stupid things like Harry Reid claiming the war is already lost, Nancy Pelosi traveling to Syria, etc. The Reid thing was particularly stupid - once he said that, he tied his poltical fortunes to the U.S. failing in Iraq. If the situation turns around there, that statement will be thrown in his face over and over again. And if he believes it’s true, he’s vulnerable to attack from the left if he doesn’t work feverishly to end the war immediately. He boxed himself into a bad corner to be in.
I honestly think corruption is a much bigger deal with the voters than you do. I think it cost the Republicans big time, and the Democrats got a lot of mileage by promising to be more open and responsible. But now they’re acting exactly like the Republicans did, and people are noticing.
And if the new brand of soap promises to get me cleaner, but actually seems to make me dirtier, I’ll probably go back to the old stuff if it’s what I kind of prefer in the first place.
They want it over, but they don’t want to lose. That’s maybe an impossible position to take, but it’s political reality. A fast withdrawl that looks like surrender or capitulation will not make the American people happy, especially if it leads to scenes of mass bloodshed and masked fanatics firing their weapons in the air in celebration while moderate politicians hang from their necks from light standards through Baghdad.
The people wanted out of Vietnam too, but the exit from that country hurt Democrats far more than it hurt Republicans.
You’re seriously suggesting that the American public as a whole is to the left of the Democratic party? Can I have some of what you’re smoking?
The first of the two polls in that link show the trends moving in the President’s favor on almost every question. A lot of the change looks to me like it’s within the margin of error or close to it, but all the numbers today are better than they were in the last polling cycle. The number of people who say the war was the right thing to do went up from 35% to 42%. The number of people who say the war is going very well or somewhat well has gone up from 25% to 32%. The number of people who say the war is creating more terrorists has dropped from 51% to 44%.
The latest Zogby Poll shows that only 3% of Americans approve of the war Congress is handling the war. That’s an amazing feat! Since far more than that approve of the war (24% approve of the way Bush is handling it, btw), the Congress has managed to piss off Republicans, Democrats, independents, hawks, and doves. I have no idea who the remaining 3% are.
Yes, that’s true now. My point is that if the Democrats push hard to end the war, and the war is seen to be a big failure, you can bet that Republicans are going to blame the Democrats for it. They’re going to claim that it was turning around until the Dems pulled the rug out. It’s exactly what was claimed in Vietnam - and it worked. Whether it’s fair or not, that’s what will happen. The Dems are stepping into a political minefield. What they should do is simply say, “We’re not going to abandon our troops, so we’ll continue funding the war. The President got us into this, and he has to take the initiative to get us out.” Then if (or as some thing, when) it completely fails and the President has to call an end to it, there will never be any doubt that it was a Republican misadventure that ended horribly.
Quite. And you’d better hope they continue to be unsuccessful. From a political standpoint, anyway. If you want to make a principled moral case for doing what you see as the right thing regardless of the political consequences, that’s fine.
That one is specifically about a Guliani matchup with a Dem. I quite agree that Bloomberg would pull some votes from Guliani. But now we’re talking about three New Yorkers with a lot of similarities.
How do you think it would stack up if Bloomberg entered a Clinton/Thompson race? Or Clinton/Romney? Or Obama/Thompson?
I might agree that if it were Obama/Guliani, Bloomberg would take more votes from Guliani. He would split the New York, “Law and Order” vote with Guliani.
This is a very good point. I don’t know enough about New Jersey politics to comment one way or the other.
Absolutely. His biggest problem with the Republican base isn’t that he’s a Mormon, but that there’s grave suspicion that he’s not a true conservative. He didn’t run Massachussets as a movement conservative, his NRA membership starts in 2006, he lied about being an avid hunter, and he has a record of support for abortion, which he now claims is murder. That’s a tough sell.
Agreed on both counts.
Yeah, I don’t think Newt can get elected either. He’d make a good cabinet-level secretary in some economic position. That’s about it.
Yeah, "middle tier’ was far too generous for those guys. There really isn’t a middle tier - there’s a bunch of guys in contention for the nomination, and a gaggle of fringe candidates.
Maybe. I guess what I was trying to say is that I don’t think Thompson has the stomach for a long fight up from the bottom. He’s either going to lead the pack, or he’s going to lose interest and drop out of sight. If his support falls further, I wouldn’t be surprised if he even declined to run at all. I think he was attracted to the idea by his meteoric climb to the top with no effort and with all the talk of his being a saviour and of his ‘star quality’. I don’t think he’s at all interested in being a hard-working also-ran jockeying for a vice presidency or cabinet position, which is often what keeps second-tier candidates in the game.
I think there’s plenty of ‘there’ there - Thompson is hugely likeable on a personal level, he does have the same ‘it’ factor Obama has, and he’s got plenty of gravitas and experience. The biggest risk with Thompson is the same as the biggest risk for Obama - they are both running as ‘shoot from the hip’ outsiders who are refreshing because it doesn’t sound like every word out of their mouths are pre-packaged soundbites. But that’s also a dangerous road to travel, and it’s easy to shoot yourself in the foot or yeaarrrgh your way out of contention. We’ll see.
No, like saying he’d sit down with all the world’s worst offenders without preconditions. Hillary was smart to go after that. It made him look weak and naive, so he came back with the "I’d go into Pakistan without Mushareff’s approval’ comment, which looked rash and ill-considered. It wasn’t a good week for Obama, and the polls are showing it. He’s now 20 points behind Hillary.
OK, I’ll go back and look. (Later; it’s almost time to put stuff on the grill.) But I’m sure I’ve been on the other side from you on a lot of political debates over the past 6.5 years about U.S. domestic policy, and I bet a good bit of that was stuff that has the GOP in trouble these days.
Oh, c’mon, the GOP has been blocking the ethics legislation for months now, even though they passed it: they’ve filibustered a resolution for setting up the House-Senate conference committee.
Earmarks reform is neither here nor there (to most people, and in practical effect); Congress is much more open under Pelosi and Reid than it was under Hastert and Frist; and your guys are still getting enmeshed in scandals by the drove. (The latest is the entire all-GOP Alaska Congressional delegation.)
Omigod - the dread PR that only wingnuts care about!!
I think you’re confusing a chipped fingernail with a broken arm.
I agree with you on the importance of corruption as an issue. Except, um, the amount of Dem corruption is pretty trivial. And we’ll have to disagree on whether the Dems are acting as high-handed as the GOP did when it was in charge, because you and I are in two different universes here.
People have given up on winning awhile back.
The rest of it - find it in the polls.
Cite?
No. Go back and read what I said.
Sure.
And you noticed that no two of those comparisons were even with the same earlier time period?
As a point estimate, there’s nothing wrong with that poll. But in terms of trendlines, that poll is worthless.
But if you want to play with garbage, note that that poll showed the number of people approving of the way Bush is handling the war is constant at 25%, the percentage of people who feel we need to decrease or remove all of our troops is constant at 66% (apparent increase, but within the MOE), and the percentage who think the surge has had no effect or made things worse is constant at 73%.
So you’re cherry-picking within that one poll. A comparison to May here, a comparison to June there, a comparison to the week before over there, and ignoring the ones you don’t like.
Now go on to the other polls there. The ABC-WaPo poll, taken about the same time as the one you like, has NO trendlines that are positive for you. NONE. Out of nine, I believe.
Then there’s a Newsweek poll and an AP poll, both taken about 10 days earlier. Same deal. Then what trendlines the USA Today/Gallup poll a few days before them has, don’t look good for you. And so forth.
You’re looking at the polls, and seeing only the ones that work for you. That won’t do, Sam. I think of you as an honest debater, despite our wide areas of disagreement. I’d like to keep thinking of you like that.
Even if the Dems didn’t push to end the war, the GOP was working hard on blaming the dirty fucking hippies for losing the war, just because they were saying discouraging words. Feh.
There won’t be any doubt anyway, except among the wingnuts, who will find a way to blame the Dems regardless.
Nah, I’m fine with both the rightness and the perception both. Too many small towns are tired of seeing their best young men come home in boxes, or missing body parts, or with stuff rattling around in their heads that normal people just don’t know what to make of.
You know what I believe we owe our soldiers, in terms of when they’re actually fighting? I believe we owe it to them to make sure they’re fighting in a good cause, with the country’s support, and, as much as humanly possible, to use them effectively - that is, to not spend their lives to no avail. As I see it, the Bush Administration is 0-for-3 on this.
Like I said, that was just the latest one. The others I’ve seen haven’t been any more favorable for you.
Let’s just say that Dems like their field a lot better than Pubbies like theirs. Bloomberg’s going to get the people who really don’t like either candidate. No matter who the nominees are, there will be far more depressed Pubbies than depressed Dems. For instance, the netroots, which by and large is pretty unfond of Hillary, will work their asses off to get her elected if she’s the nominee - after having worked their asses off to try to keep her from getting nominated. And she’s the most divisive (intra-party) of the major candidates.
The energy’s all on our side, and what unites us is a lot stronger than what divides us. Bloomberg? He just ain’t gonna get many Dem votes. Fuhgeddaboutit.
Neither do I, beyond that.
And it won’t help him with independents either.
Except nobody would want him because he’s a loose cannon.
Agreed.
That’s a bad comparison, I think. Besides being an inspiring speaker (from what I’ve heard, that’s been one of Fred’s problems this time out; don’t know how he used to be), Obama’s a genuinely thoughtful guy, a serious policy wonk who’s really put together a pretty good outline for an approach to the world. I don’t see him shooting from the hip all that much. He may say something that strikes people as different, but he’s probably thought about it a lot already.
To the sort of people who only have a hammer in their toolbox. The consensus, AFAICT, seems to be that that debate helped Obama.
Really? It looked like it was hardly just tacked onto the speech; it was only one sentence, but it fit in with its context.
The U.S. has had an official policy of ‘nuclear ambiguity’ for a long time, which makes a lot of sense. Don’t threaten anyone with them, don’t promise not to use them. That makes them effective as a deterrent without threatening anyone overtly.
To Obama’s credit, he seems to have realized that he stepped in it as he was speaking, and tried to nuance his way out of it. But still, it helped build a narrative that he might not be ready for prime time. And it’s being used against him not by Republicans, but primarily by Clinton.
I don’t think it is quite as simple as which group is larger, sure if Obama was the candidate I would guess that most black Americans would vote for him, but if Hillary was the candidate I don’t think for a second that all women would just go out and vote for her, there are quite a few women who don’t care for her. Are there really that many people that hate Mormons?
But I see them getting off their couches to vote against a woman or a black man, whether the Republican candidate is Guliani, Thompson, or Joe Palooka, a plumber from Greasy Creek, Kentucky with no previous political expereince. I fully expect a huge galvanation of the evangelicals if either Clinton or Obama get the Democratic nomination.
Practically the whole Evangelical community hates Mormonism (not Mormons). It’s not just a non-Christian religion like Judaism or Islam, it is, in their view, false Christianity. Heresy is always scarier than infidelity.
