And Bush had made that reform a centerpiece of his second-term agenda. If it’s dead, which it is for now, that’s a pretty hard hit early in the term.
You’re entitled to your interpretation of things. I think that if Roberts represented himself accurately in the Senate hearing, he’s a very good judge and seems to have the makeup to be a good Chief Justice. I don’t know how often I’ll agree with what he says, but that’s not what makes somebody a good or bad judge.
I won’t speak for anybody else, but that’s not true for me. And in terms of a Supreme Court nominee, they ARE in a weak position. They don’t control either house of Congress and their approval of a judge is not required.
So what? They’re not the ones dictating how things go in Washington these days. If people are dissatisfied with the government in November 2006, generally that will work to the Democrats’ advantage. No question that they can’t just sit back and do nothing for another year, but at this particular moment, I think they’re doing the right thing. If Bush’s next nominee is someone they feel they need to fight against - I guess we’ll know in a couple of days - that’ll be different, as I said.
Do you think that, given a few weeks, Karl Rove can come up with a masterstroke that will shift the blame for Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, gas prices, Valerine Plame and Tom DeLay to the Democrats?
Do you mean why aren’t the Dems putting up of a fight? As I said, you have to choose your battles. They’re fighting where it makes sense to do so, but not just opposing things across the board. They fought him on Social Security, and won that battle.
In the case of Roberts, yes. McCain and his band agreed to not vote for the nuclear option unless the Dems fillibustered a non-extremist candidate. Now, that’s a very amorphous thing, “extremism”, and there certainly are condidates whom the Dems could make the “extremist” case for, but Roberts isn’t one of them. It would have to be someone more like Janice Rogers Brown. n.b.: I don’t personally consider her an extremist, but that label could be applied to her much more easily than to Roberts.
I didn’t mean that they should just sit back and let the Pubs self-destruct. Sorry if my post came off that way. But they need to choose their battles wisely, and Roberts wasn’t a battle they could win. Do you think a fillibuster of the Roberts nomination would have been a plus for the Dems? I don’t.
As soon as there’s a 2008 nominee, you’ll see “leadership”. Not before. The “problems” you see are at least as much a *result * of being out of institutional power as a cause of it. A couple thousand more votes counted in Ohio this time, or Florida the last time, and this thread wouldn’t exist.
I really have no idea what the Democratic party is about these days except to hold the line against Bush. I concede the Republican onslaught has been so relentless they’ve had little time for anything else, but as John Kerry’s nomination showed us, as a party, they lack anything compelling to say, and that’s a serious problem. So long as they leave that vacuum, the Republicans will fill it, with total crap, if they have too. I think we’ve seen enough to know total crap can be sold with great success and facility if you scream it from the rooftops enough.
Just imagine if that void could be filled with something distinctive, appealing, and yet wasn’t total crap. Anybody? Anybody?
My own suspicion is that the Democrats’ inability to respond to this in a horribly effective manner, besides simply choosing their battles and giving the Republicans enough rope to hang themselves with, also stems from the divisions between the Democrats themselves (much like the divisions between the more traditional conservatives and neo-conservatives coming to light). While simple obstructionism requires only broad agreement, I feel that trying to advance anything horribly specific would require a party-wide consensus that just isn’t there. We have the more Clinton-esque, pragmatic wing that seems to be holding onto power, and which most Congresspeople seem to belong to (including John Kerry, as much as he’s trying to appeal to the base, and myself), and the smaller, but more passionate and motivated part of the party that’s somewhat further left. Getting those two wings of the party to agree on a common agenda without a truly energizing leader is going to be difficult. (For example, I rather suspect that both BrainGlutton and myself would love a resurgent Democratic party, but I rather also suspect we have strong disagreements on what the agenda should be).
A President who defeated a former Vice-President on an extremely close election with some highly questionable votes in his favor, cut taxes, invaded a foreign nation, and who triggered an international crisis over WMD.
Sadly, the Democratic strategy can be summarized as follows:
[ol]
[li]We’re different from the Republicans.[/li][li]We’re the same as the Republicans.[/li][li]<WHINEY LITTLE KID VOICE> Me too! Me too! Me too!<?WHINEY LITTLE KID VOICE>[/li][/ol]
They have no identity, anymore. They certainly don’t represent the Working Man. :dubious:
Thanks to one of the few Dopers who I can be sure wasn’t being sarcastic.
Although, seriously speaking, the loss of the Scoop Jackson wing of the Democratic party has, in my view, been a net loss for the Democratic party. JFK was anti-Communist and strong on defense. Kerry’s Viet Nam service could have been the ticket to present him as anti-terrorist and strong on defense. Instead, his voting record and general passivity in Congress made him look more like a Viet Nam protestor, even without the Swifties.
Although the larger picture remains as it has been mentioned a tiime or two in this thread. The Dems don’t stand for anything; they are simply the anti-Republicans. It might even do them some good to pick a fight and then lose it, over some matter of principle - the refusal of Roberts or Miers to promise to uphold Roe v. Wade, or a plan to fix Social Security, or something. Anything but this “we won’t achieve anything but sniping at Republicans”, regardless of how popular it might be among the True Believers.
The joke back in the 70s was that if the Democrats in Congress proposed a bill tio invade Mexico, the best the Republicans could do would be to get them to phase it in over three years. Nowadays it’s the Dems in the same position.
If the Dems are really serious in their concerns over the deficit, or Social Security, or disaster relief spending, then let them submit some package of spending cuts and tax increases and really try to get it passed. If they fail, at least in 2006 they can say they tried, and argue plausibly that things would be better if they had succeeded.
It is not automatically true that anyone who is discouraged from voting Republican will then vote Democratic. Often they don’t vote at all. And that doesn’t help anyone.
Well done. You could even have started: A President who was sent to an elite boarding school and then made the ivy league with his father’s help. A President who defeated…
Actually, what I would love would be a reformed electoral system (PR, IRV, ballot fusion) under which both the big-tent parties would be likely to break up along their natural fault lines into several smaller ones, each more internally homogenous and with a more clear and consistent ideology and agenda. See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=269169
I was thinking of that “parallels between Kennedy and Lincoln” that circulates from time to time.[ul][li]Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy who urged him not to go to the theate. Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln who urged him not to go to Dallas.[]Lincoln was shot in a theater, and his assasin fled to a ware house. Kennedy was shot froma warehouse, and his assassin fled to a theater.[]Both men were shot from behind, on a Friday, sitting down next to their wives.[]Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.[/ul]Etc. [/li]
My favorite was added to the list later on.
[ul][li]A week before he died, Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland. []A week before he died, Kennedy was in Marilyn Monroe.[/ul]I was trying for something like “Both JFK and George ate a lot of Bush while in the White House”, but I couldn’t get the line to flow. [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll second this. In 2004, I didn’t vote for Bush because I was unhappy many things about him. However, I didn’t vote for Kerry either. Why? Because he gave me no reason to. Yes, I realize Bush sucks. What are you going to do differently? I never really got an answer to that question. He never gave me a reason to vote for him, and that’s why he didn’t get my vote.
That is very close to how I feel as well. I was very discouraged with the war from the beginning and did not vote for Bush. Nor did I vote for Kerry for the reasons you stated.
That’s hardly a substantive rebuttal. Care to address the actual topic of the thread instead?
marley23, oddly, the Enlightened Master has apparently never discussed the alleged graveyard voters in his own city. But here is a good summary anyway.
