Ah, yes. Let’s disillusion yet another generation of the idea that their vote means anything.
I feel exactly the opposite way. The voting pattern you establish when you’re young tends to stick with you for the rest of your life. One of the exciting things about the Obama candidacy is that he’s bringing large numbers of young voters into the Democratic fold. That’s the sort of demographic base that can give a party consistent wins for decades.
Agree, IF they hypothetically were going to get off the couch and vote.
Okay, if you don’t care about alienating the next generation of voters, how do you feel about alienating the most reliable Democratic voting block for the past 30 years?
If they were so reliable, why is Hillary second in the popular vote, second in pledged delegates, and second in number of states won? Seems to me if they feel alienated, it is only right, since they backed the also-ran.
Uh, there already have been record turnouts in the primary. Many of those are newly registered Democrats. Sure some of them might not follow through in the general, but if they care enough to vote in the primary (which usually has lower turnout) it’s not unreasonable to think they’ll vote in the general.
Miscommunication on someone’s part here…I was talking about African-Americans, who have broken overwhelmingly for Obama. Who did YOU think I was talking about?
I understood jayjay’s comment as meaning that nominating Clinton, as well as alienating young people, would also alienate African-Americans, who are a quite reliable Democratic voting block.
On edit, I was right. 
Probably mine. I thought you were talking about the rural white male vote, or who ever the Hillary constituency de jour is.
Nonsense.
And ad hominem, to boot. This is Great Debates. Do you have a comment on the position, instead of the person that has advanced it?
John McCain is a weak candidate. He may have been a force eight to ten years ago, but his misstatements about Iraq are becoming a pattern. This causes people to question his competence and view his age and health as a detriment. He is hopelessly connected to the failed Bush White House and doesn’t seem to be raising the stash of cash needed for the presidential race. Democrats couldn’t be in a better position. I believe the fight between Clinton and Obama is the actual fight for the presidency. The Republicans have chosen their candidate: HRC. I guess the rightwing decided that a corporate centrist is much better than a progressive populist. Thus, Obama is being caricatured, by the right and the Clintons, as a leftwing radical, who is part of the America hating liberal chic. And so it goes, we will choose our president based on bowling scores and cheap made in China lapel pins.
Which position do you want me to comment on? The one that you put forth, that if things were the opposite of what they are, Hillary would be winning?
And since when has questioning someones motives been ad hominem? Are you saying there isn’t a Republican movement to spoil Democratic primaries for Hillary?
Irrelevant, even if there were Republicans buying billboards for Hillary on every turnpike in the nation.
Questioning someone’s motives instead of answering the point they raise has been an ad hominem fallacy since the term was invented. Before that, it was simply a fallacy that no one knew the name of.
If my point has flaws, expose them. If it doesn’t, concede it. Who I am has nothing to do with it.
In a sense, this is academic – in another thread, I raised very similar points, and RTFirefly dispatched them with solid arguments, which I conceded… before we even began this exchange. But your total lack of understanding of what constitutes argument ad hominem prompted me to undertake this discussion.
The Democrats are in a pretty good position, but don’t get over confident. Do you not remember 2004?
I misunderstood the definition of ad hominem, and I conceed that my suspicions for the motives of your argument don’t necessarily mean the argument is wrong.
But I also think that you didn’t make much of a point for me to argue against in the first place. In this discussion you never explained WHY we shouldn’t count caucus results to determine who is the stronger democrat candidate. You just announced that Hillary would be ahead if we discounted caucuses, as if it were Jeopardy trivia or something. Sure, I can’t argue with that, but so what? You can manufacture all sorts of circumstances in which one would be ahead of the other, if only you can choose which results to keep and which to throw out.
He gave an explanation, although it was very brief. Caucuses are a completely different animal. You can get bullied into supporting someone and since you have to show up in person, sometimes for an extended period of time, they typically have very low turnout. The folks who do turn out aren’t necessarily a broad spectrum of the voting public. Iowa, for instance, had something like a 10% turnout for its caucus.
Even if one thinks the reasons caucuses should not be counted have been explained, it seems to me their level of difficulty is the same for every candidate’s supporters and underrepresents all the people equally, as well.
Under the current system, if one candidate does better in caucuses than another, doesn’t that speak to that superior campaign’s organizational and on-the-ground skills?
The point I was arguing initially – which, as I mentioned, has been rebutted to my satisfaction in another thread – is that one method has to be the optimal one. In other words, even if we disregard the idea that it’s the caucuses that are suspect, then we can conclude the primaries are suspect; one can hardly claim that two such dissimilar methods BOTH produce the best possible results.
As I say, I no longer advance this argument, but that’s the one I was hawking above.
I’ve seen a little bit of it here, but much more around, where Obama supporters are infuriated that Hillary hasn’t rolled over and died. It was the sense of entitlement which puzzles me.
And… this is exactly what I’m talking about. You can complain about the rules fairly, but this is awfully close to complaining that they’re not giving you the results you want. The rules don’t give it to the one who wins the most votes: they created a clear process.
But moreover, claiming that Hillary is somehow a huge loser for a slight deficit is a little odd. Let’s face it: she stumbled a bit when Barrack essentially came out of nowhere and has really put on the steam to make a comeback. At this point, the difference is pretty trivial, and I would be shocked the superdelegates didn’t consider that Barrack has bene slowing even as Hillary speeds up. That doesn’t mean she’s necessarily the best candidate; they can make up their own minds. But I’d think they were crazy people if they didn’t.
Strikes me that Obama did that himself. Hillary only hooked him on the line he reeled out. I don’t like Hilalry, and if anything I believe I’d like Barrack personally, but I don’t her as really going negative on him. If anything, she’s been much nicer than I thought possible.
Complete aside - I find it funny how every time the Democrats go negative, they’re only mimicking the GOP. Especially since Democrats were masters of negative campaigning before the GOP existed.
I don’t actually think Barrack can win the White House, because I think he’s a weak candidate who played his hand farther than anything it deserved, so I don’t much have a dog in the fight. However, I’m a little concerned when Democrats say things like this. If Hillary takes the nomination, I don’t see how this somehow destroys the party. Matter of fact, this would seem to be a validation of the process, in that it actually does sometihng independant and does not blindly follow the slight plurality. Whether that’s a good thing is a pihlosophical question irrelevant to this thread, I suppose.
Where I come from, dropping from a 20% lead a month ago to a 9.4% lead on election day is hardly ‘speeding up’. ‘Fading’ would be a more accurate description of such a performance. Clinton didn’t put on steam; she barely held on, in a state where all the demographics massively favored her. If I was a superdelegate, THAT is what I would consider, alongeside the fact that she has essentially zero appeal in large areas of the country. Doing well in the Northeast and California just isn’t enough.