I agree Sarah Palin is an ignorant and mendacious scoundrel, which Quayle was not. But she didn’t really hurt the McCain ticket, and if anything spiced it up a little. In the end maybe she cost him a few votes, but maybe not. You can’t look at the VP choice during the campaign through the lens of “I am a smart liberalish voter and I know this person’s horrible.” The question is simple; does the VP choice help or hurt the campaign? Quayle was legitimately, from the get go, a drag on the Bush 1.0 ticket. He was laughed at as a dimwit right from the start and his Vietnam “Service” was a point of contention as well. Yet Bush still annihilated Dukakis.
When was the last time a VP choice actually affected a campaign? Hell, I can’t even remember the last time the VP made the difference in delivering his STATE.
Is it your position that a madman intent on assassinating the President would stop and say “oh, well, I’d better not do it now because then Mike Pence would be President?”
I absolutely agree with you, but how do you communicate that to the masses in a way that makes it seem like you’re doing something real and tangible? This is the basic problem, the real solutions take time, much more time than two terms of a presidency, possibly generations. Meanwhile, rounding up muslims and placing them in internment camps, banning muslims from entering the country and carpet bombing cities held by ISIS are all physical tangible things anyone can see. Authoritarianism and racism offer a quick visible “solution”. I just hope Clinton / Obama can do a good enough job of selling the alternatives.
The public during World War II was not any more educated or informed than today’s public, but was willing to see through a war that went very poorly, with far worse loss of life, for the first while. The public was willing to go through the massive surge in violent crime post-WWII without electing fascists, but I do not recall the USA being populated wholly be geniuses during that time.
“It’s the voters’ fault for being stupid” is usually the wrong answer. If the people are voting for something different it’s because they feel they have been offered poor choices.
Who determined the choices? In the case of the GOP, there were seventeen contenders. Was their nominee not what a majority of Republicans wanted? They can hardly complain about their own choice. In the Democrat’s case, no one except Bernie wanted to challenge the Clinton machine. Whose fault is that? Hillary put together a fund-raising and campaigning team to win the nomination, and it resulted in a majority of Democrats deciding she was the best candidate.
Just who is complaining about poor choices, and where were they during the primaries?
Because there have never been any Republicans that treated the Saudis as less than the evil scum they are. You won’t find any photos of GOP president walking hand in hand with a Saudi prince, or calling them great friends and allies.
The media, who gave him free tv time, and the RNC political apparatus - themselves a pack of morally suspect billionaires - who embraced him and his message because he was usually (well, sometimes) on brand.
