Here’s something I can agree with. We’re too busy with our own day to day and entertaining ourselves to really pay attention and stay involved. That allows others to choose our course for their own purposes.
My question in this thread is, what method must we use to actually be heard. Is voting enough anymore? I’m thinking it may not be.
Remember how the Senate gummed up both Reagan’s and Bush’s proposed tax cuts, which would have been fiscally disastrous, and kept them from happening?
Me either.
ETA: Ditto that crazy notion of an invasion of a country that didn’t particularly represent a threat to us.
I’ve made no claim that most Americans want some one basic change, although I’m thinking that average voters on both sides would agree some serious change in the influence of lobbying is needed.
It’s obvious that liberals and conservatives don’t have the same views about what’s best for this country or exactly how to go about achieving it. IMO the process of honest debate and compromise would still gradually move us forward. What I see is a lack of honest debate as demonstrated by our current admin.
If there is no shadowy group pulling the strings I’d say that at least the economic interests of a few have been given far too much priority. Eisenhower warned us about the establishment of an industrial military complex. Do you think Vietnam and now Iraq were motivated in part by economic interests rather than our security?
btw, please get my screen name right if you’re going to continue.
The people who vote are most likely a good sample of the population. If you had everyone in the country become informed and vote in every election, I don’t think that you would see a significant change in direction. At most you might see greater push for no change at all. Most people are happy to have the people who care duke it out amongst themselves.
And I don’t see why you’re saying that your vote isn’t being heard. The Democratic party is less organised than the Republican one, so they have a hard time utilising their position, particularly when most of the voting public is against what the party wants. The public wants us to fix the Middle East. The Democratic party wants to pull out. The Republican party wants to build a couple forts and pull out. The reason for it becoming a big drawn out mess is because the politicians are stuck listening to the voters instead of being able to go their way. (Which happens because the existance of two parties discourages centralism, since you have to get party support, which only happens if you’re in the middle of their half of the spectrum, not the overall spectrum.)
Half republican you say? Imagine my surprise.
I understand that compromise is part of being a politician and an effective leader but the way you’ve phrased it here doesn’t quite make sense. Wouldn’t a drastic change in his positions make him seem insincere and the opposite of what his campaign has been to this point. That’s exactly what’s being questioned because of his recent compromises.
I don’t know if apathy is even the right term. Most people just aren’t politically minded. They get up, go to work, come home, eat dinner, and go to bed. There might be one or two issues that they think about from time to time, usually economic issues that affect them personally (high gas prices).They are generally happy with their lives and while they bitch a good bit, the idea of a sea change would bother them greatly.
That’s why a successful, mainstream politician doesn’t need to be guided by any masters to be told to moderate and compromise. It is what the constituents want.
We have all of these debates on SDMB and realize that the fact that we have political opinions, left or right, puts us in the extreme minority of the population. The pols already have our votes, they need to convince the regular people…
He’s already got the Democratic vote in his hand, so it doesn’t matter if he changes his positions any to them, so long as he doesn’t go too far off the reservation. And frankly, the public doesn’t care about his policies. “TLDR” as a phrase exists because it’s a truism for 99% of everyone. People just care about whether when they hear him, he sounds good right then. Anyone who actually cares about a politician’s real politics can go and look up his voting history, but that’s pretty rare and ultimately they’re such a small percentage of the population that it’s not worth trying to get them.
But the main thing to keep in mind is that it’s unlikely that Obama or any candidate has ever actually stated his position in a way that couldn’t be reinterpreted at different levels of meaning. When he’s talking to a crowd of liberals, he’ll emphasise the words in a way that sounds more amicable to the interpretation that they would like, and everyone’s brains will remember it as having been very clear and concrete and jiving with what they believe, even though a textual analysis will show that very little of anything was said, let alone being concrete.
Any successful politician, by definition, says nothing at all one way or the other on any particular position. They just sound favorable to “working on that” or favorable to “making a change for the better”, because if they say what “better” actually means or what the solution that they will “work on” clearly, it’s going to alienate some percentage of voters. No two people in the country have the same exact view of what needs to be done to make the world a better place. So if you ever say what you actually mean in a way that can’t be reinterpreted 800 different ways, and you do that for every issue, the only person who will vote for you, is you.
Look at his voting history if you want to know what his politics are. Listening to him speachify just tells you whether he’s amiable and charismatic. Any policy you think he might actually be talking about is mostly imagined on your part.
Part of what you’re describing is simply the battle for what’s called ‘The Median Voter’. Let’s say this here is the political spectrum:
Left --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Right
There’s two candidates, B.O. and J.McC.; here they are:
Left ------------B.O.--------------------------------J.McC.------------------- Right
Chances are that the voters to left of Obama and to the right of McCain will vote for them anyway because these candidates are closest (most proximal) to them. Because these voters have no alternative candidate to vote for, the candidates can afford to alienate these voters somewhat. At the same time, the voters that are in between the two candidates are the ones that count. Therefore, it pays for both candidates to concentrate on these voters and move to the middle ideologically to make sure these voters don’t go and vote for the enemy. So here’s what happens:
Left -------------------------B.O.----------J.McC.------------------------------ Right
Except that McCain is actually shifting rightwards.
Yes and no. If you are envisioning the “economic forces” as the heads of oil companies, TV networks, banks and the Masons, as someone else said, then no. But I think it’s obvious enough that a lot of factors (some of them economic) make it difficult to solve big problems even if most people agree about what the solution should be.
You could make that argument for sure. Whether it’s corruption or compromise, people who make the ‘shadowy figures’ case always sound ridiculous, and they’re certainly paranoid.
Anybody who thinks all you have to do is vote is wrong.
yeah, well, the model is not perfect :). I think the assumption that people to the right of McCain will vote for him regardless of what he does, as long as he stays to the right of Obama, is not accurate. I have a feeling its truer for the left than for the right. Also, you might want to question whether the l-r dimension is the only one along which US politics plays out.
Well as an armchair strategist, I’d presume that if McCain is doing so it means that he’s going on the defense. Rather than trying to win people, he’s just trying to keep the ones he has from being taken by Obama. If the Republican segment of the population was significantly greater than 50%, possibly a wise choice, but I don’t think it is.
Or it might just be that he’s failing at presenting a obscure front. I’d have to imagine that campaigning for long periods of time and raising money and all of that is rather stressful, and it’s hard to stay impassive and political, hiding your real beliefs, when you’ve got a lot of pressure on you.
Indeed, even my mom, the staunch Republican, agreed that the Republican party is starting to suffer a bit of a rift between Religious Republicans and Secular Republicans. (Of course she hopes an Obama presidency will be so awful that it will bring the party back together, for better or worse.) The Democratic party is less organized than the Republican, but the Democratic voters are more unanimous in their wants than the Republican. It’s harder to campaign to the right, and it could be easy to get sucked into dealing with just them if that’s your starting point.
Remind your friend that the 2000 Florida vote went all the way to the SCOTUS and they ruled against a recount. What more was Gore supposed to do after that?
I don’t remember the details. At the time I had no idea Bush would be the horror show he has become and I was under the assumption that people supported others right to vote.
I do seem to remember Gore making a statement about respecting the rule of law after the court had made it’s decision. Wasn’t there a recount going on already and the issue was a time limit or exactly what would be counted?
Why did it even go to the SC?
The Supreme Court ruling stopped the recounts. And it went to the Supreme Court because nobody else could settle it. 
Although I couldn’t exactly explain the legal issue.
I believe that the fundamental flaw of democracy, as a political system is its pernicious indulgence of the wide spread desire of human beings to order the lives of their fellows. Republics add to this failure, the winnowing of the common man according to the strength of that same desire, until only those who aspire to tyranny are given authority.
We have no secret hidden masters. We, ourselves are the masters, and we have desire for power without conscience or ethics. The only thing that everyone wants, is for everyone to want what they want. I agree with me all the time, but I am aware that I would be a terrible leader.
Tris
Ah, but it is about different political views. Yes, most of us are agreed that the country is absolutely headed in the wrong direction. The problem is, half of us think it should go in one direction, and the other half think it should go in the other. Everyone is pissed about Iraq, but the liberals think that money should on domestic programs to help the poor, while conservatives want to do their utmost to eliminate government altogether (to take things to their extreme, of course).
So yes, we can elect a different president (and I hope we do), and different congressmen, but change still only happens incrementally and usually, therefore, slowly. The only way to make it happen quickly is the way George W has just done - by exploiting fear. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato said in The Republic that this was the ultimate fate of all democracies - to be exploited with fear by a tyrant, leading to a tyranny. We’ve shown over the last eight years that we’re perfectly ripe for it.
But where do the shadowy “they” who are pulling the strings enter into it? I don’t think they’re the movers. I think they’re the cutters of deals with whatever system they find. If the rules themselves become incompatible with their aims, then there are always individual enforcers of those rules who can be bought. “They” have no unified political agenda, although individuals among “them” may have political beliefs. They have no organization, no secret meetings. They just have businesses to run, and most of them will use any means necessary, whether lawful or not, to maximize their profits.
With all due respect, are you really put that forth as serious argument?
They promised a lot, but it doesn’t surprise me one bit that they haven’t delivered-- especially on the war in Iraq. They barely have a majority in the Senate, and it’s easy for the Republicans to block things or for Bush to use his veto power.
Can you give some examples of what you mean? I expect Obama to move more to the center in the general election, but that seems to be S.O. P. for Democratic candidates. I suspect we’ll see McCain moderate some of his positions, too.
Well, I’m not fooling myself, so I’m not sure who this “we” is of whom you speak. But yeah, there seems to be a lot of political naivete out there about who Obama is going to “change” things. I think things will change wrt how Bush did things, but I expect that if McCain wins, too.
More action from us.
If the forces in control are so good at keeping politicians from making significant changes, why should they give a rat’s ass whether Gore or Bush won?