Nixon tried his best to be responsible and boring. Bush Sr. thought the Presidential debates were show biz.
After Mondale was creamed by Reagan, the Democrats went for a walk in the woods and decided that they had to leash their crazies. Fewer crazies implies less excitement. Though if you are a policy wonk, you eschew personality and focus on the science and the facts. Not boring to me really, but I’m immersed.
Anyway the OP is correct. Crazy isn’t boring: a maniac with his hand on the nuclear button is dramatic and modern conservatives love their drama.
Well, we all know why they’re doing everything they can not to be “boring.” They have to differentiate themselves to the right in order to catch the so-called “base” which is necessary for winning the primary. It’s all one big attention-whoring fest. They don’t necessarily really believe or care about half the things they say.
In theory, yes, but what we have is a rapidly changing society facing a complex of media concerns vested in certain ways. Being “conservative” now is really being reactionary. Donald Trump, as well as Ted Cruz, and others, are appealing the the reactionary instincts of a (relatively small) segment of the population who understand the world only through the prism of certain media representations. It’s twisted, but it isn’t dull.
So what? I’ll tell you what. Reading for context is the single most important skill you can bring to a message board. Taking posts out of context and pretending they mean something else is going to get you mocked or ignored.
Show me a bigger clown in a prominent political position than Joe Biden! That guy made it all the way to VP on the democratic side and is a total clown.
Sure, Trump is a clown, but what led to him being where he is could easily happen to the democrats. A rich showboat with lots of money jumps into the race and uses his name recognition and a bunch of populist nonsense to get high numbers in very early opinion polls. Someone has said it before that Brad Pitt could jump in on the Democratic ticket and get higher approval ratings than Trump is getting on the Republican side.
The race on the Democratic ticket this year is boring because Hillary is boring and everyone knows she’s going to win. That doesn’t mean there are plenty of clowns in the Democratic party. The last open election in 2008 when Obama won the nomination had no lack of clowns: Biden, Kucinich, Dodd and John Edwards!
Biden and Edwards were candidates who had major support and weren’t just vanity campaigns like Trump. Either of them had a chance of actually winning. They are also both complete clowns that aren’t qualified to run a Post Office.
This is just silly talk (except for, perhaps, Kucinich). Nothing the others have said comes close to Trump’s birther nonsense, racist nonsense, and other conspiracy-theory nonsense.
Yes, I admit that Trump is quite crazy. But he’s not too much worse than the examples I mentioned. But the key difference is that Trump has no chance of winning, and everyone knows it. He’s high in some polls because of name recognition. That’s it. He won’t win.
The Democrats have had people almost as crazy as Trump who had real chances of winning. I mean, who in their right mind would support Edwards? That guy was an obvious scam artist. “Two Americas”. He oozed smarmy, ambulance chaser, con artist vibes. He was not a serious candidate. Yet he was taken seriously by many democratic voters. Much more seriously than the Republican base is taking Trump.
The pie chart of who is responsible for the '06 and '08 Democratic wins is about 99.9% George W Bush and .01% other things. I’ll grant you that some small part of that .01% might have been Howard Dean’s leadership.
No, they weren’t “almost as crazy as Trump”. They weren’t conspiracy theorists, and they were capable of walking back and apologizing after saying something stupid. Even including Edwards, they were not even close.
Ugh…yawn. Total snore fest and same tired horseshit they have been spouting for…well, for as long as I’ve paid attention to them. Seriously, only lefty types can get excited about stuff like this.
As to the OP, I’d go with the above theme. They have been saying the same tired old horseshit for decades now. The only reason they look good (to anyone but a lefty) is because, well, consider the alternative of Trump and the rest (with the possible exception of Bush, who is almost equally boring). Just be content that this thing is Hillary’s to lose (and though you guys won’t, be thankful that Sanders has no real chance, since if he made it the Republicans might actually win this next election :eek:)…don’t ask for excitement in your candidates, since if they were actually exciting by the standards of most of the folks in this thread they would be as unsuited to getting elected as Trump is.
I’ll take a boring executive who actually believes in democracy over a loud mouthed racist bore who thinks he can run a country like another one of his cheezy bankrupt businesses, and who has the moral fortitude of a slug.
Ask him which foot got him his deferment and he “can’t remember” Ugh.
I supported John Edwards. His “2 Americas” rhetoric really resonated with me. After climate change I think wealth inequality is the biggest problem our nation is facing. Our country was and is in desperate need of a leader who isn’t afraid to address the issue head on. Also Edwards was the first candidate to get into the specifics of how they would govern. He put a plan for expanding health care on the table and forced Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama to do more than just talk in generalities and to ante up and do the same. The differences between these actual proposals became one of the main focuses of the primary after Edwards dropped out and with the energy the primary gave Obama it became a major part of the Democratic platform. And when he won he had to work to enact health care reform into law.
Obviously John Edwards doesn’t deserve all of the credit for that but he is the one who got the ball rolling. If you don’t believe that’s serious then I don’t know what to tell you. Today over 16 million more Americans have health insurance. I’ll stack that against your feelings about John Edward’s character any day of the week.