I think they learned their lesson with nader in 2000. True or not, its gonna be a while before the notion that progressives put Bush in the White House fades away.
Why the fuck not? Have you SEEN what passes for a Republican these days? I was pretty disappointed in Obama but as someone said earlier, other than caving to Republicans on taxes health care, Obama and this congress got a LOT done despite the Republicans using the filibuster as the option of first resort. If the economy was better and I mean just a little bit better, maybe a 1 percentage point drop in unemployment, his re-election would be in the bag.
No, he had a filibuster proof majority for a very short while but he had the majority for two years.
Evil Captor’s local situation is he lives in the Atlanta metro area in a conservative place where he’s been voting in futility for decades … have yet to vote for a local official on any grounds other than “lesser of two evils.”
Not as long as FOX news continues its determined effort to fight against the facts. Unemployment could drop 5%, and FOX would fight to ensure that people remained ignorant of the drop.
To paraphrase a great, progressive philosopher: You go to the election with the progressive you have, not the progressive you might want or wish to have at a later time.
A strong primary challenge would not hamstring Obama, it would pull him to the left. And unless you’re looking for four more years of effectively Republican governance, that would be a good thing.
Oakminster, you are so far to the right you can’t distinguish progressives from socialists. As the nationwide success of OWS should tell you, there is powerful progressive sentiment in the country right now. Nothing mints progressives like hard economic times, and the last eight years has been minting progressives like crazy. The time to start building on that sentiment is NOW. I doubt if the progressives could make much of a dent in a primary, much less the general election, but just the THREAT of doing so would be enough to get progressives a place at the table, cause the Dem leadership is big into caving to threats.
I like this one. It’s not a description but rather a laundry list of goals. I am not in complete agreement with it by any means, but most of the goals listed seem to me to be progressive and worthy.
Only by the standards of this board, and perhaps other bastions of liberalism. I’m actually pretty moderate. I consistently graph slightly right of center on those political orientation tests. How many other conservatives do you know that are atheists, pro choice, pro gay marriage, and pro legal weed? Of course, I do like guns, small government, and low taxes–except that I would tax the ever loving shit out of legal weed. And be first in line at the store to buy it…
Haven’t you ever seen a Rocky movie? BO is just doing that thing where Rocky allows the other fighter to pound him for a while so he can get mad and come back with the fury of a tiger and make a complete mess of the other guy. Except for the times when he gets his ass beaten into a coma.
Not really. That was a challenge in the general election, not in a primary.
A “progressive challenge” to Obama in the primaries would perhaps make a bunch of progressives feel real good, but it wouldn’t do anything to shift Obama to the left. He might spout a few niceties, but after the election, he’d govern exactly the way he wants. I suspect that, regardless of a challenge, he will govern a little bit more to the left in his lame duck term. Especially since Biden isn’t really a contender in '16.
Yikes, did I just reference 2016 as if it were almost tomorrow. :eek:
And except for the times when he forgets to come back with the fury of a tiger. I’ll be really happy if sometime during the election this coming year if Obama happens to recall that he is of the same party as FDR and LBJ and begins to demonstrate that he has the balls they did.
I define it, at far greater length here, as something well to the left of “liberal” and well to the right of “socialist” and roughly equivalent to “social democratic” in European terms.
Well your analogy would make some sort of sense if I were proposing that we should oppose Obama in the general election, as Nader did. Since I was only proposing PRIMARYING Obama, the analogy is a huge Fail.
Cmon, American politics has drifted so far to the right that a progressive is someone who thinks indefinite detention without trial is a bad idea. To wit: “Shouldn’t we be giving the niggers a hearing before we lock 'em up, sir?”
