I think in practice people vote against the candidate they dislike rather than for the candidate they like.
Would you vote for somebody for Pres. who looked antithetical to your views, but at least competent?
I’m a pragmatist I would vote for a sleazy person who was very competent at the job.
Its all very well having a well meaning loser incharge, but if their good intentions don’t come to fruition because they’re incompetent then they’ve achieved absaloute zilcho.
I suspect that many national leaders in the liberal western world have been less then angelic then their public images would suggest.
On a personal level I couldn’t care less if the boss does coke and bangs hookers if he gets the job done right.
My only caveat with this is that it might leave him open to blackmail or other outside pressures.
He/she might not be a very nice person but out of their own self interest, ie. getting reelected, leaving a good image behind them etc. would probably do the right thing,( bearing in mind they’re under almost continuous public scrutiny from the electorate and the media)for the wrong reasons.
Your greatest ever President in my opinion, Jack Kennedy, was banging virtually anything that had a pulse.
Nixon achieved Detente and opened up a meaningful dialogue with communist China after years of silence from them.
He also made the Soviets back down when he had his own Cuban missile crisis.
Whereas Carter who IMO was one of your most honest POTUSs was an absaloute disaster when it came to international negotiations.
Please note if the candidate is sleazy AND incompetent (think Dubya) then no I wouldn’t vote for them.
I would not. I don’t understand that mindset, and there was a lot of it during the last presidential election. People on this board, for example, making the argument to me that we needed new leadership; fresh, visionary, intelligent discourse; with an energizing, charismatic leader who could pull us out of the doldrums and break down the political barriers that had us all at a stalemate–all that hope and change stuff. All I needed to do was ignore the trifling little fact that I disagreed with virtually every aspect of his platform.
I agreed then and now that Obama is a charismatic, intelligent, articulate leader. Since he’s using those skills in the service of objectives I strenuously oppose (as he promised he would), why in the world would I vote for him? I’d prefer a less effective leader committed to the goals I hold important.
Do I want an incompetent President who might get the right thing done, or a competent president who will definitely get the wrong thing done?
What’s to debate?
A sizable minority of posters in this thread have said competent + ideologically opposed trumps the alternative. Now, you’re an intelligent guy - in fact, we’re all fairly intelligent posters here, and we have a difference of opinion. Ipso facto, there seems to be something here to debate.
One telling sign, I think, is our esteemed Alessan agrees with me and is posting from Israel, if I’m not mistaken. So, suppose that an ideologically agreeable fellow were put in charge of that country for a year, but with the unfortunate drawback that he doesn’t know how to administrate, delegate, negotiate or communicate when the pressing need arises. What would happen?
I think that much of the disagreement here is over the definition of " antithetical to your views"; I doubt Alessan would say the same if he was thinking in terms of someone who was competent, and wanted to destroy Israel.
That is my problem with the OP.
I have trouble believing that anyone actually debated this two years ago when deciding to vote. I can’t imagine there was a significant number of Obama voters who said “the guy is competent so I will vote for him even though he will enact policies I do not agree with.”
I have no problem seeing a significant amount of McCain supporters who made up their own minds that Omaba was incompetent - specifically, they claimed he was unqualified to be a president. And I’m not talking about the Birther idiots; I speak of the “Community Organizer!” crowd.
Frankly, the OP is a none-so-subtle way to attack Obama’s performance thus far in office.
There are many people who voted for the man who are not 100% thrilled with him thus far. I cannot imagine any of them held their noses and voted for him because of percieved incompetency from McCain.
Well, as I said in the OP, that was more or less my reasoning in 2008. I knew Obama had socialistic tendencies antithetical to what I would ordinarily vote for, but I thought at least he wouldn’t run the country into the ground as McCain/Palin were sure to, and as Bush had been.
But come on, even James Carville is calling this incompetence for what it is, and other Democrats likewise are painting the Sestak affair as an embarassment. Even in the pursuit of partisan benefit, Obama’s endorsement is the touch of death in PA, MA and elsewhere. Can anyone say with a straight face that this is an even minimally competent national leader?
So much depends on the opposition, and some on the running mate as well.
The only Republican I ever cast a vote for was Chuck Grassley (Sen., IA). If they nominated him for prez, and, say, Sue Collins for veep, and the Dems put up, say, Robert Byrd and Jim Traficant, why, sure, I’m voting for Chuckles. 
And against those two, he’d win by the biggest damn margin since who laid the rails.
I don’t know about anybody else, but I expected Obama to have donned a high-tech scuba suit by now, and lead a team with Bruce Willis, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris. They would battle the oil-mutated sea monsters to get to the source of the leak, which is actually a multi-dimensional singularity that converts sea water into crude oil. Big Oil wants Obama and his team to destroy it, since it would destroy their business, but when they find that it’s actually sentient and named “Slippery Sammy” they convince it to only squirt oil (which is actually its poop) into oil tanks and power the United States in its fight against global Islam.
McCain and Palin would have done this by now. Fucking lazy-ass Obama.
So what about his administration has been unexpected then? The country has not been “run into the ground” by any reasonable measure - in fact, all indications are that the country is in much better shape now in just about every way than when Bush left office. (You can argue we could be even better, possibly, but not that things are worse.)
Obama has (or has tried) to do just about all of the things he spoke about in his campaign and none of his actions have “ran the country into the ground” by any stretch so I am unsure why you are surprised…
If anything, he has done a lot more to alienate lefties who supported him because of ideaology than he ever could to alienate a righty who found him the only person “competent” for the job on the ballot.
Well, I daresay economic and technological growth and social progress would continue under just about any president (barring the country breaking up, as under Buchanan), but some of the specific ways the U.S. is worse off (compared to 2000) are pretty bad.
Of course, we have no way of knowing if President Al Gore would have been any better.
I was unaware we were in our third term of the Obama administration…
Hang on, wouldn’t the salient comparison be to the start of 2009, not 2000? Or am I missing something here?
I’d go for views and hope she hired competent people to keep her in control. Bush was the most utterly incompetent President in the history of the US, and his views were equally repugnant. But he did appoint a competent transportation secretary.
I’m not sure why my earlier statement has proven confusing. If I may attempt to rephrase, American in 2010 is better off than America in 2000 in very many ways, and this would be true regardless of who was president during this period, as it was pretty much always true during any ten-year period in the republic’s history, with a few exceptions like the Civil War and Great Depression.
For the particular Bush43 administration, though, we can probably (though never definitely, of course) assume that had someone else been in charge, the U.S. would not now be embroiled in Iraq, New Orleans would probably be in better shape, gay marriage, environmentalism and stem cell research would be further along… so while the country may be overall better off, in some fairly specific ways it is not.
Of course, in 2013 or 2017, I’m sure we can cherry-pick the Obama administration the same way. It’s just that Bush43’s particular fuckups seem so very unnecessary.
My inspiration for my earlier comment was actually the election of Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister - I’d despised him for his beliefs most of my life, but after he was elected I gradually began to respect the man, basically because he was good at his job, taking whatever right wing or left wing action as the situation demanded. Considering the clowns who followed him, my country sorely lacks a leader with his unique brand of competence; someone who doesn’t put ideology ahead of service to his country.
In the unlikely event that an American president decides that it is a vital U.S. interest to destroy Israel, were I an American I would probably support him. Sucks, but there it is.
A highly unethical position. And besides; I was speaking of a hypothetical competent leader for Israel who wanted to destroy Israel. Competent doesn’t mean patriotic.
If you consider a leader’s ultimate duty to be the good of the nation, I’d say patriotism would be a prequisite for competence.
And yes, I know I’m veering close to One True Scotsmen territory. Let me sleep on it.
Possibly beause the OP and all discussion until you said what you said was about Obama in the White House instead of his direct predessesor. The statement was confusing because you seemed confused.
Again, I don’t see the point in this. It was better off than in 1930 too. That’s not the issue of this thread.
The latter is interesting since most every economist said that our recession was the worst economic climate we ever had since the Great Depression. You can argue that such things are merely cyclical however there are heights and depths that leadership can either curtail or exacerbate. For example, Clinton was fortunate that Silicon Valley blew up during his administration however many people feel that his leadership and decisions and policies made things ever stronger across the board.
Similarly, It can be (and has been) argued that Bush exacerbated a cyclical low and made it into the worst mess since the '30s. It can also be argued that Obama helped get us out of that mess faster than had we just “stayed the course,” to quote another Bush, which is what probably would have happened with McCain - he who admitted freely that the economy was not his strong point.
Those things would get us a lot closer to the actual OP than 2000, incidentally.
So what? The OP doesn’t try and assume a Gore presidency. It starts up three or so years ago, choosing who is going to clean up the mess that the real president left behind, not the differences that would have taken place with a theoretical one.
A thread about how different things would have been if Gore had defeated Bush would probably make for an interesting thread. Just not this one.
(Aside that also has nothing to do with the OP: While at an Obama speech, I confronted a couple of Nader supporters with their “everyone’s the same” bullshit. I asked them if they honestly believed that things would have been the exact same in 2008 if Gore had won. They said that, yes, things would be the exactly the same. I asked them how the Kool Aid tasted and walked away, hating Nader even more.)