Dean the Disaster - Page 3

To which I should add:


If the Democratic party had AN agenda, one that they could all get on TV and talk about, I'd be unbearably happy. If they had an agenda dictated by the extreme left of the party, I'd run naked down the street singing their praises.

For now, I"d settle for them having an agenda not determined by the republicans.

What, exactly, is your point?

Dean's got me energized...well at least a little bit. I'm tired of Democrats acting like pussies. It's time to kick some ass.

65% of Utah votes Republican, #2 in the country after Montana.
He was responding to "you don't hang out with conservatives".

Heh. The Rude Pundit comments on the Dean "flap." Warning: when the Rude Pundit calls himself "Rude," he means it. There is lots and lots of foul language.

I'm pretty sure Rageous was joking. But thanks for coming to my defense!

The Montana margin was 60-40, the Utah margin was 70-30. Utah was the highest vote % for Bush, though a number of other states were close. Montana was about the 12th Bush-iest state, which was about in the middle of the states that went Bush. And we elected a Democratic governor and Democratic legislature in 2004 year too.

It was 71.1% Bush to 26.4% Kerry in Utah.

The reality is that I think they had a little help from some folks on the Republican side who wanted him gone as well.


It's easy to believe ill will of someone you already hate.


That was exactly what Gingrich was doing with the press when he began his decline. He gave them enough rope each week to hang their prejudices on. Dean seems bound and determined to follow the same path.


In other-words, find out what will turn out more people, not drive people you need away.

Democrats need Catholics. Instead of figuring out how to turn them out, they are driving them away. Democrats need white men and women. Instead of turning them out, they are driving them away.

Think about what you are saying here. White Christians could never be part of the Democratic base, so it is okay to bash them to fire up the base. That is a pretty damn large group you are tossing away there.


I've done better than watched. I attended the 1996 convention in San Diego. I was the campaign manager for a black Republican man running for an Assembly seat in California.


Who says they are worried. In my view it is simply part of what shows the Democratic leftward shift and helps provide more evidence for things like winning public opinion on say, confirmation of judges.


They might turn it around quicker than that. You never know.


When the actions don't change, the talking points don't have to either. The fact is the Democrats won't even consider reform let alone new ideals.

Nick

wow. that's a broken fuckin sarcasm detector.

:-P

But that doesn't mean you hang out with them. I mean the Republican party captured 40 percent of the Hispanic vote and 25% of the Asian and Jewish vote and they are nothing but white.

Nick

Sure. Same with Trent Lott. One of the problems with being Speaker of the House is that there's always a Dennis Hastert type who wants your job.


Who said anything about hate? Gingrich was a brilliant political mind and his legacy is that the Republicans took back congress and haven't lost it since.


Well, the difference is that Gingrich is an elected official holding a job that placed him a few heartbeats away from the presidency. Dean? Not so much.


Well, it depends upon what you mean by "need."


50 million people voted for Kerry in the last election. I don't follow you.


Huh? There's a difference between saying that Republicans tend to be exclusively white Christian men and saying that if you're a Christian you have to be a republican. You know, people in the KKK tend to be white Christians, too. Does that mean that if you're a white Christian you have to be in the KKK?

See?


I doubt it. But you have more faith in them than I do.

They do have an agenda! It's just that Bush's spin doctors are really good at their job of making things up or twisting them. Good thing is though Bush's approval rating is sliding now. For me it couldn't happen fast enough.

http://www.pollingreport.com/BushJob.htm

However a second point is realizing that leading the cavalry and commanding the entire army are not the same jobs. Gingrich was great at leading the cavalry charge up the hill but never made the transition. He was at the top of the hill and still trying to lead a charge up something. He couldn't adapt and was tossed.


Brilliant doesn't give one a sense of human nature. He burned a lot of bridges as he crossed them. He tossed a lot of bombs that took harmed others with friendly fire. Perhaps that is what it takes to get there, but the point was that eventually his own people turned on him when it is clear they won't on say Delay for example.


I seriously doubt that was the motive involved. It isn't as if people were worried about the health or even motives of Clinton or Gore from the Democratic side of things.

However with Democrats, the tone for election wins has really become much more strident. We saw this with Nader. With the margin so thin, everything that costs a few votes hurts. The second people thought Nader was putting his personal ambitions ahead of a party win, they were willing to work against him. This could be true for Dean as well.


Need is pretty clear there. You can enjoy twenty years of wandering in the electoral wilderness to find your definition of need.


Follow the growth of exurbs and suburbs and see how they are voting. Notice the Republicans snatching away Hispanics and Catholics and you will note that the group supporting Democrats is likely to decline or show limited growth and the people supporting Republicans are growing. Yet Republicans are also reaching out and still trying to convert Democrats. Republicans can understand the one vote equals two math even if Democrats cannot. They are digging hard into California, into black communities, and very, very hard into Hispanic communities. Democrats are simply writing votes off when they are already behind.


Except for you risk losing credibility when people figure out you are lying and are attempting to associate them with those negative images for political gain. The Republicans are less diverse than the Democrats but that doesn't mean they aren't diverse at all. Dean is doing a sort of reverse one drop rule and it is alienating rather than creating support.

Nick

This won't last long given that everytime republicans are in power the poor in this country lose ground. Some of the very same groups you listed are very much affected by this. Also everytime we discuss this some people would like to forget that before Bush we had a democrat in the whitehouse for 8 years. And we will again.

I don't have to. You already refuse to believe it. Anything I say will be discounted in some spin doctor way so what's the point?

A hint : Read some of Kerry's speeches.

Oddly enough I believe Bush will do that.

Nope just the t-r-u-t-h .

And not even a proper quote. That's the poor lose ground. However since there are more of them than the rich you might as well say that.

That is a nice open ended expression. The poor lose ground. Exactly what does that mean? If I have a million dollars and you have 100 million and in 10 years I have 10 million and you have a billion. I have lost ground, but I am certainly not poor.

Can you find a single category in which the poor are suffering worse today than they were a generation ago? Do they own fewer cars or homes? Is their life expectancy falling? Anything?

Nick

Unbelivable! ( Slaps forehead! )

Boy have you found a home!

The extreme Left has screwed the Democratic party Period. If you dont see that then your Blind as a bat. A Spinmaster and Liar won for the 2nd time because of No message from the Democratic Party and Not having anyone who was a decent Governor. America dont elect some G.D. Political Spin Senator. Take a look at history. Kerry didnt have a record of anything.??? Vietnam ? Please another govt F. Up. why even mention it. Sorry Fact is America was stuck with George for lack of a decent candidate in the Democratic Party. The Left Extremist found one of the most left and promoted him as their candidate. Poor Job, They had better people then Kerry but when the extremist run it all. Its Time to Boot all Incumbants out Period.

Or you could provide facts.

See, this is a really fun thing for conservatives to sayand they've been saying it for 30 yearsbut the fact remains that it's just not true. We've hashed this out in numerous threads, but the fact of the matter is that when the Democratic Party held to its liberal/lefty ideals, it kicked ass and took names. When it moved to the center, post-Nixon, it's gotten bitch-slapped at the national level. now it's getting bitch-slapped at the local level. We really ought to just have a thread and dispel this myth of the "extremist left" running the party.


Well, Kerry ran a terrible campaign (as noted in Jon Stewart's "YOU'RE TRYING TO LOSE!" comment) that was mealy-mouthed and uncertain and afraid and generally wussy. There was no real coherent message. There was no endlessly articulated 3 point plan. They didn't use the media well. They didn't respond to attacks. It wasn't until the Clinton team of Begala and Carville got involved (and Clinton himself stepped in to tell Kerry to STFU about Vietnam, because every time he mentioned it, the Republicans shoved it down his throat) that the campaign started to fire back, but by then it was too late.

I hope this proves once and for all that Shrum has no business running a Presidential campaign.


Not lately, we don't elect senators.


There were good candidates in there. I think Dean, with whom I disagree on far too much to have voted for him, would've run a firebreathing campaign that would've energized the base in ways that Kerry, quite frankly, was incapable of.


You know, this was another one of those talking points that never even got questioned. The Republicans had one of their publications rank him as "most liberal," then they trotted out the talking heads to the shows day after day after day.

And Kerry is left?! The guy couldn't even bring himself to say he was a liberal on the campaign trail, much less a lefty.


I think the party needs serious shaking up. It's been conventional wisdom/staus quo for too long, and frankly, I'm tired of them getting their teeth kicked in. But if they keep acting like they have been, they deserve it.

Part of it all, though, is that George Bush is the Bill Clinton of Republican campaigners. He's relentless. He's ruthless. He's calculating. His handlers are brilliant. The persona he's cultivated is perfect. I mean, the guy ran in 2000 claiming he was a "Washington outsider." Heh. It's brilliant! He tosses out the best Texas drawl a guy from Connecticut can do, makes a few verbal gaffes, and turns out he's a "regular guy"! Never mind that he comes from a political dynasty that's equal to the fekkin' Kennedys.

It's brilliant!

My only hope is that, like Bob Dole (who I *do* like) against Clinton in '96, Kerry was the last gasp of something.

I'll provide more than he did.

http://www.consumerfed.org/cfa_ncuf_cuna_lowincome.html

http://www.freemarketproject.org/spe...sr20041014.asp

That is not evidence. Saying that the income of the poor is not growing as fast as the income of the rich is not proof that "The poor lose ground".

Also, your second link was unrelated to the topic.

Could you explain your thinking here?

You can't say that you are getting poorer when you income is growing. It does not matter that your neighbor's income is growing faster than yours, you are still not getting poorer.

Well, if you consider "poor" to be some kind of fixed status that is independent of economic context, yes. That's true. But the gap between the "poor" and the "rich" is clearly growing, and the poor income is not keeping up with the rates of everyone else, which means that poor fall farther and farther behind.

In other words, many poor people today are wealthy by depression-era standards, but clearly that's not true.

See, this is what has destroyed the Democratic party, and this was my point earlier: Democrats kicked ass and took names when they ran as liberals from the 1930s through the late 60s. FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson. Think about it: between FDR and Johnson, there was ONLY Eisenhower. For two terms. [EDITED to reflect my mistake that Ike served one term)

When the Dems shift to the center, there's only Carter and Clinton. Three terms.

Trying to be "Republican Lite" has left the Democratic party in the state it is today: beaten, abused, confused, afraid, and generally ass-kicked by a Republican party that has dominated the Presidency since Nixon.

I think the big flaw in your reasoning here is that it assumes that no change has occurred in the country. If the whole country has shifted with regard to progressing on race, gender equality, etc. You can actually reach a point where additional change either moves from equality to privilege for certain groups, or where the group advocating the change has shrank too small or is viewed as extreme.

FDR was arguing that the elderly should not die poor and should receive a stipend so that they literally did not have to die on the job. They started Social Security at the age of 65 when the average life expectancy was barely 65. In this modern age, we have people living on average to about 75, they can start collecting Social Security at 65 (63 in some instances) and their poverty rate is half the general population and much lower than the child rate. On top of this they receive national health care with Medicare.

The estimated shortfalls on these programs is now estimated to be triple the entire GDP of our country and yet some would claim we are not spending enough. There isn't much more liberal to be in this instance. In fact what has happened instead is a huge intergenerational transfer of wealth in the wrong direction.

Women were once even denied the right to vote. Yet now they have an average life expectancy that exceeds men by seven years. They have higher rates of education overall. Yet we are told they are oppressed and that the people dying sooner and receiving less education need to cough up even more. We have family courts clogged with women who believe that even though one family is now becoming two, there should be no change or lowering of their lifestyle.

As with any circumstance, enough can be enough.

Nick

And I think the big flaw in your reasoning is that it assumes there was no change in the country between FDR and Johnson.

There was but that doesn't mean an appeal for more of that change today is going to affect people the same way today.

Nick

Why? We got global wars out the butt. We got poor people. We got old poor people. We got bad schools. We got high gas prices. We got drugs. We got gangs. We got fucked up inner-city gulags. We got coorporations that lied and put thousands of people out of work. We got lost pensions. We got a bunch of people running the country who want to get back to the good old days of the 18th century.

Why would people not want change? Why do you not have any hope, Nick? Why such a nihilist?

Aside: I quoted your response to a friend of mine, who came back with this: "look. just because one thing used to be true doesn't mean that anything is true unless i want it to be. got it? "

If only wanting change were all it took to fix the multitude of issues you mentioned. The reality is that we have moved to the point where change is no longer about society holding people down. It isn't even about giving what we can to insure that those with less have a little more.

We have now moved beyond actions that require setting the rules right or insuring the fat of the land goes for a good cause.

If you ask me to buy your medicine for you. I can do that. If you want me to personally or hire someone to bring the medicine to you and administer it to you, I can do that.

When you want my lung, I can't do that.

All resources are limited. Ask for the fat and you get it. Ask for my flesh, you might even get some of that. Ask for the flesh of my child and that is too much.

That is where we are at now and so appeals for MORE don't have the same effect. That isn't nihilism that is reality. The poor are not starving, they are complaining that their cable rate isn't subsidized low enough. The elderly are not starving, they are complaining that they can't afford new golf clubs because they have to spend so much on prescription medicines within their already free health care plan.

Now again, if you claim that these programs should be made more progressive so fewer people get benefits that obvious don't need them, fine. If you want to claim that certain programs that are currently universal, like Social Security and Medicare, should be made into need based programs for the most destitute, again fine. However would be reform, which I have stated that Democrats should argue for, and it would not be keeping things the same which bankrupts the entire next generation and the country as well.

More.. more..more... uh... there isn't any more... well then more... more... more...

It isn't hard to see why that appeal doesn't work.

Nick

Wow. Just. Wow.


Indeed. It's hard to understand why the Democrats aren't taking your statement there and screaming it from the rooftops in the South to show that the Republicans do not care about them.