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The American Presidency: The Once and Future Elections Thread
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Pokemon Black 2: 0519-5108-3139
Maybe it's his "keep your friends close and your enemies closer" card.
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That's another little problem Rmoney has to solve. Willard can always pull a Caligula and nominate his dancing horse. :mrgreen:
This isn't really a new attitude among the right honestly.
That quote isn't as big a deal as we might like it to be, not unless Obama can use it to energize his voting base.
It'd also come in handy when they want a war to fight when their puppet regimes bite them in the ass like clockwork.
I don't mean for this to sound flippant, but who did Dick Cheney energize? Or Gore? Or Biden for that matter? I've heard more about Biden, getting blue collar white workers on the side of the half-black son of a single mother elitist (lol), but I never bought into that idea. Is there any data that really points to the idea that the purpose of a running mate was to energize the voting public? Or rather, that such attempts have been at all successful? Just from anecdotal experience I can say that a lot of folks took one look at Palin and said "What the fuck, McCain?!"
Ron Paul isn't "real" Randianism either.
The GOP took many of the ideas of Ayn Rand (mostly the prosperity gospel/fuck the poor stuff) and ditched the rest (like the anti-religion stuff).
Palin did energize the right for a while. They salivated over her during her first speech. The GOP's interest waned when they were constantly barraged with reality that she was a brain-dead nutcase.
In any case, I'd love to see some polls on American attitudes towards the Arab Spring. How widespread is the view that we should have thrown down behind Mubarak to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from taking over?
Romney is looking for someone who isn't going to outshine him. That's a very short list. Portman is from Ohio, which is a must-win state for Romney. The reason I don't think they're going to go for an "energizing" candidate is that old adage "once bitten, twice shy." They're looking for the anti-Sarah Palin, I think. Of course, my crystal ball isn't any better than anyone else's.
I'm not sure, but there's also a strand of liberal interventionism that feels we should step in and "make things better". (Though admittedly, none of them are going to vote for Romney).
A lot of people don't understand that sometimes the best thing to do is step the fuck back and wait.
Sadly, the average American doesn't give a shit about foreign affairs. They only pay attention when something bad happens to us as a result of another country's policy. Plus, foreign affairs are taking mostly a back seat to domestic matters on the economy this election. Most people sitting on the face are very unlikely to let that quote end up being the deciding matter or even factoring into who they vote for. The London fuck up will probably have a bigger impact than the quote because Romney managed to fuck up in an area that was deemed impossible to fuck up. The average American isn't going to care too much about foreign affairs but they do want someone who can do that stuff and Romney kind of proved he can't.
They've admitted the last bit, I'm fairly sure. Which is why I'm with you on Portman.
Whose speech at the convention will put everyone to bed nice and early on Wednesday.
Paul Ryan is as pretty mainstream right as you can get right now. Or Alan Greenspan. Who are coincidentally, probably the two most famous Rand disciples in America.
Though shryke is right, they did ditch the anti-religion bits.
He's seems mostly in alignment with the typical GOP views. pro-Ryan plan, anti-choice, supported the blunt amendment and pro-guns. I'll see if i can track down the rest of his positions but I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that he'll help Romney and the GOP further alienate most minorities. Actually with the shooting in Colorado and the scare in Maryland, where we could have had a second mass shooting this month, his staunch support of the 2nd Amendment could prove to be a liability.
With everything else going on, I'm pretty sure Romney wants to avoid getting caught up in the gun control debate if that has a new serious start. I'm not familiar enough with Portman to know if he'll shut up if told to do so or if he'll jump right in on the NRA's side. I don't see that debate helping anyone with a presidential run this year and the NRA/GOP position could prove to be rather harmful to such prospects.
To be perfectly honest, he's not the only one like that in the West. When the Palestinians decided to vote out the more 'peaceful' but terribly corrupt Fatah (Arafat's party) a few years back and vote in Hamas (who is admittedly violent, but also promised to eliminate corruption, build infrastructure, you know, things most democratic governments try to do), Canada was one of the first to slam the doors on any diplomacy with the Palestinians, since they had voted for the wrong people.
Bush urged Hosni Mubarak to move towards democracy. The dictator did nothing. At their request, Obama supported the people trying to actually move towards democracy and has refused to support the dictators. We have gotten democracy in several Middle Eastern countries.
Only a retard would choose the Bush strategy. Dictators don't usually peacefully give up power just because you are trying to get them to be more democratic. They only give up power when they absolutely have to.
Eh, it's clearly a conservative newspaper, so I assume the fact that he's expressing a view shared by many conservatives wasn't as alarming to them.
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
That seems about the same as everything that is said by any US politician.
Better than the rumors that he was going to say Jerusalem should be controlled by Israel only at any rate.
Maybe they're starting to leak batshit rumors so the "normal" talk doesn't seem so out there :twisted:
Because 9% think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! 9% of respondents could not fully
get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check for, "I
have utterly no idea what you're talking about. Please, God, don't ask for my input."
I don't know enough about his foreign policy to have a broadly informed opinion (because he's saying very little about it), but yeah, the inclusion of Poland on the itinerary in particular is a pretty big sign that he's dusting off the G.W. Bush white papers. The Romney team says they included it as a stopover because Poland is one of those nations that has strained relations with the U.S. under Barack Obama. There's really only one American strategic interest that relates to Poland where we've seen a shift since the Obama administration, however: the Ballistic Missile Defense Shield. Nevermind that a huge part of the reason we abandoned that program is that nearly 60% of Poles were opposed to playing landlord to a defense installation which Russia promised was due to become the focal point of a new nuclear cold war.
Also please ignore the fact that we've already moved on to a seaborn system that launches the interceptor vehicle from refitted Arleigh Burke-class Destroyers, obviating the need to strike a diplomatic compromise with Donald Rumsfeld's "New Europe," but whatevs. Let's all just sit back and listen to "You Forgot Poland 2: Electric Boogaloo."
Well, the paper is owned by Sheldon Adelson.
So, it kind of is.
I hope to God above Gods that Romney is simply lying through his teeth to appease Adelson.
So I'm giving the Romney camp like a penny's worth of credit, but I have to take away half of it because Romney question-dodged.
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Yeah the GOP's recent foreign policy doesn't leave a lot of room for "diplomacy". Especially with the Bush people making up Rmoney's team of experts, if elected expect a lot more flag draped coffins to be forbidden from being shown by the media.
Is there any evidence the debates in modern times actually affect anything? Do we see changes in the polls?
I know they sure as fuck don't affect the media response to them. There are three debates. Obama will win one of them, Romney will win one of them, and one will be a tie. If the media is feeling especially motivated, maybe they'll put some effort into tying the Romney win to the debate where he does least-bad, but I would guess it's all going to be pre-determined based on what they think will best further the horse-race narrative they want. I'm guessing they'll either go Obama-Romney-Tie (if they want some sort of underdog/comeback/this-will-be-so-close angle) or Obama-Tie-Romney (if they'd rather do a Romney-gradually-getting-better-but-can-he-close-the-deal? bit).
As usual, they'll wind up tying "winning" the debate to overcoming some sort of media-defined fault. If Romney does particularly bad, he'll have "won" based on something like "he needed one human moment and he got one, TOTAL WIN" or "he made it almost fifteen consecutive minutes without outright insulting some major voting bloc, SUCCESS" or "he did not actually, technically burst into laughter when saying that one thing that was such obvious bullshit, FLAWLESS VICTORY." And the debate that goes to Obama will not be, "Wow, dude broke Romney's shit right off and then raped him with it," it will be couched as something like, "Obama picks up a narrow win there by avoiding discussion of the economy."
It'll be a complete farce. I can't wait.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
But are we convinced Romney can actually have a human moment or go fifteen minutes without insulting someone?
I guess that's why they'll hedge bets with option three.
This is all doubly bad because aside from the GOP as a whole never elaborating on diplomatic options, Romney never elaborates on anything.
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McCain vs Obama saw more seperation post debate. And the media tried hard to say what you are saying with those debates (especially palin vs biden) but every poll after the fact showed the public disagreed strongly. So a bad debate performance can harm the campaign, or in the case of last election solidfy against the loser.
Anecdotal: My mother turned on John McCain in 2008 because of the debates. So, people like that exist I guess but I'm not going to try to guess in what proportion.
Also, yeah, the media generally doesn't understand what "impartial" means. The way to actually handle discussion of who won what debate is to not treat it as a win / lose at all. No commentators saying, "Well I feel Obama won," or any shit like that. The only mention of 'wins' should be from polling regarding the performance of each candidate. And y'know, polls are polls. The media should just cover, "When asked about x, person y responded with z." That's it. Commentary on the news on news stations is the most vile fucking thing. Leave it to comedians and talk show hosts.
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The media is just too unreliable for it to work like that anymore. If it ever really was.
We'll have to see post olympics, but it could be that people in america are already fairly certain who they are going to vote for. If thats true Rmoney's in trouble, because most polls show him down to Obama and not making up ground, especially in demographics like women and hispanics.
Well most people don't pay attention until the conventions. That's why there aren't any debates until October. For the majority of the population, even the voting population, nobody cares right now. It's all white noise to the normies.
But yeah, Romney is in a bit of a pickle assuming this economy thing doesn't pull a 2008. And even then I'm not convinced Mittens would have it in the bag.
And don't remember, the more you learn about Mitt Romney, the less you like him*
*statistically speaking
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."