the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

despite being a shitty candidate Kerry got more votes than any Democrat to date, so iatee otm.

running against an incumbent is v hard, as mitt is finding out

Bush approval rating = not entirely out of control of his opponent's campaign!

04 I remember as slow motion slapstick "You have got to be kidding me", and that's from several thousand miles away - can't imagine it would have been any more enjoyable from the inside.

Or - if Bush is a fundamental, what fundamentally changed from 04 to 08 to make him poison?

more time

Guys, this dude was never, ever gonna be President, whether running against an incumbent or an inanimate carbon rod.

http://theneweditor.com/uploads/JohnKerryReportingforDuty.jpg

i might be misremembering, but it seems like the avg American's disappointment and/or rage w/ Bush really didn't really manifest until '06 or so (thanks in no small part to the free ride he got from the MSM)

gee I wonder if I can think of anything that happened from 2004 to 2008 hmm can anyone think of anything

I turned 35

The most important election of your lifetime. If you are a fruit fly.

Isn't '96 more of a forgotten election than '04? I followed it fairly closely, and I don't remember a single specific about it.

bob dole fell down

Direct quote from Bob Dole?

96 was a foregone conclusion, 04 was closer

The Iraq War (if that's what you mean) was 18-months in by the election, Abu Ghraib was April 2004, there was plenty of dead on both sides. I mean, it became clearer over the second term that he and chums had no real plan beyond a power- and oil-grab, but from the outside, that seemed pretty clear all along.

Enormous recession as well, but recent history doesn't suggest that people are that keen to give him credit for it :)

And of course Hurricane Katrina, which can't have helped, but again "George Bush hates Black People" is something that it's surprising that it's surprising.

I'm kind of getting turned around here: I'm not really asking "why did he do so badly in 08" as "why did he do so well in 04"?

Direct quote from Bob Dole?

― clemenza, Thursday, July 5, 2012

lol

he was talking abt the total financial collapse of the usa xp

xpost
i guess it comes down to the voting public's awareness of how singularly awful bush was. i remember being completely baffled that anyone would vote for bush. bush vs. soiled pants - vote for soiled pants. bush vs. a telephone - vote for the telephone. bush vs. the actual devil - vote for the devil. he was already an embarrassment, evident to anyone. and in the debates, i thought kerry tore him apart. not that debates actually influence things much, i guess.

but there we were, the morning after election night, passed out alone on the sofa with an empty bottle of jack. fuck, what a terrible day.

yeah Kerry 'won' every debate it just didn't matter

Speaking of Bob Dole speaking of Bob Dole, I'm a sap for September-of-my-years stuff like this:

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201207/bob-dole-profile-gq-july-2012

If you think all politicians are evil, don't bother.

he was talking abt the total financial collapse of the usa xp

no, I'm pretty sure he was talking about my 35th birthday

same diff

'04 was all about the war, and 18 months in most people in the US were still "USA KICKS ASS" and "We'll get those WMDs yet!" etc. end of story

lol @ Bob Dole joke btw

Dems were totally stupid to run a guy on a "he will fight this (stupid/unnecessary/illegal/completely bonkers) War better than Dubya!" platform. catastrophically stupid.

last Dem I ever voted for

so I guess the challops comes down to 'kerry actually prob did better than any other possible dem noms woulda done'

dean woulda been a disaster prolly, edwards...lol, the rest, lol

yeah that's the grim irony. I dunno if any candidate would have beat a "wartime" prez.

bill clinton

yeah edwards, we dodged a fuckin bullet there

Gen. Wesley Clark! What about him

I'm kind of getting turned around here: I'm not really asking "why did he do so badly in 08" as "why did he do so well in 04"?

Wait, why did WHO do so badly in '08? Bush wasn't running, McCain was.

Yeah, that could've been made clearer, but you're not disputing that if he'd been eligible to run, he would have lost to EG a public payphone?

what?

O trending upwards this past week on 538, at 68% to win.

what?

Just riffing off Z S above - or to put it another way, does anyone think that, if the term restriction had been removed* and Bush had run in 08, he'd still have beaten John Kerry? And does the answer differ based on whether Kerry did or didn't run in 04 in this universe?

Term limits removed not as implausible as John Kerry beating Obama of course - or for that matter the Republicans nominating someone with Bush's approval numbers, even as an incumbent.

*no footnote

Idle speculation of the day: what will be reaction this year if Romney pulls a Bush and wins the electoral vote but not the popular vote? (could happen in the other direction, too, but I know what that reaction would be)

my reaction will be buying a gun

If Earth-2 Dubya ran against Obama from Earth-Prime in 2004, would he have selected John Kerry as his running mate

Dubya/Power Girl '08

http://www.cosmicteams.com/cosmic/img/csa1.jpg

Nate Silver has Romney-electoral/Obama-popular at 1.7%; he's got the reverse at 3.0%.

Obama Superman appeared a few issues ago in Action comics, iirc.

you can always tell frank quitely people by the shoes

well, it's down to three

http://i47.tinypic.com/106yr1h.jpg

l-r: o_O, ;_;, ^_^

Some evidence that nothing happened in '96, and that '08 actually was exciting (or at least interesting).

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/america-is-bored-with-politics-again.html

Opinions about the 2012 presidential campaign today are fairly similar to the public’s views in June 2004. At that time, 79% said the campaign was important (the same percentage as today), 52% said it was too long (59% today) and just 33% said it was interesting (34% today).

only 59% today say that the campaign is too long?? that's kind of amazing. i guess i've never really looked into it too closely, but i always assumed that campaigns in america are waaaaaaaaay longer than in most other countries and that the effects of being in permanent campaign mode are obviously detrimental.

I think there are a lot of people that pay no attention to commercials/the news/the world around them and don't notice campaigns until late in the game.