I will keep doing, but not worth it! The 2016 Presidential Primary Voting Thread

So the Clintons and Kissingers do hang out.

Ugh Clintons are such POS.

The ex-President isn't the only on the trail for Jeb. (sic)

Barbara Bush, the former first lady, hit the trail with Bush in New Hampshire, boasting to voters that her son is an honest and decent man.

Lower-profile Bushes have made cameo appearances as well: Jeb Bush introduced his uncle, John Bush, at a campaign stop in Mount Pleasant on Wednesday, and joked for two minutes about various members of his family, including a granddaughter, Georgia Helena Walker Bush, who has the same initials as Bush 41.

rapidly going from Poppy Bush to Scrappy Bush, Yabba-Bush, Bushy-Dum etc.

Freddie deBoer:

The problem, from my perspective, is that the politics of association — the ways in which politics becomes about establishing a given in-group identity, and more importantly, an out-group identity, threaten to become the only kind of politics, in general and especially among progressives. I’ve written a lot about this and I don’t want to belabor the point. Suffice is to say that the tactic involves spreading a particular political belief through associating it with a social or cultural group people want to be a part of, and that this tactic has become inescapable in the past decade or so. It’s no coincidence that this has occurred along with the rise of social media, as the lines between the social space and the political space have blurred considerably in those forums. Again, I should point out that this isn’t an entirely bad thing. These tactics have proven to be remarkably effective at, for example, spreading a particular vocabulary. Look at the rise of the language of academic feminism. I don’t think people realize how quickly that language has taken over progressive politics and media circles. Go back in time even ten years ago and a lot of the language would be just unrecognizable to the people then. And that’s in a world where the humanities are often treated as a joke. But there are deep problems with this situation, too.

What does this have to do with “bro”? I think “bro” is the purest distillation of this associative function of politics, and that the only meaningful definition of “bro” in this sense is “person from the outgroup,” “person who I can treat as ridiculous or irrelevant without argument.”

I’ve written a lot about this and I don’t want to belabor the point.

He belabors it all the time though.

politics becomes about establishing a given in-group identity, and more importantly, an out-group identity, threaten to become the only kind of politics, in general

seriously nobody even has to pretend to give a shit about history anymore do they? It's the most irrelevant subject possible!

ah yes, for the days when politics had nothing to do with in-groups and out-groups, and obnoxious privileged asshats were not driven from the ranks of movements they didn't belong in anyway with the cruel, career-ending label of "bro." i fear for the direction of our country and our politics.

won't someone think of the bros

I think what distinguishes the historical weird bullshit of purity test obsessions and the in-/out-group tribal gatekeeping thru American presidential primaries is that they're now occurring in a space that hypercharges and overclocks the response/retransmission cycles.

The trad ways we had of these convos and public declarations and such, be they pamphleteering or op-eds or mass media broadcasting or cable news or blogs and YouTube, haven't accelerated to the point where things are now.

And the speed of data blasts at each other are enhanced by other recent sociopolitical developments from GOP fracturing to Citizens United funding the disparate cell leaders of that fracturing.

It's like the worst mechanisms of the human brain sharpened and amplified by social media that damage all other bits of interaction are particularly weird in this already screwy social process.

i definitely agree about amplification, tribalism, bubble effects and stuff.... have ranted about that on ilx before (re: the right-wing info-sphere and dylann roof specifically).

just not sure i buy it as a cudgel against e.g. the proliferation of a certain vocabulary in progressive circles (which i incidentally think is way less widespread and compulsory than the blurb above would imply). it kinda starts to sound like anti-"SJW" stuff: oh, you haven't been sincerely persuaded of the value of thinking this way, you just toe the line to impress some feminazi girls. the ~social space~ has blurred into the political sphere. it's similar to the way i see the people-who-agree-with-you-bubble as a real problem, but not quite the same. not sure i can articulate the points of discontinuity right now though. hrm.

Let Freddie do it. He writes words.

this was megyn kelly, on fox, going to ask some people in a room a question in order to get karl rove to accept the outcome of the election -- just saying it was even more epochal than you remember. this was incredible too of course.

― denies the existence of dark matter (difficult listening hour), Saturday, February 6, 2016 9:14 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just rewatched this, god is it satisfying. it's a different sort of thing than the failure-to-walk-on-stage debate pileup, where the humor builds with each combination of people back there and how they're acting/responding, all these little character-type moments. like some kind of vaudeville routine or a silent comedy. megyn kelly being sent into purgatory because karl rove can't accept the election results is a different order of satisfaction, this deepening schadenfreude as you feel this giant machine and its avatars unable to face the facts their own system is giving them. rove at the desk sweatily running different numbers, spectacles falling down his nose, scratching his head, there's gotta be a way. the boys in the back room having absolutely nothing for them. off in another monitor, the thing you'd actually think would be filling the news screens: enormous crowds cheering the victories as they pile up. for one second the camera following megyn kelly catches a screen showing the current live broadcast in all its stupidity, would be a mise-en-abyme if only they'd stayed there a second.

also megyn kelly in that outfit/hairstyle is total ws of shame, i was pained to realize ;_;

I watched it live. I watched FOX the last half hour before Ohio was called. I ran out of tonic water.

oh is there a link for that? Would love to watch it

That was really a thing to see. I had just flipped over to Fox to see how they were handling things and got to see the entire chain of events. Amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TwuR0jCavk

the walk of glory/shame starts about 5 mins in iirc

love Karl showing his knowledge of Ohio county names nice work Karl

i only ever saw it thanks to ILX - bar i was at was tuned to MSNBC. thanking u all once again. let's trot this out every four years along with the ben carson trainwreck, it'd be a better tradition than most election year cliches.

what's the unskewed polls guy up to this year?

i had completely forgotten about the unskewed polls thing. i can say with 99% confidence that this election will be even zanier than the last, but 2012 was truly bonkers

love Karl showing his knowledge of Ohio county names nice work Karl

Well to be fair, some of those places are namechecked in the Rush Limbaugh theme song.

i have never, ever, forgotten about unskewed polls guy. i have to stop myself from posting "this will surprise many" virtually every other day in response to totally ridiculous optimistic predictions by one camp or another.

i had completely forgotten about the unskewed polls guy. the craziest thing about that election night in 2012, for me, was the way it slowly became clear checking in with rove on fox and conservatives on blogs/twitter - that they *all* actually believed only their own polling, all the way up until the votes started coming in, and they all were expecting romney to win the election. including romney. they didn't think the democrats would turn out like they had the previous cycle. i mean, in 2008, behind the scenes everybody was pretty certain obama was going to win. the mccain people knew it. not this time.

Romney hadn't written a concession speech, recall!

when she says "the doubts that Karl Rove is attempting to place" (5:58) it's simply the best

and his concession was soooooo lousy. no sense of timing or anything. couldn't even wait for the limp applause to clear before going to the next line. robot smile through the whole thing. i mean all of that was basically par for the course with romney and who could expect that anybody would rise above their normal baseline in what must be a really exhausting, bizarre adrenaline moment - but still, it sucked.

kinda wondering what the best concession speeches of all time are

xpost i just love all her patter to cover what would otherwise be blatant dead air + footsteps as she's making her way down the hall. "keeep comin'... here we go... now when we practiced this before, uh, in our rehearsals, we lost all audio in our ears, right about here. it's happening to me again."

i'm thinking it's something like a city council election in a small town, and someone loses but somehow finds out before the speech that they are now in fact the mayor (?!) and ooooh how the tables are turned during that concession speech

Think I've only seen Rove on TV once this cycle, months ago.

Trump called Cruz unhinged today. I'll use that as an excuse for an Angry Samoans YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL_1BrblQkI

not strictly an election night concession speech but i did go to hillary's 2008 speech at the nat'l building museum when she suspended her campaign and honestly it was pretty emotional in person, that was the speech talking about the highest glass ceiling and how at least now there were 18 million cracks in it.

about turnout this year.. i've read some dem folks on twitters noting that there's cause for concern that turnout on the dem side so far in the primaries is underperforming 2008, while GOP turnout is higher. idk if it's all because of the trump show, or how long it will last. obama actually did find new voters and get them to show up but so far clinton and sanders, not so much

ted kennedy 1980 comes to mind, where at the end of it you really are way more interested in voting for the guy who just conceded.

the 2012 aftermath was one of the greatest things to witness. It was the greatest example of trying to force a narrative I'd ever seen. Romney won that first debate and the narrative amongst his fanbase was that he was his race to lose, even if it would still be tight.

It was just kinda funny that the thing most of us knew was going to happen happened exactly as stated, but the purveyors of strange conservative math were dumbfounded. notorious right-biased Gallup, in the weeks leading up to the election, actually forecasted a Romney victory based on the 'likely states' (even as the forecast had started to shift more comfortably towards Obama in most other forecasts).

A friend of mine got invited to a "Free at Last" party which the sole purpose was to celebrate Romney's victory live (I'm still regretting not crashing that thing). People like that clown Wayne Allyn Root were predicting a 'landslide' for Mitt, and naturally he wrote a pretty pathetic follow-up article blaming America for being guilty of stockholm syndrome. The National Review also took a beating after Silver was vindicated, since Jordan had invested so much in tarring him as 'partisan' and trying to shift the election.

I also remember several twitter debates where Nate Silver was called a hack, and to be fair, he'd just gotten 2008's election right, but had done less convincingly in the 2010 mid-terms, which they were hinging on. It was just this group of conservatives adamant that the numbers crunched were wrong, and that the numbers they had manipulated more favorably for themselves were right.

I remember some conservatives whining that it was the unexpected turnout of certain minorities etc that swung the election, but even that was predicted by Silver and his peers (twas another area that Gallup wildly whiffed, iirc)

xpost i dunno, i feel like a 6 or 10-way race is just inherently more interesting. plus more of a "my vote will matter" factor. that's setting aside that each of those candidates might have some stable of voters they're really bringing in the door, who aren't showing up otherwise.

lol @ the "free at last" party. that could have been beautiful, or gotten really ugly really fast, i dunno.

there's cause for concern that turnout on the dem side so far in the primaries is underperforming 2008, while GOP turnout is higher.

yeah :-/

W.'s on CNN stumping for his brother right now--supposedly the first time he's stepped out the house since 2008 or something.

xxxpost sorry for HuffPo link, but I never actually saw this at the time it got posted - they replied about their failures publicly: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/gallup-poll-2012_n_3384882.html

W.'s on CNN stumping for his brother right now--supposedly the first time he's stepped out the house since 2008 or something.

― clemenza, Monday, February 15, 2016 6:12 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

waiting for him to crumble to his knees in a "prophetic vision from God"

Lindsay Graham actually just made me laugh: "If you wanted to take money out of politics, you should have joined my campaign...'cause we ran out of money."

"I don't know about you, but I like bushes!"

oh lindseypaws

fuck i can't watch this motherfucker talk, i can't do it

(dubya i mean, not graham)

we're in the era where we can't tell political quotes apart from whatever the dudes handing out strip club flyers on the vegas strip are saying at 2 AM

conservatives whining that it was the unexpected turnout of certain minorities etc that swung the election

they did work pretty hard to suppress the vote by passing all those voter id laws. so unfair for them that people showed up and voted

kinda wondering what the best concession speeches of all time are

I remember McCain 2008 as being good but I can't remember much about it now

I know W. wants to remove himself from politics, but I don't see the point in hauling him out there unless he goes after Trump much more specifically than he did.

xp. yeah, he was quite gracious and dignified. also did about as good a job as possible to try and soothe his outrage, agitated, butthurt crowd

so it was the Preparation H of concessions