US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

oh god npr doesn't even mention what he's calling the thing...

back in black

This should scare Dems into voting for The One.

did Perry declare...? I missed that

Party puppetmasters have a way of winnowing out unacceptable frontrunners, eg Howard Dean

xp

i had to spend all weekend w/ my bachmann loving cousin. i was like ... why? and he was all 'she's not afraid to tell it like it is.... and she's smart' and then i punched him in the face, lopped off his head, and mounted in my trophy room.

Next to your Borders Rewards card?

yeah. atop a pile of ticket stubs from that awful winnie the pooh abortion i saw yesterday.

lol

Party puppetmasters have a way of winnowing out unacceptable frontrunners, eg Howard Dean

party puppetmasters = buncha democrats in iowa?

GOP version is a bunch of big guys with hats in Texas

also if you don't think Gephardt fell on his sword to destroy Dean at the behest of Party apparatchiks I think yr missing a piece of the puzzle

I really don't even know what you're declaring here.

That attempting to make more of a stand and demagoguing more would not be an effective political strategy.

can you explain about gephardt? honestly i though he just came in 3rd and that was that, with the 'scream' bs being cooked up by the media a while later after it 'went viral'

http://thequietus.com/reviews

How do you know? The Dems haven't tried it in years.

whoops -- xpost to tim

That attempting to make more of a stand and demagoguing more would not be an effective political strategy.

Wrong thread!

as far as I can tell, the thing about Dean was that a bunch of (rich) Internet nerds fell in love with him and artificially inflated his apparent level of support; the scream was kind of lol (mostly because it was a terrible scream) but from what I understand from insidery friends it didn't really contribute to his "downfall" because his level of support was grossly inflated

can you explain about gephardt? honestly i though he just came in 3rd and that was that, with the 'scream' bs being cooked up by the media a while later after it 'went viral'

Gephardt went after Dean hard in Iowa, running vicious and flagrantly disingenuous attack ads against him, openly fought with him for union endorsements - of all the other candidates in the race at that time, Gephardt was the one most obviously acting as the "establishment"'s attack dog against Dean. Then there was "the scream" (which was a ridiculous non-issue) that played into the DNC's hands, and Dean was done.

Dean won the major union endorsements in Iowa btw. dunno if I would call the SEIU "internet nerds". he won the state.

wait you are saying one guy running for the nomination said bad things about the front-runner? sounds like a conspiracy.

most of the rest of the candidates were trying to ignore Dean/downplay his significance. Gephardt was the only one blowing all his money running ads against him.

you do not need to go into conspiracy zone to find examples of people running attack ads against a front-runner. blame Iowa, the media and the Dean campaign. there's nothing mysterious here.

lol at Dean as a democratic 'outsider' anyway. that was marketing.

Dean had an even bigger hard-on for balanced budgets than Obama did, FWIW. (nb: i was a Dean supporter, not that it made any difference when my state's primary came.)

he's an insider now, I don't think he really was one prior to his campaign. and I don't think anything "mysterious" happened, the Gephardt thing was totally obvious!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Democratic_caucuses,_2004

60% of the iowa caucus-going party had already coalesced around not-dean.

if gephardt went hard after him, you could just as easily say that it was gephardt misreading dean's "lead" as badly as everyone else. i'd honestly never heard this quasi-conspiracy idea before.

xps

Dean won the major union endorsements in Iowa btw. dunno if I would call the SEIU "internet nerds". he won the state.

Polling throughout the primary campaign consistently showed Dean either in first place, or second behind Dick Gephardt. However, last minute surges by rivals John Kerry and John Edwards as well as negative campaigning between the Dean and Gephardt campaigns resulted in an 11th hour slump for both campaigns. In a poll released by the Des Moines Register just before Caucus Day, Dean registered in third place with 20%, behind Kerry with 26%, and Edwards with 23%, but ahead of Dick Gephardt with 18%.[10]

Throughout Caucus night, Dean was in a fight with Gephardt for third place in Iowa behind Kerry and Edwards. With 100% of precincts reporting, Kerry received 38%, Edwards received 32%, and Dean came in third with 18% while Gephardt finished in fourth with just 11% of caucus support.

how is coming in 3rd "winning the state"

we have a weird, pretty unfair but sorta democratic way of nominating candidates. if these all powerful puppet masters with their uh...attack ads...were in charge, hill woulda been a sure thing. they aren't, she wasn't. random people in Iowa were entirely responsible!

god bless America!

As Dean pollster Paul Maslin noted in the Atlantic:

the most serious damage was coming from Dick Gephardt and his labor minions in Iowa, who relentlessly attacked Dean for his supposed weakness on Medicare and Social Security and his prior support of NAFTA. Although Dean's personal ratings remained strong, the Gephardt barrage took its toll. When, on October 29, we completed the first night of a new poll, Gephardt had retaken the lead in Iowa (by an impressive margin) for the first time in more than three months.

xp
Gephardt was supposed to cruise in Iowa, as the pseudo-favorite son candidate. He was pretty desperate to take Dean down, but came in third anyway.

The scream was more important than anything nasty that Gephardt said, because no one outside Iowa and political geeks and operatives paid the slightest attention before the caucuses. After Dean's winning Iowa the media took the opportunity to shape the nation's perception of him in the next few hours when anyone was paying attention. The media could have annointed him the Next Great Democratic White Hope and the country would have bought the story, for a while at least. Instead the media savaged him non-stop for the next week.

sorry Dan yeah I misspoke (missposted?) - forgetting which ones he won (New Hampshire?)

After Dean's winning Iowa

WHAT THE FUCK

HE CAME IN THIRD

He won... Vermont

lol you guys seriously

this what I'm talking about, the Internet reality had little to no bearing on the actual reality, and the polling reality realigned itself sharply after the Iowa caucuses

Let's fight Obama, not each other.

Yes. I was wrong. The memory plays tricks. In retrospect, the Dean Scream took so much air out of the room after Iowa, it naturally seems like Dean was the Only Story to emerge, and it makes no sense after all these years, except in the framework of a win. Why bother to crucify a 3rd place finisher? Answer: New Hampshire.

the 'dean scream' took off as a meme w/o the major media doing much about it. live by the internet, die by the internet...

it was a stupid goofy meme and the media doesn't have the attention span for much else. Iowa took the wind out of his sails, the 'scream' was just symbolic of his embarrassing placing after the hype.

remember when Gore got slaughtered months earlier for delivering an Angry Speech? Krauthammer said several times with a sad shake of his head that Gore "was off his meds."

it's hard to see him getting the nom in a screamless world unless he crushed nh. and that seems incredibly unlikely considering how quickly his supporters fell apart.

srsly though his scream was hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yshnhEHBtO4&NR=1

he ruined a perfectly good message with one weenie "YEAH!"

the dean campaign and its end has a bunch of lessons, but an example of a "true-blue liberal" being shanked by "party insiders" and the "corporate media" is not really one of them... not any one of those things stands up to scrutiny really.

the guy just lost.

otm

^^^ yup

what's he doing with those two fingers

really the people who should be learning from the dean campaign are ron paul supporters - it really doesn't matter how many people on your msg board are sending money/gold.

a friend of mine wrote an article at the time basically saying exactly that with a "Democrats who don't actively court minorities always get screwed"; the article itself is gone now but the Internet reaction from angry Dean supporters is priceless

btw I wasn't claiming Dean to be the second coming of FDR or anything, just a relatively unsafe prospect the Dem topdogs didn't want to win the nomination. They got lucky w/ Obama turning out to be identical to (or 'better than') Hillary Rodham.

btw I wasn't claiming Dean to be the second coming of FDR or anything, just a relatively unsafe prospect the Dem topdogs didn't want to win the nomination

this is still true. Dean "just losing" is also true. these are not mutually exclusive.