Your 2016 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

In essence, the result of that 2008 near tie vote was that Obama got to go first with the understanding that Clinton would automatically get the nomination 8 years later. What this means is that (barring unforeseen circumstances)there will have been no left wing challenge in presidential races for 16 years and I think that suits the Party and its rich donors just fine. They hate primaries. And since they will have had 16 uninterrupted years of preferred policy, even as the voters get to feel the inspiration of the two historic firsts, why would anyone rock the boat?

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com.br/2014/06/that-marriage-of-convenience-was.html

Progressives might have been able to leverage that fierce competition in 2008 but they got caught up in the emotion just like everyone else...

shame on u alfred

I would never use "leverage" as a verb

is there a precedent for a totally uncontested nomination like this?

I would love more than anything for Hillary to get pushed by the left by somebody/something - because she is actually susceptible to pressure - but I don't know where it's going to come from. probably nowhere.

Taft.

she is actually susceptible to pressure

I must've missed this. Anyway, pressure is off once the presidency starts and you can chuck everything you said in the campaign, as BHO has illustrated.

I would love more than anything for Hillary to get pushed by the left off a cliff

Hillary's political m.o. is basically "if that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don't also blow"

First term presidents are susceptible to financial pressure/lobbyists (gotta get re-elected!), second termers aren't susceptible to any pressure beyond the threat of impeachment.

xp

and they're usually hamstrung by the opposing party and their own party's re-election schemes; nothing much ever happens in 2nd terms except on the unpredictable foreign policy front

xp

is there a precedent for a totally uncontested nomination like this?

it's still only 2014, i'm assuming there will likely be some kind of challenger?

Hard to imagine -- even that crazed socialist Bill deBlasio is trying to arrange the coronation for Brooklyn.

I'm hoping for any kind of surprise to unleash that leaden Rodham spontaneity.

no money = no challenger

hillary already has challengers announced and more likely but 2016 for dems looks like an old style gop coronation. 2016 for repubs looks like an old style dem clusterfuck.

edwards was the progressive candidate in 08, seem to recall a good number of fools who bought his war on poverty come to jesus, ignored that previously in his political career (where he'd been exposed as a lightweight already) he'd been a true blue dlc type who wanted to make the democratic party more 'business friendly'. he tried to play kingmaker (it was assumed among other things he wanted attorney general) but other flaws in the man ultimately made him as irrelevant and powerless as the progressive grass roots (he was already as vain).

idk anybody on the left that ever took Edwards seriously

Watching her with Diane Sawyer I relieved the nightmare.
― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Had the same problem. Before I had any feelings about anybody else, I unequivocally didn't want her to win in 2008. In the six years since, with her largely of out of view, that fingernails-on-a-blackboard antipathy has faded. The first time she let loose with one of her Amy Poehler guffaws in the Sawyer interview, it flared up.

a good number of fools who bought his war on poverty come to jesus, ignored that previously in his political career (where he'd been exposed as a lightweight already) ...

up to here u could be talkin bout the sainted Bobby Kennedy

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/06/hillary-clinton-vs-russ-feingold-a-wake-up-call-for-democrats/372553/

I would totally vote for Russ but let's be serious

So depressing that we are fucking sleepwalking toward a HRC nomination.

hi!

http://usatelections.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/afp-e-faces-12-clintons.jpg?w=1200

i'd prefer a nominee further to the left, but not sure another democratic candidate would win (maybe warren).

Warren shouldn't run tho, she is needed in the Senate

i agree (at least this election cycle).

feel like people push her because she's the only alternative to Hillary that trumps her "I'll be the First Lady President" angle (which admittedly is going to be just as much of a factor, if not moreso, than Barack's "First Black President" appeal)

also because she's (in her own, understated way) a magnetic candidate, with the potential to be totally presidential. she's maybe a little too fiery and blunt now, but that's partly what i like about her.

in a weird way I don't know any women who are enthusiastic about Hillary the way people were enthusiastic about Obama. there's this sort of measured acknowledgment that on her merits she is not really that great.... but

I knew plenty in 2008. Now? Notsomuch.

my mom is so excited for president hillary

how is Warren more fiery and blunt than any man?

Don't really know that much about any of this at this point (so discouraged), but it feels like these days (especially with evolving demographics) it's more about firing people up and getting them out to vote than it is about appealing to some magical (and idiotic) set of "reasonable" undecided voters. In that case, HRC seems like a not-so-great candidate, esp. If she's not going to fire up women in any big way.

I'm just wondering if some sort of straight-talking liberal (like Warren, but it doesn't have to be her) would actually have success these days. Polls seem to suggest people are more liberal on many issues than they think they are. But I may just be caught in in a bunch of liberal blogosphere horseshit, I dunno.

how is Warren more fiery and blunt than any man?

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, June 11, 2014

her grilling of the bankers testifying before congress, and of the s.e.c. officials who hadn't brought a single case against those bankers to trial, was especially fiery and blunt (much moreso than the blowhard questions that other representatives ask). it's more that she's blunt, doesn't seem to pander, is a very focused cross-examiner, and carries herself in a way that can all seem sort of "northeastern elitist" to some.

waren is no more fiery and blunt than any man, e.g., richard gephardt, bill richardson, evan bayh, tom vilsack, etc? many, maybe most, recent democratic presidential candidates have overly-mannered, overly-calculated panderers.

why a Bernie Sanders candidacy would not accomplish a single solitary thing

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/03/no_bernie_sanders_should_not_run_for_president_why_his_challenge_would_achieve_little/

― images of war violence and historical smoking (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, June 4, 2014 2:34 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a strange argument for you of all people to accept

Yeah that was a pretty cynical piece. But of course Salon have always been tireless Clinton boosters.

...to put it generously.

It seems far from a pro-Hillary piece (and yes, even farther from being pro-Obama).

There is no reason to suspect, after all these years, Hillary Clinton in the White House will be any better than the Hillary Clinton we have come to know as a hawkish corporate Democrat; if history’s any guide, she’ll be worse.

is Salon pro-HRC these days? I have no idea.

this is a strange argument for you of all people to accept

bullshit, bcz we're done, it's e$$entially fixed, and none of it matters

if anyone on the true anticorporate left managed to win the billion-dollar POTUS auction, they would not live to January 20.

Hope and change!

also Bernie Sanders is a hack who says pretty things

and Hellary is not going to be "pushed" anywhere ideologically, as like her hubby she had her principles lanced in the '70s

Ew @ "lanced."

If Brooklyn gets the Dem convention I am v interested in seeing how deBlasio instructs the NYPD to handle protests, which should be daily and vigorous.

don't you mean vigorou$

hard to $ay

"What is this, Russia? We're not allowed to get rich anymore?" - Paul Begala

http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/06/11/crossfire-clueless-on-israeli-occupation/

Russia has more millionaires than any other country iirc

She could've just said, “I did not grow up even imagining gay marriage and I don’t think you did either. This was an incredible new and important idea that people on the front lines of the gay right movement began to talk about and slowly, but surely, convinced others about the rightness of that position. I was initially reluctant because I didn't know much about it; eventually I began to see how important it was to gay friends. They convinced me I had a moral obligation to support it."

Instead she attacks one of NPR's more annoying questioners.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/hillary-gay-marriage-npr-terry-gross

"Well, Terry, Bill and I thought we knew how to count votes at the time -- our pollsters stick to us like flies on shit."

totally dgaf about what she thinks or thought about this issue, since it's totally immaterial now