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

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.

at the neighborhood july 4th party i enjoyed listening to a sloshed new neighbor do his "anybody but a kenyan socialist who hates america" speech, and then 10 minutes later listen to his very nice, aussie spouse explain that they were soon moving with their two kids to australia because of the superior social safety net, health care system, and quality of life. the husband would be the only one with visa issues, but would somehow have favored status, blah blah.

beautiful

safety nets are for white people, like duh.

they're called "hammocks" for everyone else

Richard Posner on his batshit party.

ha, Posner OTM; this is exactly what happened to my father

(or more accurately, the Republican embrace of social conservatism, which is anathema to him, at the expense of fiscal conservatism drove him away)

The social conservatives have taken over the party and pushed out many of the fiscal conservatives and their irrational take on society is now reflected in their irrational take on economics. They're still free-marketers ('cause Jesus, duh!) but their ability to actually see the world around them has been diminished by a rigid, partisan, ideological orthodoxy so they're practically forced to espouse ideas like Obama's a Kenyan socialist and Obamacare is substantially more socialist than Medicaid.

gop just used to have a more respectable sheen on their mean spiritedness before the internet

by no means do I pine for the good old days of WFB Jr, Goldwater, and Greenspan, all of whom would drink a martini with a liberal and then pour the remains on the impoverished waiter and set him on fire.

Johnson's prescience about the Civil Rights Act has actually come to pass; the South just won't for a Democratic party (once very largely their) party because they distrust any democratic impulse for non-white ppl. As that has become more and more socially unacceptable, they switched parties, won over more and more local parties and school boards and slowly asphyxiated the blue dogs and other conservative Democrats that used to represent the Old South. They got their way but they're still going to lose generationally and perhaps, all the more so that their distilled version of American social conservative is unalloyed to any rational or circumspect thinkers.

the problem is that by the time they die they will have ruined 75% of the United States

I know this doesn't happen all that often in Anglo-American politics but perhaps one the present parties in the duopoly might die. It happened to the Whigs.

I mean the fiscal conservative party is now the Democrats. The Republicans are batshit economically right now and not even in a unified way. It all vaguely reminds me of Bismarck instituting social welfare legislation in the 1880's to screw the Social Democrats.