I don't suppose it would be too much to ask you to go comment on, oh, anything else, somewhere else? Nevermind. Impeach Bush.
I'm not calling anyone an idiot, Deckard. And I'm well aware of the popular vote totals. I really don't know what's gotten into you on this campaign. I've never known you to totally ignore the actual argument someone's making in favor of some unrelated deflection, but you've done it repeatedly during this campaign. You keep telling me I'm a jerk for believing what I believe, but you've not once answered a single question I've posed or countered a single argument I've made. I'm talking about Florida and Michigan here and about the Clinton campaign trying to: a. cheat by changing the rules after saying those races shouldn't matter b. lay claim to a popular vote advantage which includes states she said shouldn't matter, and worst... c. continute to put out this incredible BS about Obama trying to disenfranchise voters. It is dishonest and it is dirty. But you didn't address any of that. You just told me the popular vote was close (duh) and said I called her voters idiots when I didn't. And then, once again, ignored every single point I've made about this race being dirty and offered no response at all except, nuh unh! I'm not calling Clinton's voters anything. I'm calling Clinton herself a liar and a cheat. I am further saying that she cares about her own ambition to be president more than she cares about electing a Democrat in the fall. As for the extremity of my position, it's pretty much backed up by The New York Times who seem to regret very much their endorsement of her campaign. If you won't listen to me, maybe you'll listen to them. Before you read it, I have to say one more thing. I am not some irrational Hillary hater like many others. Apart from the Iraq vote, I have always admired her. I have often argued for her potential candidacy and her electability as well (I believe here, but certainly in the company of friends). I never voted for Bill, but until this campaign I have always said I would love to see her as president. The scorn I feel towards her now did not exist before this race and is neither irrational nor unearned. She has worked extremely hard to earn the enmity of this Democrat. If you don't like it, I really don't care. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/o...41&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink EDITORIAL The Low Road to Victory Published: April 23, 2008 The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election. If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead. On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned. If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.” By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience. No matter what the high-priced political operatives (from both camps) may think, it is not a disadvantage that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share many of the same essential values and sensible policy prescriptions. It is their strength, and they are doing their best to make voters forget it. And if they think that only Democrats are paying attention to this spectacle, they’re wrong. After seven years of George W. Bush’s failed with-us-or-against-us presidency, all American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate — right now and through the general campaign — about how each candidate will combat terrorism, protect civil liberties, address the housing crisis and end the war in Iraq. It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.
And yes, Deckard, I do think I am much better. Or at least that I'm a better Democrat. I've never lied about or misrepresented the record or position of any Democrat, for example. She has and she continues to. I would never suggest our own frontrunner was disenfranchising voters in crucial swing states for not wanting to change the rules and hand over hard fought (and fairly fought) frontrunner status. She has and she continues to. And I would NEVER say that John McCain was more qualified to be commander in chief than any Democratic party frontrunner or even candidate. And I've never suggested a single reason to vote for him over Clinton or suggested that anyone else vote McCain or stay home. I have simply said that Hillary Clinton has repeatedly offended my sense of fairness, honesty, sincerity and party loyalty and, as such, I will not cast a vote for her under any circumstances. That's my right, as a Democrat, whether you like it or not. Furthermore, I have exhaustively explained my position here and have asked you for a direct response to it on many occasions, since it seems to rankle you so. The fact that you've been unwilling to engage me on my actual points is your problem, not mine.
I love how Batman fashions himself as Mr. Critical Thinking Intellectual Man when it comes to politics, yet supports the most under-qualified, over-hyped candidate in decades to run for the Presidency. Here is a guy shouting down the supporters of another democratic politician who does not want to disenfranchise Floridians and Michiganders, in the name of supporting Barack 'Marketing Campaign' Obama -- man of no accomplishments. When did you give up on critical thinking and buy a ticket for a ride on Barack's fairy tale hot air balloon? Just hilarious...
You are ignoring my "actual points" by claiming I don't respond to yours. I just reponded to a post of yours by pointing out that, regardless of what you think of her, nearly half the Democrats in this primary season obviously don't feel the same way you do about Hillary Clinton. You talk about her using as much venom as you seem to be able to muster. I get it. You currently hate her, intensely. And I will repeat that compared to many previous primary seasons I've witnessed, this one has been relatively civil, regardless of how you view it. That's my opinion. Impeach Bush.
I'm sure if you walked out into a busy street, Trader_J, you could find a bus to occupy you. Impeach Bush.
No, Deckard. I claimed that you didn't respond to mine because you didn't. The entire premise of my post, which engendered yours, was this FL/MI crap. You posted back to say the race wasn't dirty, that I was extreme and that any criticism I made of Hillary should be considered criticism of all the people that voted for her (give me a break). But somehow, you totally forgot to say word one about FL/MI!!! LOL! That reminds me of something. What was it....? Oh, yeah... Every other post I've made about this campaign after which you've posted back to tell me I was wrong and to chide me for being wrong but somehow totally forgot to tell me WHY I was wrong on the merits. I have raised: - Hillary's misrepresentation of Barack's position on Iraq - the same on abortion rights - the same on party loyalty (Reagan comments) - the same on health care - the same on trade (and in each and every case pointed out how she was dishonest and knew she was being dishonest) - the incredible move of suggesting she was against the war before Obama was as well as Bill's incredible move of suggesting they were both always against it - the unprecedented move of suggesting the Republican nominee is better qualified to command our armed forces than the Democratic frontrunner - this BS in FL and MI. You have answered.... SQUAT. Until you do, stop lecturing me. TIA.
I posted in response to the vitriol you wrote about Hillary Clinton. You are simply creating a "controversy" out of your hat regarding me. Why? I can only attribute it to you having nothing else worth saying. Bummer, dude. Impeach Bush.
Deckard, the "vitriol" isn't homemade. It's in response to actual issues. I raise them, you chide me for raising them, refuse to respond to them and tell me I'm out of line. This is a debate forum. If you think I'm wrong, you're supposed to say why. I haven't created anything regarding you. I have simply posted my opinions. If you're going to continue responding to my posts, it would be awesome if you'd respond to my freaking points. And it's a shame you have to make this personal too saying I have nothing better to talk about when what I'm talking about is the election and where I'm doing it is in the forum where we discuss those things. I haven't done that with you except to complain that you have completely failed to address the substance of a single point I've made (bullet pointed for your convenience above). I swear to god it's like arguing with basso.
Let me save the strain on the CC.Net servers and just summarize Batman's argument against you, Decks: "You are dumb. I am smart. Barack Obama is flawless, without sin, and possibly conceived by the Holy Spirit. And I don't care if Obama's spiritual mentor dry humps a podium while cursing America during Church on Sunday in front of small impressionable children. And I hate basso. And Jorge is my Papi."
Tried that before, man. You keep replying to my posts to tell me I'm wrong but for whatever reason you keep refusing to say why. I wasn't arguing with you (or with anybody but Hillary Clinton). I was just posting my opinion. If you don't want to argue with me, that's fine. But if you keep replying to my posts, you can expect me to keep asking to reply to my points as well.
p.s. This.... .... is inaccurate. Those are the numbers including Florida. Maybe you support including Florida (and/or Michigan). I don't know since you don't seem to want to talk about it. But your post was wrong. Your own site puts the spread at 48.6 - 46.9 without Florida. More importantly, it leaves her more than 500K to make up with the most populist states remaining favoring Obama.
Someone on his staff called her a monster. I doubt she was alone in having that opinion of Hillary after the display she's put on the last few months.
p.p.s. Even the above spread of 1.7% doesn't include the popular vote in the caucus states of IA, NV, ME and WA because those numbers aren't officially reported the way they are in primary states. If you include the popular vote in those states, realclearpolitics.com (a non-partisan standard for counting such things) places the spread at 2.1% with a difference of 610,575. First off, of course caucus states should be included in any popular vote total if popular vote is suddenly supposed to be a determining factor here. I'm sure the Clinton camp, with all their talk of disenfranchisement, would agree. Second, I agree that this has been a very close race. A 2.1% spread in the popular vote after all these contests, especially given the historic turnout, is incredibly close. But... It's not nearly close enough. PA was far and away Clinton's best chance to catch up -- in popular vote and pledged delegates. That's the reason that, before the expectations game took over, back when we were actually focused on the type of victory she'd need to win this thing, her over/under was set around 20. The over/under of 20 was not about expectations; it was about what she would need to have a reasonable argument that she could actually collect delegates and popular vote sufficient to gain momentum and have a (still very long) shot at taking the lead. A 20% victory in PA wouldn't have done a lot for her on the pledged delegate contest, which everyone agrees she virtually lost a while back, but it would have doubled her net popular vote in the state. Given the turnout there, she could have made up about 400K of the 800K advantage Obama had. It still would have been a longshot, as there are no states as large as PA for her to make up the other 400K she'd need, but it would have gotten her a lot closer. Furthermore, a 20% victory seemed doable for her given the demographics there and the fact that she was polling around those numbers before the race in PA began in earnest. As it turned out, she wound up with about a 9.4% victory and a net gain of 215,000. Regardless of the momentum she's enjoying now, that simply wasn't enough for her to have a credible shot at overtaking Obama in popular vote given the states that remain to vote. I mentioned this before, but the most populous among them are NC, OR and IN. And none of those states is near the size of PA. PA was her last, best hope. She could score unlikely blowout victories in NC and OR (which both favor Obama) and IN (which is basically tied) and would still be short. In other words, having lost pledged delegates and number of states won, it has also become impossible for her to win the popular vote. Or at least it's become impossible for her to win it fair and square. That is why she's turned to the desperate strategy of insisting on counting FL (where she not only agreed not to campaign, but officially agreed with the DNC position of not counting the vote) and MI (where she not only agreed not to campaign and agreed it shouldn't count but was also the only major candidate on the ballot). Worse though is the fact that she is now not only insisting on counting those votes toward a popular vote total, but is making the argument that Obama is trying to disenfranchise voters in crucial swing states. That is horribly damaging to the person that is almost certainly going to be our party's nominee. Worse, it's horribly disingenuous. She was for not counting FL and MI before she was against it. But the worst thing about all of this is the lie that this is a principled position. If it was a principled position she would have taken it when it mattered -- when she had something to lose and not just something to gain from taking it. And, as I've said repeatedly, if she had done that then -- when it could have made a difference -- she would have been blown out in IA and NH, effectively ending the race. She has definitively lost the pledged delegate race. She has definitively (and mathematically) lost the most states. All she had left to convince the remaining unpledged super delegates was the popular vote. Yesterday she failed to win by a large enough margin to compete even in that arena. So what did she do? Amazingly she started claiming she was leading in the popular vote already. How? By including two states whose votes she said shouldn't count and agreed wouldn't count. I repeat: She is a cheat. She is a liar. She is doing great damage to the party. The rules are the rules and she is welcome to stay in this race until the bitter end and to make the end as bitter as she likes. But she does so at her own peril if she hopes to have a future in this party. Barack Obama will be our nominee this fall. And he will be the de facto leader of the party. And the nastiness in which she has engaged, and the damage she is doing to him in FL and MI now, will not be well regarded in the future.
I have an interesting question: Clinton supporters, if Hilary does not get Dem Nomination and runs as an independent anyway, would you vote for her?
As far as I know we don't have any of those sorts of Clinton supporters here. We have some that still prefer her, but each of those has agreed to support the Dem nominee no matter who it might be I think. I'm probably the only Obama supporter here who's said he wouldn't support Clinton as the nominee. But you raise an interesting point. Exit polls in OH and PA show that there are far more Clinton supporters that wouldn't support Obama than the other way around. That's not surprising to me as his supporters might be angry at her for running such a negative campaign, but they don't find her utterly unacceptable and for the most part they certainly prefer her to McCain. Meanwhile, her entire campaign at this point is premised on the idea that he's unelectable, unready to lead, shady in various ways and basically unacceptable. He has never made similar arguments about her. In the last few days she has added in the idea that he's trying to cheat her out of a nomination she's already losing by refusing to count votes in states they both agreed before the fact wouldn't be counted. Her supporters would naturally feel negatively toward him at least until she tells them not to. And even then they won't all come back, given the nastiness of the race. The longer this goes, the longer she clings to last hopes of winning (each of which is premised on making him utterly unacceptable), the worse it will be in the fall. The most fascinating thing to me about all of this is that both sides in this primary campaign seem to feel they deserve to win and would be cheated out of it if they lost. And, in fact, they don't even quite seem to feel that way equally; Clinton supporters seem to feel even more strongly about it (not here, but generally, according to polling data). That blows my mind, since he is winning by every possible metric, there have been no allegations of wrongdoing on his part, but supporters of the losing campaign seem to feel more cheated by the idea of ultimately losing than supporters of the winning one. That is a result of desperate rhetoric on the part of the Clinton campaign which has led her voters to believe that caucuses, proportional delegate allocation and the DNC's refusal to let MI and FL decide for themselves when their primaries should be held are each unfair advantages for Obama when both campaigns (and all campaigns) knew and agreed to the rules before the primaries even started. If Clinton gets "cheated" out of the nomination, she will have been cheated by the rules. But her sense of entitlement is so strong that her supporters have come to hate Obama just for beating her fair and square.
I would feel like staying home if Hill won it, but I would vote for her because I do not want the prospect of McCain winning.
This is what a medium range sort of guy like Roger Simon says. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9839.html Don't stop believin', Hillary By ROGER SIMON | 4/24/08 5:05 AM EST Text Size: Now that Clinton has won Pennsylvania...what next? Run, Hillary, run. Run in Guam, run in North Carolina, run in Indiana. Run in each and every one of the nine contests that are left. Then make some states do their contests over. Should Barack Obama’s victory in Vermont really count? I don’t think Vermont is actually a state. I think it is technically a socialist republic. Have somebody check this out. And Obama’s victory in Alaska? Are you kidding me? They let caribou vote in Alaska. And do some other stuff that levels the playing field: Raise the voting age to 65 in all the remaining contests, for instance. You do great with this group, Sen. Clinton. Younger people don’t really care about who becomes president anyway. All they want to do is go on this World Wide Interweb thing that they keep talking about. And while you are at it, Senator, cap all salaries at $50,000 a year, take away all college degrees and give everybody a gun. The demographics are clear: That is your base vote. Also, no men get to vote unless they have a note from a woman saying they are mentally competent. (Good luck with that!) And, Sen. Clinton, keep portraying yourself as a sympathetic underdog. That works much better than when you were the inevitable overlord. In Haverford, Pa., last Thursday, you told the crowd: “Just knock on the door and say, ‘You know, she’s really nice.’ Or you could say it another way: ‘She’s not as bad as you think.’” It is a theme that worked in Pennsylvania and will work elsewhere. I can see the billboards now: “Hillary Clinton. Not as Bad as You Think.” But do not give up the kitchen sink stuff, Senator. Make it a Good Hillary/Bad Hillary kind of campaign. Good Hillary talks about the dreamy, gooey, feel-good stuff, like when, in your victory speech from Philadelphia Tuesday night, you said: “We are, in many ways, all on this journey together to create an America that embraces every last one of us. ... I believe with all of my heart that together we will turn promises into action, words will become solutions, hope will become reality.” But Bad Hillary can’t go away. You have to have the Hillary who says Obama is “elitist” and “demeaning,” and you have to keep running ads that portray him as the guy who won’t be able to protect us from the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, long lines at the gas pump, Osama bin Laden or ringing telephones. And speaking of Osama bin Laden, isn’t he a Muslim? And didn’t Bad Hillary say Obama was not a Muslim “as far as I know”? Keep up that subtle stuff. It is gold. And then, of course, bribe the superdelegates. These are the 794 party insiders who have one standard for all their decisions in life: “What’s in it for me?” So offer them something. You know how many interstate rest stops there are? They have to be named for somebody. And promise the holdouts that they will be appointed ambassador to Bermuda. It doesn’t matter that they all can’t be ambassador to Bermuda, because we don’t have an ambassador to Bermuda. (Say it was Bill’s idea.) And even if you can’t get ahead in the delegate count, don’t stop running! Go to the convention in Denver and chain yourself to the front door of the Pepsi Center and refuse to leave unless every resident of Florida and Michigan — not just the rogue delegates but all 26 million residents! — is seated inside and gets to cast a ballot for you. What’s the worst that could happen? Howard Dean comes out and bites you on the ankle? Forget about it. I could carve a tougher guy out of tofu. But most of all, Sen. Clinton, never give up, never surrender. And remember: There’s always 2012.
