Let‘s not omit the stupid, stupid 2004 electorate that gave us John “Balls and Strikes“ Roberts and Samuel “It’s my wife’s fault” Alito, despite having endured four years of George W Bush’s absolutely disastrous first term.
🦄 The Casual 2024 Presidential Election
- Thread starter monsterscraponme
- Start date
-
- Tags
- politics united states
- Status
Let‘s not omit the stupid, stupid 2004 electorate that gave us John “Balls and Strikes“ Roberts and Samuel “It’s my wife’s fault” Alito, despite having endured four years of George W Bush’s absolutely disastrous first term.
That entire post is an overly generous reading of the status quo and the electorate frankly.
The electorate making “sophisticated” choices when it’s between an 81-year old person who has done substantially more than Trump ever did in his term and is surrounded by capable experts vs a incoherent, ignorant 78-year old who worked even less and didn’t even do the job to begin with, short of enriching himself via any means necessary and has absolutely no one to fall back to in case he kicks the bucket is…a stretch. Doubly so for anyone that has read through focus group panels.
Last edited:
GWB’s record wasn’t great and it was already abundantly clear he was a disaster then, to say nothing of his open anti-LGBT campaign and canceling one of the biggest musical acts in the country. And calling it “wartime” has always been a little, weird considering it was an open ended war on a concept and a small group of terrorists, instead of a state or allegiance of states.
Not that I want to relitigate his atrocious two terms, but people need to stop giving him or voters at the time a pass.
The only thing I was taking issue with in particular was giving voters a bit of a free pass, as outlined in that second paragraph here. GWB and the politics of the time paved the way for a lot of what came after in the Republican Party, which is that of being endlessly at "war" with an ever shifting conceptual enemy (e.g., "terrorism", "deep state", etc).
A lot of the over reaction of that time wasn't just faced externally, but internally, at more moderate/skeptical Republicans and, of course, anyone that wasn't a Republican because now they were effectively terrorist adjacent. It's also when Fox really cemented itself as a far right propaganda network and it hasn't let up since. That entire period basically wrote out a systematic template for even more extreme voices in the party to follow and take the party on its current nihilistic, radically extremist, destructive path.
And that's precisely what Trump and company have built on.
It's not surprising that Trump would be the next electoral success story for the party, after granting two terms to an incompetent failson of a former president who was, up until that point, the single worst president in modern history, having overseen the worst terrorist attack in the country's history, engaged in two failed wars and sent thousands of Americans into a pointless meatgrinder of a war for no reason (sound familiar?), threw away a huge opportunity cost in addressing our environmental challenges and only made them worse, radicalized his party, threw us into one of the worst economic recessions in recent memory, and then quietly peaced out to go do oil paintings on his ranch.
This whole election feels like a 2004 redux, where we know what the choices are and we're just going to pretend like it's a normal election and go careening headfirst with the worst possible option and then pretend later that we really had no idea at the time.
I’m just reading your words a bit differently, but it’s fine. We’re in agreement and I’m not interested any more than you are in getting into a debate about it.
I just didn‘t want anyone to let GWB or the voters at the time off the hook here, because we knew very well what we were dealing with at the time and there may be some people that weren’t around, don’t recall, or think otherwise. Especially, since it’s already been twenty years and we’re still dealing with the consequences of that time and have seemingly learned nothing.
And again. It’s worth noting that having Palin as an actual VP candidate or Republicans constantly pushing the US to the brink of default, also didn’t do us any favors. The rest of the world has steadily watched as Republicans have made this country increasingly dysfunctional.
It’s worth noting that while the leader asks Biden to step aside because of the debate performance on the wishful thinking that some magical candidate will be able to step in, consolidate the party, and magically win, it also notes that Trump isn’t much younger, but of course fails to ask the same of him or make any mention of his clearly declining faculties. It’s just more of the same.
Last edited:
That isn’t too different from 2020 tbh.
As others have said, and I agree, I don’t care if Biden drops dead in August or if he turns into a ham sandwich in October, I will still vote for him because there’s a reasonable, competent team there that isn’t just around to grab power, enrich themselves, and watch the world burn. I’ve had quite enough of that two decades into the new millenium.
Personally, I don’t think he’s sinking to the abyss, but do I feel good about things? No, but I wouldn’t even if Harris or anyone else was at the top of the ticket (see 2004).
No, the concerns are real. You’re just mistaking the constant ineptitude of the party for a lack of concern.
Republicans have zero qualms about obtaining power and then immediately using it.
Seriously. Some people are acting like the DNC nominating convention is going to have Joe Biden acting like Bob Barker on The Price Is Right, read some random name from a card, and some unknown charismatic nobody from Kenosha, Wisconsin is going to run down the aisles to get a chance to win the presidency.
Weird. I was well aware of Biden’s positions, his age, and abilities for a while now. There’s been no shortage of coverage regarding his “baggage” for ages, it’s just everyone’s wetting the bed after a worse than expected debate performance.
His failing a debate doesn’t change my lack of enthusiasm and absolute commitment to voting for the ticket.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken
No, but I’m aware of how old the candidates are and the inherent impact that might have. It doesn’t really matter tbh.
If I take the argument at face value, the sundowning corpse of Joe Biden has done a lot more than I expected and more than most presidents decades younger than him. Trump is incoherent and mentally and physically unfit and “sundowning” himself (if we’re going to make random virtual medical assessments), and his administration got a lot of genuinely awful stuff done despite that and being one of the laziest people to hold the office in recent memory. So do I care if Biden is “sundowning”? Based in his current record in office and the alternative, not one bit, even if my personal preference is different.
Also, I’d argue “playing the political environment” means actually persuading voters more than just politicians since that’s what they respond to. Putting the onus on just politicians to do what you want is a bit lazy.
If Biden’s capabilities matters to the voters, then they had every opportunity to rally behind and vote for Dean Phillips, who ran a single issue campaign on this very issue and only ended his run in March of this year.
They did not and he barely got any votes, crowds, or attention from voters. Everyone mocked him and now those same people are shitting their pants, waiting for some magical, alternate reality and a time machine.
Also, if Biden loses, it won’t be because of his diminished capabilities, which Trump shares in spades, but because they preferred Trump and his policies/record. Candidates share some of the blame, yes, but ultimately the voters are the ones deciding and they’re not some guiltless, inactive class of people that magically get to claim “how did this happen“ after the fact.
”Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” - H.L. Mencken
Meanwhile, voters are now magically clueless that Joe Biden is 80+ years old and may now be aging and now that’s some sort of conspiracy?
This is getting beyond silly.
Hm, not so sure about that GWB thing. Pretty much the same thing.
He’s seemed largely fine before and safe environments is pretty much what handlers do. Journalists holding secrets is nothing new, lest anyone recall the mad rush to the printing presses when Trump’s term ended and dozens of journalists came out trotting out their “it was actually way way worse so pre-order now to find out just how bad it really was” exclusives.
None of that amounts to some grand conspiracy.
The polls were done 3-4 months ago. We've seen one disastrous debate for both sides, and one interview that critics didn't like because it reinforced their concerns.
Do you think you're going to get substantially different results from "strong" (unknown) candidates in the next week? If it's 58% Biden, 21% Harris, 17% Whitmer, and a bunch of randos on the margins, is that process going to assuage anyone currently panicking? Are we going to repeat the process again in 3-4 months if Biden still wins because things may have changed again?
After reading this forum for the past week, I thought that was the status quo and also the concern.
Warnock won his last election in 2022 against Herschel Walker, a poor candidate and former NFL player with allegations of CTE, with 51.4% to 48.6%.
I don't know that that would qualify as "out-sized electoral success"., let alone when you're dealing with a compressed time frame, high stakes, and minimal national name recognition.
Honestly, this general sentiment nails a lot of things for me personally, because this election has turned one nightmare campaign into two, with the additional one being aimed within the Democratic Party.
It’s starting to feel like 2004 got lonely and woke up next to 2016 in bed, and now I just want to wake up in 2033, when there will be no elections (assuming we still have them).
Yeah, you’re going to have sell the pitch a lot harder that voters are scrutinizing candidates and making informed choices after just now realizing Biden is old and running mental actuarial statistics, and that Trump is somehow immune from that same scrutiny, let alone after he killed hundreds of thousands of “extra” Americans by minimizing a highly contagious and fatal plague for months on end and ended Roe (something that is quite popular).
I’ve read transcripts of focus groups among swing voters and I’m sorry to report that the drinking bird toy is flying the plane.
Not sure why you’re suggesting that or if she’s just collateral damage in the continued carpet bombing of Biden.
Touching housing is a kiss of death. This country is well past the point of Marshal Plans for anything and it will absolutely set off a substantive portion of the electorate that has “got theirs” (e.g., student debt crisis). Never mind that the Supreme Court will find no “history or tradition” of housing in colonial America because it was just teepees and open living or whatever nonsense they wish to conjure up as legal justification and that every red state AG will collectively sue against it. I’ve participated in enough community meetings in my neighborhood to see that split in person.
The best bet there is to Trumpian rhetoric about the crisis and offer up some loose plans/specifics around addressing it. The federal government isn’t going to really solve it any time soon any more than we’ve managed to address health care or higher education or any other substantive issue.
Eh, this seems a bit pedantic, all things considered.
It’s also a little weird to point to Warren as some source of potentially infallible statements, given that she’s made some of her own (disclaimer: I like both of them as politicians).
I don’t necessarily trust any politician on laws and figures, let alone a lot of people, because the devil is in the details and people can make mistakes in good faith.
But...but.... Democrats has a different standard.
Always. As are women (often held to a different standard).
While I still think alleging "covering up cognitive decline" is running ahead of reality and a bit of a stretch*, I think saying "we all know Trump after 9 years of relentless coverage" is a bit misleading insofar as anyone extrapolating that the second term will be like the first term (something the current issue of The Economist just sort of glosses over) may very well be terribly mistaken.
We've already seen the consequences of the first term, including some that are now coming to the fore during Biden's term (hello, SC), but the second one could be dramatically different and not really "known". If a decent clip of Project 2025 comes to fruition, we may very well be speed running the worst aspects of things and obviously, events tend to take the lead on what happens (eg, covid).
Point in case, is he going to make a fuss about Ukraine and kinda of do nothing because he's lazy (eg, Afghanistan)? Or is he going to just turn off all the support and let Putin run rampant to mass murder/rape/torture? Is he going to let Netanyahu "glass" Gaza like he suggested and/or let Saudi-funded son-in-law/Kushner cut the ribbon for a new LIV sponsored Trump course in the middle of the Arabian desert in exchange for Israeli normalization, some US security guarantees to MBS's regime, and ensuring all Saudi royals spend small fortunes at his course? Are we going to get fast-tracked mass deportations once he gets his personnel in and his court appointees throw out legal challenges, with all the economic and personal consequences that follow? Is he going to make the Justice Department report directly to him, and thus remove all checks and balances, as Project 2025 has planned?
There are lots of things we just don't know despite all the coverage and what he says is meaningless because the only thing we do know is that he's a proven liar that puts his interests above everyone else.
*I don't care to litigate the point, just expressing a difference of opinion here.
David Frum is not anyone I’d take advice from. It’d be like asking David Brooks for his views on...anything.
Dems not marketing their successes isn’t new, nor is Trump taking credit for anything good, whether real or complete fabricated. What’s missing from those excerpts is the fact that Democrats don’t have a set of propaganda arms that consistently reach millions of people, whether that be Fox, talk radio, or the online ecosystem that blindly repeat the “good news” or talking points. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to do it more, but they don’t have the same infrastructure to do it with.
Dems not marketing their successes isn’t new, nor is Trump taking credit for anything good, whether real or complete fabricated. What’s missing from those excerpts is the fact that Democrats don’t have a set of propaganda arms that consistently reach millions of people, whether that be Fox, talk radio, or the online ecosystem that blindly repeat the “good news” or talking points. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to do it more, but they don’t have the same infrastructure to do it with.
My point was in the first paragraph. Maybe everyone knows it, maybe it was extraneous. :: shrug ::
This is the other half of what I was largely going to say, but mercifully someone else took the time to read Frum‘s drivel and wrote a lengthier response.
Also, while I don’t inherently think Frum is entirely acting in bad faith, he may very well be. I just tend to think he likes media attention, chumming it up with the pundits, and offering his consistently poor advice and opinions that never had any real bearing on reality. He was a speech writer for one of the worst presidents in modern history who never made any particularly good speeches and his pieces seem to be a continuation of that caliber of work.
The real life version of me is the absolute opposite of this. This was my evergreen electoral anthem and it remains doubly so this year.
This is like saying, “What could go wrong?” when planning a last minute vacation.Gonna take a couple days to shake out, but...
I'm thinking this might become the most unified Democratic Party of my lifetime. (And that's a few years.)
hopin', hopin', hopin'...
If there‘s a full throated rejection of Republicans despite the current electoral map come early November, I might say it then after the fact, but only briefly and so quietly only Voyager 1 could hear me.
It would be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Consistency and standards are not the media's forte.
Guessing the top three are the likeliest candidates, given their swing state potential and that they seem to be solid in their respective positions. My money would be on Kelly, personally, but we’ll have to see if the chemistry is there. I suspect they’ll get along swimmingly.
The other three have potential optics risks IMO: two women may be too much for an electorate that seems open to Trump, Walz looks older in an age focused race, and Pritzker is quite wealthy, which may be off putting to a subset of the Democratic base where we need everyone’s vote. Those aren’t huge hurdles, but I do think there’ll be a slightly higher tendency to risk aversion given the circumstances.
No real substance per UCLA law professor Rick Hasen (link to Stay Tuned w/Preet Bahrara episode on discussing legal issues re:changing nominees that dropped today; ~30m). FEC moves real slow, as we’re still resolving 2016 electoral issues. Just throwing mud at the wall. There aren‘t any real issues here, but Republicans will try to do anything.
Headline is misleading as he’s still donating to a super PAC he created to help the Trump campaign:
“Elon Musk is not spending $45 million a month to elect former President Donald Trump, though he has created a new super political action committee (PAC) to fund the Republican candidate, the billionaire told conservative commentator Jordan Peterson during an interview Monday evening.”
He lies all the time so hard to make the actual details of what he is contributing, but he is absolutely supporting Trump and helping to fund his campaign, even if it’s not “$45m a month”.
It‘s probably $42,000,000.69 a month.
This is pretty much it. He’s lazy, doesn’t know how to run organizations well, and there’s a reason his businesses tend to do poorly. If you have enough money though, you can mitigate a lot of your downsides in spite of your general stupidity.
Hard to think of a less appealing chyron than “Full Trump Speech”.
The only thing worse is reading a transcript of one because it becomes like reading a piece from an unreliable narrator in a foreign language.
Is it? Because Sarah Palin wasn’t that long ago and Trump’s decision making skills were never highly regarded (countless failed businesses, handling of COVID, staring at an eclipse, etc etc).
For all we know, he might’ve thought he was choosing Don Jr as his running mate, got confused because they looked kinda similar, but he signed some papers someone put in front of him and it was too late.
The way the EC is set up, it doesn’t matter if your opponent is a complete idiot, a savant, or a pumpkin, you’re liable to lose to them regardless. That’s a separate issue.
Yes. I always liked Harris, even if I didn’t always line up on policies here and there, but it is so, so refreshing to see joy, especially against seeing a bunch of perpetually angry Republicans.
Shoot that energy into my veins.
- Status