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host · 08-13-2006, 07:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by politicophile

Here is my first attempt in some time to inject new blood into Tilted Politics.

The 2008 political season is still so far away that all predictions must be taken with an unusually large grain of salt. Nonetheless, I find it interesting to predict the political future to the greatest extent possible. Here are what I believe are the big unknowns that will shape the race, as well as my predicted answers:

DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY:

1. The major question here is, of course, who will be the "Anti-Hillary?" Everybody knows who the perceived frontrunner is (Hillary) and everyone knows that the primary will ultimately develop into a two-horse race between the pro-Hillary faction and the anti-Hillary faction. Michael Moore recently had some choice words for Hillary about how she should expect to be thrown under the bus like Lieberman was, so it appears that the progressives will be searching for another candidate. Because so few Senators voted against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq, most of them are not viable alternatives for the progressive movement. I predict they will reach out to a popular Democratic governor who is not dogged by early support for the invasion of Iraq......

.......Anything I missed?

Yeah....I think that you missed the idea that "anti-war" is a republican label/talkingpoint.

Quote:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/ope..._political.htm
The Rovian Political Ploy and Why It Will No Longer Oppress America
By Anthony Wade
August 13, 2006

....The plan is pretty clear for the Rovian machine. Paint anyone who does not support the war efforts as cowards, who are weak on security, and cut and runners. I understand why Rove would play such a card, no matter how ridiculous it may be. First of all, it has already worked for so many years, why abandon it and secondly, it is the only card the GOP has left to play. America this time will be smarter however. Making them empty their liquids on line for flights will not be enough this time around. Here is the dirty little truth the GOP hopes you forget this November...

Iraq had nothing to do with 911, terrorism, or al Qaeda. No matter how many plots are foiled, it does not justify the Iraq War and America knows it. Don't think for a second that this foiled plot will be the end of it for the GOP. There may be another Osama tape released just in time to help GOP candidates, like he did in 2004 to help Bush. There may be more chatter and elevated terror alerts, timed to bump positive democratic stories from the front pages. Unfortunately, there may be another "event" designed to catalyze the American people into such a fearful state that they run to the polls to vote republican. What Karl Rove has not figured out yet is that America is on to them. If there is another foiled plot, they will be able to see through the façade and understand how the political whores are using it for their gain. If they see chatter and elevated terror alerts, they will also look to see what stories the media machine are trying to bury. God forbid, if there is another event, the American people will realize that it only validates that the Republican Party cannot protect them anyway.

We have heard the buzz words and the focus group tested phrases. We understand that there is no rise of Nazism and that the only fascist developments are in this country where corporations have taken over the governing of the people. We know that democrats do not want to "cut and run", but rather we want to end a debacle, save as many lives as possible and allow the entire world to help in the rebuilding of Iraq, a country we have destroyed. We understand that it makes more sense to listen to a man like John Murtha, who has more experience defending this country then this entire chickenhawk administration combined. We will not allow the swift-boating of anyone, anymore. The media can shove Mel Gibson-gate down our throats for weeks, as they did Natalie Holloway and Michael Jackson before him, and it will not matter. Call me a foolish optimist but I am starting to believe that the mind of the oppressed has awoken to the truth and a new day is dawning over our democracy...........

To win support from democrats, a potential candidate, candidate, or a politician serving in the U.S. senate and not up for re-election is compatible with the sentiment of mainstream voters in the US , if he or she simply says what Rep. John Murtha (D-PA), did and says......

(Polls show current US mainstream sentiment:

http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm

http://www.pollingreport.com/terror.htm#USA )

Quote:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...ack=crosspromo
"Swift Boat" Veterans Set Sights on Rep. Murtha
The Iraq war looms over another race, as the group that helped defeat John Kerry targets the antiwar lawmaker.
By Noam N. Levey, Times Staff Writer
August 13, 2006

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Two years after a cadre of veterans helped sink the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), they have found a new target in the old steel country of southwestern Pennsylvania: Democratic Rep. John P. Murtha.

In a fight that organizers say will feature rallies, TV ads and an aggressive Internet campaign, these activists are promising to make Murtha pay for his criticism of the Iraq war.

"I will do my best to 'Swift boat' John Murtha," retired Navy Capt. Larry Bailey said at a recent news conference here, invoking the 2004 campaign against Kerry that took its name from Vietnam War-era Navy vessels.

Few believe that Murtha, a Vietnam veteran who has represented his district since 1974, is in much danger of being driven from office......

......Unlike Lieberman, whose support for the war cost him Democratic voters, Murtha confronts a challenge sparked by his repeated calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Long among the most hawkish Democrats in Congress, the once media-shy Murtha has become a standard bearer for the party's antiwar wing since airing his criticism of the Bush administration's commitment in Iraq. And on street corners and town squares of this Rust Belt district, a small but committed corps of volunteers has joined Bailey, a North Carolina resident, in trying to make sure Murtha's constituents remember it — and vote against him in November.

Murtha has brushed aside the attacks.

"It's ludicrous," he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times last week. "What they are trying to do is distract from the [Iraq] issue…. There is no one who supports the military more than me."

Murtha's allies, led by a veterans group based in Richmond, Va., held a counter-rally in Johnstown that largely overshadowed Bailey's news conference. The pro-Murtha event featured former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who lost three limbs while serving in Vietnam.

The battle over Murtha's opposition to the Iraq war is unfolding in a place where support for the military has been an article of faith at least since the Civil War. The communities that form Murtha's district were among the first to send volunteers for the Union war effort — a distinction proudly noted on a memorial in Johnstown's town square.

Today, 15.3% of the district's residents are veterans, slightly above the national average of 12.6%, according to the Almanac of American Politics.

And when a Pennsylvania National Guard battalion stationed outside Johnstown returned in June from a yearlong deployment in Iraq's Anbar province, some 1,000 well-wishers turned out to show their support, according to a unit spokesman.

For years, Murtha has been the embodiment of that spirit, many locals say.

The democratic party has been trying to find it's way during the rapid, dramatic decline of it's former base.....organized labor. It is an inclusive party, as the fact that Harry Reid, who voted for the resolution, in fall, 2002 to authorize the use of force. if it became necessary, in Iraq, is senate minority leader, and the Senate campaign of "right to life" democratic candidate, Bob Casey, who leads against republican Rick Santorum in that PA race, clearly shows.......

Quote:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...l/15266956.htm
Posted on Sun, Aug. 13, 2006

PARTISANSHIP, NOT WAR STANCE, HURT LIEBERMAN
By Noam Scheiber

........Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, may be one of the most successful politicians of the new era. He initially supported the war in Iraq, but today he's viewed as one of the more reliable anti-Bush votes in Congress.

Perhaps more important, Reid is one of the more effective Democrats when it comes to denouncing and disrupting the Republican agenda. He routinely outfoxes his Republican counterpart, Sen. Bill Frist of Tennessee, as when he frustrated Republican efforts to tie a rollback of the estate tax to a bill raising the minimum wage. The rank and file revere him for it. According to a poll last year, roughly three-quarters of liberals who had formed an opinion of Reid had a favorable impression of him.

There's no doubt this new arrangement has a lot to recommend it. A party should stand for more than the sum of its interest groups. Anyone who doesn't think so needs only review, say, the 1984 presidential campaign, in which opponents successfully attacked Walter F. Mondale as a captive of big labor.

But the old interest-group system had at least one key advantage. In principle, it was capable of producing winning candidates in every part of the country, because it gave Democrats more ideological or partisan room on more issues.

Lieberman, it should be pointed out, probably abused this flexibility. But over the years many Democrats, among them Rust Belt politicians like Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, used it to remain viable in districts that were more conservative than the party's liberal wing.

The counter-Bushies typically respond that they're pragmatic enough to know when pressuring fellow Democrats helps the party and when it hurts. And to their credit, they've taken it easy on moderate Democratic senators from red states, including Bill Nelson of Florida and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. As a general rule, they try to favor the most liberal candidate who can win a race, not the most liberal candidate, period.

But the rising influence of the counter-Bushies raises two big problems. First, their judgment may be flawed when it comes to questions of electability. After all, many believed that Howard Dean -- a man who imploded during his first test, the Iowa caucuses -- could win a presidential election.

Second, the demise of the old interest-group model makes it tough for Democrats who don't share the counter-Bushies' liberalism to enter politics, since the structure that traditionally supported them may no longer exist. For example, even though today the counter-Bushies generally support the Senate campaign of Bob Casey, the Pennsylvania state treasurer and son of a former Democratic governor, the socially conservative Casey dynasty was built with strong support from organized labor.

Likewise, Reid may be pretty close to an ideal political tactician for the age of the counter-Bushies. But as a young politician in Nevada, he was known more for his opposition to abortion rights, to the equal rights amendment and to some restrictions on gun control than he was for his anti-Republican salvos.

Without a socially moderate constituency like organized labor having pull within the party, it's unlikely that he would have ever been elected to the Senate -- and unlikely that future Harry Reids will be able to win the lower offices that prepare them for federal races. That's a shame, because while Democrats may feel that they no longer have any use for Lieberman, they need all the Harry Reids they can get. Interest-group liberalism is a lousy way to run a party. But it may be better than the alternatives.

Democrats, despite being locked out of all legislative deliberation in the house of rep., for the last 12 years, and unable to introduce any bills or to receive permission to hold any hearings, were slow to learn that the fierce partisanship practiced on the other side of the aisle, must be met, "head on".

There is no "litmus test" that democrats must pass. The congresspersons who voted in late 2002 for the authorization for use of force in Iraq, despite the administrations frequent claims, did not have access to the depth and breadth of the intelligence info that Bush, as POTUS, had access to, especially in the category of dissenting and varying views, not contained in the rushed, 2002 pre-vote NIE, an "intelligence esitmate", reportedly completed in 2 weeks, that normally is compiled over 2 years.... My post at this link provides much support for this, as well as support for the premise that Bush made regime change in Iraq his top priority, 9 months before 9/11:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...4&postcount=94

In the <a href="http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpost.php?p=2103921&postcount=1">Huh? </a> thread on this forum, my OP also shows examples of what the republicans are trying to frame the November election into being about, and here is democratic primary loser, Joe Lieberman, voicing that false issue:

Quote:

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...57&postcount=1
Independent Lieberman kicks off revamped campaign in Waterbury
Associated Press
Published August 10 2006

......... "I'm worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don't appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us - more evil or as evil as Nazism and probably more dangerous that the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War," Lieberman said.

"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."..........

An accurate way to describe democrats is not "anti-war". Like the majority of Americans polled, democrats are against what I've described and documented, here:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...57&postcount=1 and here: http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...03&postcount=9

Anyone who wants to run a winning campaign for the 2008 democratic nomination for POTUS, need only to state (and believe) that the invasion and continued occupation of Iraq by US troops is a mistake and a senseless waste of money and manpower that necessitates the withdrawal if US troops, ASAP, first to desert bases already constructed, to discourage incursions by military forces of Iran, and then out of Iraq to the extent that withdrawal can be accomplished without leaving Iraq defenseless against invasion of troops from Turkey or from Iran.

Many democrats in congress have refused to shift even to the above described position. Politicians are followers, and the polls show that democratic offiiceholders need to catch up to where John Murtha has moved to on this issue.

The latest "terror plot" in Britain, is made up of homegrown and Pakistani participants. US airlines were weakened economically by the 9-11 attacks, and then bankrupted by continued low bookings and escalating fuel costs.
Polls show that Americans have caught on to the apalling and expensive mismanagement of the response to the 9/11 attacks by the Bush administration. Democrats recognize that the 9/11 attacks, the Katrina crisis, and the first "red terror alert", all took place in, or just after the month of August. If a democrat is elected to the POTUS in 2008, you can be sure that the president or the vp will spend august in Washington.....every year.....and that, if the airlines survive this latest secuirty alert, money wasted in non-productive detours like Iraq has been, will be spent trying to eliminate security breaches in airport passenger screening.....improvements such as funding for chemical liquid and gel screening equipment....needed for ten years now, but not funded into development and production, passenger screening methods that are consistant and address practical risk potential, and policies that address the root causes of suucide attacks, as well as more emphasis on properly categorizing and seperating criminal from political attacks. Democrats understand that the real threat is that the government will run out of money and the citizenry will experience the loss of most of their rights if this "war" continues to be fought with no regard for the cost, loss of constitutional rights, and a focus on correcly identifying what the greatest terror threats are, and where they originate. A big challenge will be dealing with an inevitable change in leadership in Pakistan.