kutulu

I read through these threads and I'm hearing a lot of BS from the right. If you listen to what they are saying the Republicans not only got control of the White House, Senate, and House of Reps but did so in a totally dominating fashion. The Dems are now totally irrelevant to US politics and might as well give up. I'm sorry but it's 100% BS.

Presidential Election: You won by a 51.4% to 48.3% margain. That is hardly a commanding lead. Yes you won, but barely.

Moving on to the Senate. You picked up 4 seats. That is huge. However look at how the races went out:
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pag...ate/full.list/

I'm going to take an arbitrary number and say that a win with 60% of the vote is a large majority and under 60% is a close race. Using that criteria the Reps won 11 close races and the Dems won 5. The Dems won 10 with a large majority and the Reps won 8. Sure you guys gained a net 4 seats but you Barely won those four seats. Most of those races had the winner getting less than 55% of the vote. Realistically those could be just as easily lost in 6 years.

I'm not going to check the house. There are just too many races and I don't have the time for it. I think that this is proof enough that the Reps do not represent some outstanding majority in America.

To the Democrats:
We have work to do but I just don't think the future is as pesimistic as the Reps would like us to think it is. There were a LOT of close races from the POTUS to congress. We only need to attract a small amount of people to pull an upset like this election on the Reps in '08.

Dwayne

What I am sick of hearing from the right is that the left has no morales. There was an article in the Boston globe last sunday about the countrys morales. It turns out that Massachusetts, the most liberal state, has the lowest devorce rate and lowest teen pregnancy rate. It goes on talking about how Massachusetts and other NewEngland states have the highest education rate. Further more, the states with the highest devorce rates are the states that have traditionaly voted conservative. I have tried to find this article unline but have been unable to. I am also sick of the right calling liberals un-American and saying that being liberal means raising taxes.

flstf

From my perspective (one who voted for neither major party) the Democrats should nominate a fiscal conservative from rural middle America or the south if they want to cut into the Republican vote. Hillary doesn't have a chance unless the Republicans nominate someone like Pat Robertson, LOL.

kutulu

I totally agree with you. In order to get most of the country to vote your way you need to have a centrist approach (or at least make people think it). Hillary will never have that. In addition, there are just too many people that ALREADY hate her.

Mephisto2

I still don't understand why people hate Hillary Clinton. What has she ever done wrong? Sure, she's a Democrat, but is that it? From what I hear she's been a very good Senator for New York.

Please educate me.

Mr Mephisto

runtuff

Every see the bumper sticker: "Jesus was a liberal"

tecoyah

She is an excellent Senator...in my opinion, and I am not a democrat. But I am in NY, and have been pleased with her record so far. Mush of the dislike for her seems to come from her affiliation with Bill Clinton, and her stint as first lady, or so it would seem.

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

kutulu

This is the cynic in me but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that she is sucessfull, strong, and powerfull. She got hit with the "feminazi" label and I don't know what brought that on.

maleficent

Good senator? She's the junior senator, so she really can't cause any trouble, what she's really done that's good, I don't know. She rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, when having no real roots in NY, she moved here and decided "oh, I'll run for senate" Why not go home to Illinois, why not go home to Arkansas. Moinahan's was going to retire and she wanted it...

It's hard to put into words why I don't like her, the whole Whitewater fiasco had me questioning her ethics. Vince Foster's death (suicide?) still is a bit of a mystery, she's the stereotypical feminazi type that so many people bitch about but when Bill was running for office, she changed her name to his and all of a sudded baked cookies.

She went on national television, before Bill's affair was outted, and whined something fierce about the vast right wing conspiracy out to destroy her husband. And then there was her huge pet project, health care reform - which went nowhere...

I'm not a fan - and I'm sure some fan could rebutt any thing I've said - - but I don't see her as a viable candidate outside of California/New England.

__________________

irateplatypus

you're right, just over 3% isn't that big of a margin... but i think it takes on a certain significance in a Presidential Race. when you figure each major party possessed 37% of all votes on Tuesday and that at most of the electorate is committed to voting one way or the other... the campaigns are only fighting over the middle 20-25%. this magnifies any spread... 3% of the total ballots cast is actually a much larger percentage of all undecided votes that could conceivably be won by either side.

additionally, you have the 3% bolstered in significance because of the lack of 3rd party support this time around. if this election weren't so heated and Bush so polarizing... Nader may have picked up 4-5% of the total vote. Liberals were reluctant to vote Nader in hopes of unseating the President, adding to Kerry's percentage of popular vote. Even so, the President's lead was still decisive (though not overwhelming) under these conditions that would seem to favor Kerry.

Senate, like you said, big win for Republicans.

House, an increased majority but less dramatic than the Senate results.

__________________
If you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

~ Winston Churchill

roachboy

more attention needs to be paid to old-school mobilization.
one of the main practical reasons the right did as well as it did was because they organized at the grassroots level, using the churches that were politically sympathetic as their base networks. this mobilization explains more about the rise and usage of "moral" (read christian rightwing) issues than anything about the substance of these issues does.

obviously the seperation of church and state is irrelevant at this level for these folk.

the other major factor that will not last too long (i hope) is the iraq fiasco--i wonder if the right needs war to sell its ideology--this was the other boundary condition that bolstered the usage of fear as campaign tactic for them.

as for "suggestions" coming from the right about what the democrats need to do--they are almost entirely not worth paying attention to. they are disengenous, top to bottom. they are based on trying to turn the results of intensive, sustained, well-funded grassroots activity into something that can be explained ideologically. the premise is false.

but this is how it goes: the right is interested in total domination. the folk who run the show do not invest in this process in anything like the way the people who are mobilized within the show do. the latter might actually care about "moral" issues--the folk running the show care about getting in power and staying there.

gramsci was right: this is a war of position, a war over the frame of reference within which politics can function. what the democrats--and the left (they are far far from identical) needs to do is take this fact seriously. so far they have not.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

flstf

I don't quite know myself. Most of what I know about her is from people's opinions of her coming from the TV political shows and discussions with some independant voters that I know.

From what I can tell some of the disagreement with her stems from the socialized medical plan she was pushing. Some people disagree with her carpetbagging in New York to run for office. From what I can tell she is considered ultra-liberal which is a death knell for running for national office.

To me she is just another big government polititian, but I usually vote Libertarian. I see no reason for hate. I would think that the ultra-liberal tag would be hard to shake. I know it's only perceptions but sometimes they stick. I think the Democrats would do well to stay away from these perceptions next time if possible.

cthulu23

Hillary isn't a viable candidate, but I think that it flows from vague assumptions such as this rather than more from any real, concrete objections to anything that she has done. The fact that "feminazi" is an all too common american perjorative kind of sums it all up. Who needs reason when you have disproved allegations (Whitewater and Foster)?

Mephisto2

So it's as I expected. People dislike her because.... well, just because.

It's also unfortunate that she's blamed for a policy (health care reform) that failed. Many people may disagree with the policy itself, but it sounds like a lot of the dislike seems to be because the policy itself "went nowhere." I'm sure there are Republican policies that failed also. Just because someone has failed to implement something they proposed does not mean they should be criticised for its failure per se (if you know what I mean). One could say the same thing about 99.9% of all politicians.

Thanks for the (muddy) insight!

Mr Mephisto

shakran

They dislike her because she had the unmitigated audacity to be a strong female presence in the whitehouse, the gall to actually do something with her status as first lady rather than sit around, giggle, and give tours to the media at Christmas, and the temerity to expect more of herself than to leave her position after 8 years with only a slogan (just say no!) to her credit.

They also dislike her because most people are sheep who will believe anything someone else tells them.

To the conservatives that are so pleased with this election, saying that Bush's re-election means he's done something right because the people must believe he's done something right, keep in mind that the proliferation of urban legends indicates that many if not most people will believe anything as long as it's explained clearly and without using too many multisyllabic words.

maypo

Hey, this is funny!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Because this is exactly what I am tired of hearing. Character assasination with hatred and no facts :
Health care is falling apart and you are complaining about someone having the foresight to try to address that issue.
Hillary, she's a bitch because she cares. (new campaign slogan)

You shouldn't even be writing in this thread because your ideas all originate from a vast right wing conspiracy Vince Fosters suicide, whitewater, health care.

The sad part is you aren't even aware you've been played.

roachboy

hilary clinton was the object of a sustained smear campaign in right media during the clinton period. the arguments were few, as i remember: she got blamed for the national health panel clinton set into motion--and a whole series of other absurd things.
the way the campaign worked, it really did not matter what if any substance there was behind anything: what mattered was that is was elaborated through repetition.

it looks like the clinton period was a kind of laboratory for the right media apparatus--working out the kinks in the delivery system, testing how far they could go in shaping the perceptions of the faithful by repeating just anything.
slander of hillary clinton was a letimotif for limbaugh for years.
that it seems to have stuck with anyone gives a pretty good indication of how important the dynamics of the "group hate" is to conservative ideology--straight out of orwell, into your lap across (at the time) the medium of am radio.

at this point, my post merges directly into that by shakran, above.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

james t kirk

[QUOTE=shakran]They dislike her because she had the unmitigated audacity to be a strong female presence in the whitehouse, the gall to actually do something with her status as first lady rather than sit around, giggle, and give tours to the media at Christmas, and the temerity to expect more of herself than to leave her position after 8 years with only a slogan (just say no!) to her credit.

QUOTE]

Exactly.

She's not a "traditional" first lady.

She's educated, tough, smart, and plays with the boys.

A lot of people can't handle that.

I remember one year when Bill's ratings were low, they tarted her up for Christmas and had her bake cookies or something demeaning like that.

How pathetic.

archer2371

Actually, the whole thing that put people off about Senator Clinton and her health care thing was that she took a bunch of experts, nobody from either house of Congress and went in and drew up a plan that really wouldn't fly. Newt Gingrich at the time declared her bill DOA and that was the end of that. She was well meaning I'm sure, but she didn't go to the people, not even to Congress and ask for opinions, basically said, "I know what's best for you and you don't so I, the really intelligent person, will do the things for all of you dumb people out there can't do." That may not be what she meant to send out as her message, but that's what it was perceived to be, and in politics, perception is everything. Plus carpetbagging is never very popular, unless you have extreme name recognition, which the Senator has. Just look at Alan Keyes for cryin out loud, the man got his ass kicked, then handed to him on a silver platter, he was portrayed as a carpetbagger who didn't understand the issues facing Illinois. Regardless I don't think he would have won anyways, but the carpetbagging hurt him a lot.

__________________
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"Hey Grif, Chupathingy...how bout that? I like it...got a ring to it."

"I have no earthly idea what it is I just saw, or what this place is, or where in the hell O'Malley is! My only choice is to blame Grif for coming up with such a flawed plan. Stupid, stupid Grif."

Derwood

I'm going to try to steer this back onto the original subject....

Two things mostly piss me off about the Republicans way of thinking this election:

1. Morals (read: Christian Morality) needs to be legislated

2. Democrats always spend spend spend and have to raise taxes to do this.

For the first, it's the obvious separation of church and state idea. The fact that banning gay marriage was even on state ballots (nevermind that 11 states voted to do just that) makes me sick.

For the second, take a look at Clinton's record for government spending vs. Bush's. Sure, Bush cut taxes but he's putting the federal deficit in the shitter and now wants to raise the debt ceiling so he can get trillions more for this war. Eventually, someone will HAVE to raise taxes to get the country back on the level, but by then, Bush will be off bass fishing somewhere and won't take the heat.

__________________
"You can't shoot a country until it becomes a democracy." - Willravel

maypo

This never really happened, your opinion was shaped by a republican media apparatus that was much more sophisticated than the democrats ability to handle it, as you said perception is everything and shaping that perception (ie Swiftboat Veterans for Truth)
has become everything.

Back to the thread: I am sick of hearing equivalization; ie When someone commits some corrupt or dishonest act that I think that the Republican party will sink to any low for power. I am amazed that they have lost none of their moral authority when the two shining media lights, Rush Limbaugh and the awesomely hypocritical bill o'reilly have been shown to be, respectively, a drug addict (excuse me, a prescription drug addict) and a power mad asshole. (you may be able to switch those around, I don't know bills' drug history)

Superbelt

Everyone knows his utterly KooKoo politics which turn off everyone this side of Jerry Falwell ensured he had no chance in the race, but it wasn't the carpetbagging that hurt him so much as the hypocracy over carpetbagging. And that was really only the icing on the cake. Frankly I am surprised that Keyes got as many votes as he did. 27% of the vote with almost 1.4 million votes for him is.... alarming.

daswig

The left ran a no-holds barred GOTV campaign, along with a massive Hollywood-driven voter registration drive. It wasn't enough. It wasn't even close.

If the Democrats want to stop being marginalized, they NEED to stop pushing shit that much of the country loathes. Two cases in point: "in your face" gay rights, and gun control.

/just sayin...

WillyPete

Derwood, you make a good point. I was thinking that yesterday.
Why did people vote to ban gay marriage when marriage in the US is largely seen as a religious rite rather than a legal contract.
I thought there was meant to be a separation of state and religion over there?
You WANT the governmet to tell you how your religion should be practised?

The big push for same sex marriage is to give each partner the LEGAL rights allowed to heterosexual partners, not the religious aspect yet America voted with a RELIGIOUS bias on this point.
Merging company entities have more legal claim on one another than same sex partners.

Quite sad.

roachboy

i am particularly weary of:

"liberal elite"---a meaningless phrase that functions mostly to convince folk on the right that they are being persecuted. a signifier for channelling class resentment.

"moral issues"---are not. they are political. they are also known as "wedge issues" they have been articulated and used to trigger a particular kind of response from the religious right. push the button, the muscle twitches.

everything the right might have to say on the question of gay marriage:
i genuinely do not understand why anyone who takes the drama of thier relation to god---the question of their soul---as their central concern in thier lives would be concerned in the slightest about who other people choose to love.

i do not understand how these same people have been been convinced that the obvious situation--marriage is a legal institution--does not obtain.

i do not understand how it is possible--at all--that folk have taken seriously the long line of vile christian coalition video propaganda to shape the understanding of what it means to be gay. this type of church basement nonsense is a form pioneered early on in the campaign against colorado's proposition 2....maybe because these videos claimed to be "documentaries" it is assumed they must be true....

i do not understand how a religion predicated on the new testament--you know, the one that talks about love your neighbor--can be warped into this kind of bigotry.


the assumption that the right gets to define what is and is not american.

that there were no problems with voting in this election.
in fact there has been a riot of trouble with this election.
in fact there is mounting eveidence of massive voter fraud in ohio.
in florida
in new mexico

no wonder the right tried to call for unity right away, inflating the nature of the bushwin, launching what amounts to a discursive offensive againt the opposition--effects of which you see here, in these boards--just give up, you are out of touch with mainstream america


what i am most tired of, however, is that the far right--the petit bourgeois core of the new republican constituency--defines itself as "mainstream"
it is insane.

that a 3% margin is a mandate.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

smooth

you said class.

quit engaging in class warfare you liberal elite.


and I propose we wait until all the votes are counted before we analyze any sort of margin or mandate.


you had too much meat in the middle for me to address, sorry.

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

roachboy

which leads to another question (hope this is not a threadjack, but you gave me the space for it, smooth):

what is the relation between concession speeches and the counting of actual votes?
if it turns out that the actual vote count reveals massive problems
or a different outcome
what happens?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

powerclown

"bushwin"
Hehehehehehe

aliali

I don't agree with most of the whining above and there are plenty of good reasons to not like Hillary Clinton (honesty issues, socialized health care, power mad, whitewater, billing records, vast right wing conspiracy, ultra-liberal voting record, high taxes, cattle futures, etc.), but here is my on-topic complaint about the winners on tues.

1) All Doctors and drug companies are being driven out of business by lawsuits. We need to take all power and rights from the horribly injured and give more, even more protections to the Insurance Companies (oh, that's right they say Doctors, but we know what this is about). Those disfigured and killed by negligence should be stopped from filing frivilous lawsuits and the way to stop all the frivilous lawsuit is to make sure that the most injured lose the most through caps on damages, etc.

seretogis

Three percentage points in the re-election of someone who didn't even get the popular vote majority four years ago is a HUGE gain. Stop being a sore loser and realize that Republicans, Bush in particular, has won people over to his side with his ideas and his strength of character.

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

roachboy

i love how folk try to trivialize the results of this election by equating it to a game of kickball in your elementary school playground...stop being a sore loser...jesus....it is a pretty adolescent way to see politics.

the election presents problems all the way around--from mounting evidence of voter fraud (i'll post stuff once more information is available--and i am sure others are watching this as well) to the question of how to react to the nature of right discourse and its relation to new patterns of mobilization that exploit churches as organizing tools. the list goes on and on. it is naieve to expect that people who opposed everything about the first bush regime will suddenly stop doing it. because it is not like we lost a kickball game by 3%.


i would prefer to think about this outcome.
which requires you retain a distance from these ridiculous calls for "unity"

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

tspikes51

The fact still remains:

Most of the voters out there voted Republican. Now, the question is, why do you associate the people who voted Republican with being right wing? I am certainly not right wing, but voted half-Republican this election.

__________________
"I'm telling you, we need to get rid of a few people or a million."
-Maddox

Superbelt

Well, since popular vote obviously doesn't matter, you can't use it to declare a mandate.

roachboy

3% more according to the current "count"
3% more of the 40% that voted.
this is not "most voters"
this is a slim majority that woudl not have happened had the right not simply been better organized.
little to do with the content of the ideology.
rather a different kind of political machine making its presence felt--and demanding payback straight away--the christian right knows full well how important its organizing was to the bushwin, and they are expecting direct payback---so much for women's right to control their bodies, for example. so much for civil rights for gay folk.

for those not directly part of the organized aspects of the space, i suspect that the marketing of an irrational war in iraq played a role. this kind of conservativism has always needed war, used war for its advantage.

the media apparatus working for the right is good at what it does, too. it manipulates bush's image knowing it is just image: those who support bush on these grounds tend to treat a highly manipulated image as a mirror of reality--witness the kind of responses that come up from teh right over and over to farenheit 911 as evidence.

gotta go

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

Why does the right think Bush protected us from terrorism?! I have heard the from my own flesh and blood, and I have no idea who told them this. Bush went to war, of course, but how in God's name did attacking Iraq (and killing over a million Iraqi's, military and civilian) protect us from terrorism? I hear it right here from the mostly very intelligent community of tfp. Bush admitted that the reasons we went to Iraq, WMDs and a connection to the al qaeda, were untrue. We did not stop terrorism by entering Iraq, we actually created more in the form of insurgents (a.k.a. rebels). We gave up our search for Ossama. The man the government named as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was cornered in the tora bora mountains. We pulled out our troops, and asked very nicely if the warlord could find him for us.

How did Bush protect America? I am really confused about this.

roachboy

what seems to matter for those who forgot about all the problems that attended the iraq farce is that bush appeared to respond to 911. what object of the response seems much less important than the fact of response. this follows from the administration's almost immediate framing of the attacks as a variant of the western film--good vs evil--no need for precision in the target selection if you reduce everything to those terms--all that matters is the fact of response and the equating of that response with the actions of "the good".....within this, it is possible to be at once vacant and resolute. all that matters is mobilization.

this seems to me the only explanation that makes sense, in general terms.

let's see: a nation united behind the signifier of a Leader mobilized into a total war against an enemy that is everywhere and invisible, both within and without, in which all that matters is the dynamic of response.....hmm....well, lots of people found this compelling the last few times around too. thinking italy in the late 1920s and moving forward. you can figure it out.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Pacifier

I think it has something to do with civil rights, a party that bans gay marriage is on the "right wing", a party that makes laws like the patriot act is on the "right wing".

a party that uses some obsure "morale values" to restrict freedoms is on the right wing.

and people who vote because of those "values" instead of war, economy, taxes, civil rights or education are making me sick.

__________________
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere. Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death
— Albert Einstein

seretogis

It's pretty adolescent to try to trivialize your opponent's victory because you don't know how to deal with failure on a massive scale. Despite all of the negative press that Bush received -- the "quagmire" coverage of Iraq, the "failure" in Afghanistan, CBS's fake memo, the "missing explosives" a week before the election, Bin Laden's October surprise video -- despite all of this, Bush won. Not only did he win, he received 51% of the vote, something that hasn't happened since 1988. Open your eyes, get over the triple-loss, and think of how to win -- by change.

__________________
seretogis - sieg heil
perfect little dream the kind that hurts the most, forgot how it feels well almost
no one to blame always the same, open my eyes wake up in flames

kutulu

When was the last time a LOSING candidate got 48% of the vote? Oh yeah, nobody mentions that. The right needs to admit that it was hardly and asskicking.

I think that truth is that the right is afraid that a very liberal and very weak candidate got that many votes. The only way to negate that is to declare an asswhooping that didn't happen. Imagine that. Republican leaders and pundits lying to us.

aliali

Who said gay marriage is a civil right and do the people not have the right to vote on that issue? No party banned gay marriage. The people voted in several different states on this issue. I don't know the details, but didn't the gay marriage ban beat out W. in every single state. That is, there were a lot of non-rep.s out there banning gay marriage.

I'm sorry, but the dems. try to restrict freedoms all the time. In addition to gay marriage, which JFKerry supported banning on a state by state level, they often seek to restrict my freedoms--they take my money and want more of it, they limit the use of my property--which is MY property--not the government's, they limit my freedom to hire and fire who I want in my business, they limit my freedom of contract, they limit my freedom to educate my children in the way I see fit, they limit my freedom to marry my second cousin and have two wives.

As to the way people vote making you sick, its going to be worse next time the more you all continue to call the majority names and insult those who disagree with you. The shrillness seems to be in proportion to your increasing minority status amongst the electorate.