2016 USA Presidential election thread I: The warm-up

[Kurokikaze]

He just needs to get on that fundraising apparatus that he's been running and make sure that he wins Iowa/NH.. After that just, gotta ride that momentum and not implode. Then once it gets super close he drops the VP nod bomb and picks Elizabeth Warren. Game over.

I can dream can't I?

[Kachiko]

I don't understand the whole NY Values blow back shtick. Whether you run to help your fellow man is a human value regardless of your political stance, which was the only ting Ted was talking about there. Donald was sharp to angle it towards 9-11 (which seems counter-intuitive, based on most peoples opinion of him here), but it has nothing to do with what Ted was talking about. It's a total red herring and people have largely been duped by Trump yet again.

[Eurell]

It was a stupid thing to say. He was attempting to attack Trump by comparing him the most populated(over 8 million people) city in the country.

What exactly are NY values anyway?

[Dantrag]

It was a stupid thing to say. He was attempting to attack Trump by comparing him the most populated(over 8 million people) city in the country.

What exactly are NY values anyway?

Every single value in the world? Just so many people that you will find everything there. BTW fucking love NYC. The memorials are extremely eerie though.

[Ragnus]

I get what he was going for. NYC best represents urban gentrification of this country in the eyes of rural residents. You ask anyone in this country "Name a big city" and NYC is probably what's coming out of their mouths. If the Cruz Commander video is any indication, he's trying to champion the rural folk who feel like they're being told that their way of life is antiquated / inferior to the lifestyle of people with big city values.

[6souls]

CNN is televising Trump's new rally at Liberty University. University president is the opener and recently he grabbed a glass of water, brought it up to the podium, then spilled half of it off the side. Dude just made himself a meme.

[notorious bum]

Ted Cruz on Trump and Reagan: "Ronald Reagan did not spend the first 60 years of his life supporting Democratic politicians."

[6souls]

But he spent his last 33 supporting them?

[Gredival]

After that just, gotta ride that momentum and not implode. Then once it gets super close(

With the no super delegates and no southern states he has?

Pundits noted MONTHS ago before the latest polls that he could win NH/Iowa but would still probably go on to lose every other state.

[Eurell]

Wasn't he a democrat until he was in his 50s? lol

[Fiye]

Then again what the fuck are conservative value? The whole thing's fucking stupid and I wish Ted Cruz would get murdered by someone in a dark alley. I hate the guy like I've never hated a politician before.

[Waraji]

Then again what the fuck are conservative value? The whole thing's fucking stupid and I wish Ted Cruz would get murdered by someone in a dark alley. I hate the guy like I've never hated a politician before.

There's always Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, I can go on...

[Ragnus]

Then again what the fuck are conservative value? The whole thing's fucking stupid and I wish Ted Cruz would get murdered by someone in a dark alley. I hate the guy like I've never hated a politician before.

God, Country, and Guns. You miss the memo?

[6souls]

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/18/462027...owing-reliance

The photo of Trump's supporters is one that should be framed.

[Dimmauk]

I get what he was going for. NYC best represents urban gentrification of this country in the eyes of rural residents. You ask anyone in this country "Name a big city" and NYC is probably what's coming out of their mouths. If the Cruz Commander video is any indication, he's trying to champion the rural folk who feel like they're being told that their way of life is antiquated / inferior to the lifestyle of people with big city values.

Big city values = Blacks, Jews, and Homos.

[Churchill]

http://www.npr.org/2016/01/18/462027...owing-reliance

The photo of Trump's supporters is one that should be framed.

I see a bunch of great Americans in that photo

[Churchill]

I will also say that article is some good propaganda. It basically alludes to the fact that colleges are set up to create democrats, what it doesn't talk about is how they all turn into republicans once they have a family.

[Gredival]

It basically alludes to the fact that colleges are set up to create democrats, what it doesn't talk about is how they all turn into republicans once they have a family.

To be fair, becoming a parent is like an express pass to becoming insufferable and stupid. The children become the center of the universe and anyone whose agenda doesn't place children first is dismissed because "You can't understand until you have kids." It's what fuels the anti-vaxxer mothers.

On that note, here's some more reality that won't dilute the kool-aid.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...e-sanders.html

After nearly two terms of power, with the prospect of Republican rule now merely hypothetical, Democrats want more. The paradox is that the president’s ability to deliver more change is far more limited. The current occupant of the Oval Office and his successor will have a House of Representatives firmly under right-wing rule, making the prospects of important progressive legislation impossible. This hardly renders the presidency impotent, obviously. The end of Obama’s term has shown that a creative president can still drive some change.

But here is a second irony: Those areas in which a Democratic Executive branch has no power are those in which Sanders demands aggressive action, and the areas in which the Executive branch still has power now are precisely those in which Sanders has the least to say. The president retains full command of foreign affairs; can use executive authority to drive social policy change in areas like criminal justice and gender; and can, at least in theory, staff the judiciary. What the next president won’t accomplish is to increase taxes, expand social programs, or do anything to reduce inequality, given the House Republicans’ fanatically pro-inequality positions across the board. The next Democratic presidential term will be mostly defensive, a bulwark against the enactment of the radical Ryan plan. What little progress liberals can expect will be concentrated in the non-Sanders realm.

So even if you fervently endorse Sanders's policy vision (which, again for the sake of full candor, I do not), he has chosen an unusually poor time to make it the centerpiece of a presidential campaign. It can be rational for a party to move away from the center in order to set itself up for dramatic new policy changes; the risk the Republican Party accepted in 1980 when Ronald Reagan endorsed the radical new doctrine of supply-side economics allowed it to reshape the face of government. But it seems bizarre for Democrats to risk losing the presidency by embracing a politically radical doctrine that stands zero chance of enactment even if they win.

And on why you can't get anything done with the "power of the people"

Sanders’s version involves the mobilization of a mass grassroots volunteer army that can depose the special interests. [....] 'You gotta take your case to the American people, mobilize them, and organize them at the grassroots level in a way that we have never done before.'

But Obama did organize passionate volunteers on a massive scale — far broader than anything Sanders has done — and tried to keep his volunteers engaged throughout his presidency. Why would Sanders’s grassroots campaign succeed where Obama’s far larger one failed?

Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so. Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it. As Sarah Kliff details, Vermont had to abandon hopes of creating its own single-payer plan. If Vermont, one of the most liberal states in America, can’t summon the political willpower for single-payer, it is impossible to imagine the country as a whole doing it.

[6souls]

I see a bunch of great Americans in that photo

Offset by the guy in blue in the middle.

[Dimmauk]

More reality that won't dilute the kool-aid.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer...e-sanders.html



And on why you can't get anything done with the "power of the people"

That is really depressing.