From the Democratic National Committee

Started by SGOS, May 13, 2018, 07:47:51 AM

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Shiranu

#15
QuoteA lot of his supporters were younger and may NOT have been energized by the old school Democratic Party.  It depends on whether the Hillary backers would have stayed home if Sanders had he won the nomination.

I think many people who voted for Hillary still would have gotten out for Sanders simply because they voted Democrat rather than candidate. That was Sanders true appeal; people wanted to vote for him, not his party, so you attract two sets of voters. And he polled better than Hillary for what that is worth against Trump.

I do agree with the remark in OP though that compared him as the Democrats' Ron Paul, unfortunately. that said unlike Ron Paul... I think he actually knows what the fuck he is talking about and isn't completely batshit.
"A little science distances you from God, but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him." - Louis Pasteur

GSOgymrat




I admit I like Oprah Winfrey. She seems like an empathetic, caring and generous person who obtained her fortune through hard work. She is good at what she does. I know many other people with similar qualities and don't think they are qualified to be POTUS either.

Mermaid

Quote from: GSOgymrat on May 13, 2018, 04:24:04 PM


I admit I like Oprah Winfrey. She seems like an empathetic, caring and generous person who obtained her fortune through hard work. She is good at what she does. I know many other people with similar qualities and don't think they are qualified to be POTUS either.
I believe Oprah herself has said this.
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities â€" all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. -TR

Unbeliever

I hope some people don't vote for Oprah in the hope they might just get a new car.
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Baruch

#19
Quote from: Unbeliever on May 13, 2018, 05:27:59 PM
I hope some people don't vote for Oprah in the hope they might just get a new car.

Run against the preselected D-party candidate in the primaries, get rewarded a house (see Bernie in 2016 ... it is his third house to own at the same time ... but unlike McCaine ... who had six houses when he ran in 2008, he probably has a clear memory of them).  If find it hilarious that any Leftist would vote for a billionaire ... including Winfrey.  Would Robespierre vote for Marie Antoinette?
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

trdsf

Julián Castro and John Hickenlooper.  I love Bernie and Elizabeth, but there is a point where age has to be taken seriously as a factor, and the Presidency is a profoundly difficult job, at least if you give a shit about actually doing it rather than issuing delusional and ungrammatical tweets at 3am.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

Hydra009

Quote from: Blackleaf on May 13, 2018, 11:00:36 AM
Honestly, I think people underestimate Oprah's chances. A lot of people love her, and she has many years of good will built up.
That's precisely why I doubt she would run.  Politics is inherently divisive.  Plus, the Presidency is arguably a step down from her current job.

SGOS

Quote from: Hydra009 on May 14, 2018, 11:05:57 PM
That's precisely why I doubt she would run.  Politics is inherently divisive.  Plus, the Presidency is arguably a step down from her current job.
Currently, she has a good sense of her own image, and a sense of how much that image depends on her behavior.  She's riding a wave of loving popularity that is highly profitable, and once she enters politics, she loses all that.  She will be hated and demonized for the ultimate petty reasons, and her adoration will be determined by irrelevancies like party affiliation.  Yeah, she's got the better job.  I think it's actually the harder job, but she is highly skilled at that job.  That doesn't mean she will be equally skilled at all other jobs.  Staying where she is seems like a no-brainer.

Blackleaf

Quote from: Hydra009 on May 14, 2018, 11:05:57 PM
That's precisely why I doubt she would run.  Politics is inherently divisive.  Plus, the Presidency is arguably a step down from her current job.

I would love to see people try to take the moral high ground with Oprah. The only ones I expect would be demonizing her are the far Right, and no one else would find their attempts to do so convincing. What could they do, paint her as an idiot? With a moron that Trump in charge, that ain't gonna fly. Imagine her and Trump in a debate. Two unqualified candidates, but one idiot who can't think of anyone other than himself. Both are successful in business, selling their names, but only one has used their wealth to make a positive difference in the world. Trump wouldn't even be able to fall back on his "quality" of not being a politician.
"Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law, to another bound;
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound."
--Fulke Greville--

Mermaid

President Winfrey was literally one of the Jokes in Idiocracy.
A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities â€" all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. -TR

trdsf

With regard to Oprah, all I have to say on the matter is that good intentions do not necessarily make a good presidency.  Case in point: Jimmy Carter, who's made a much better job of his post-presidency than he did of his term in office.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

SGOS

Quote from: trdsf on May 15, 2018, 11:27:30 AM
With regard to Oprah, all I have to say on the matter is that good intentions do not necessarily make a good presidency.  Case in point: Jimmy Carter, who's made a much better job of his post-presidency than he did of his term in office.
I was disappointed by Carter too, but in retrospect, many of the things that disappointed me were not his doing.  Presidents take a lot for blame for things that started long before they ever became candidates, and also take credit for things they had nothing to do with.  Carter wasn't the most dynamic sounding president, but I read a piece about one thing he did that was good.  Whether he did it by accident or design, I cannot say.  Short term it didn't work in his favor.  It may be the most important thing he did, and people didn't like it.  He is often noted for his doom and gloom attitude to many American problems, "If the country is sick, it might require a bitter pill."  And that brings me to:

INFLATION

Carter presided over the worst inflation I've ever seen in our country.  And up until then, no president tackled it with more than band aides.  People blamed Carter for it, but it really started much earlier with the Vietnam war debt, and the article put most of the blame on Carter's fellow Democrat, Lyndon Johnson who escalated the biggest war debt at the time.  Nixon may have equaled him, but that's a guess on my part.

How does a country get rid of unpayable debts?  They can inflate the dollar for one thing.  We blamed it back then on the Arabs, but a case can be made that the Arabs were only responding to our inflation, not the cause of it as is the popular belief.  Carter's role in curbing inflation was to appoint Paul Volcker to the Fed, and he's the one who served up the bitter pill of putting the brakes on the government printing presses, and raising interest rates, sky high too, which curbed spending.  People don't like inflation, and they don't like to curb spending money they borrow, and there wasn't a lot to borrow.  But economics being the mysterious set of ideologies that it is, this tactic seemed to work.  And people hated it!  Except me.  I put my money in the most boring investment of all time, a money market that invested exclusively in government T-Bills, and I was making over 20% paid in monthly dividends.  Eventually, that market went down to 2% or something not worth the effort.  It may not even exist today in an environment of sub prime tranches and other exotic investments on Wall Street.

Volcker was head of the Fed well into the Reagan presidency, and when inflation started to ease, and the printing presses started to roll again, and when borrowing rates came down, can you guess who got the credit for America's economic boom that followed?

I read this a long time ago, and found the article surprising, I didn't identify it with some partisan group, not any that were well known at the time.  It made sense, but it could be wrong, too.  Maybe inflation stopped on a dime with Reagan's trickle down economics.  You think?


trdsf

Quote from: SGOS on May 15, 2018, 12:23:53 PM
I was disappointed by Carter too, but in retrospect, many of the things that disappointed me were not his doing.  Presidents take a lot for blame for things that started long before they ever became candidates, and also take credit for things they had nothing to do with.  Carter wasn't the most dynamic sounding president, but I read a piece about one thing he did that was good.  Whether he did it by accident or design, I cannot say.  Short term it didn't work in his favor.  It may be the most important thing he did, and people didn't like it.  He is often noted for his doom and gloom attitude to many American problems, "If the country is sick, it might require a bitter pill."
Oh, definitely, Carter was beset by a terrible run of luck that would've derailed any presidency, and wasn't his fault, and I won't argue that Reagan got the credit for Carter's long-term planning.  Certainly "trickle-down" (or supply side or Laffer curve or, most accurately, voodoo economics) didn't turn the trick: we know that because it's been the only thing the GOP has offered for just about the last 40 years and the only thing it's given us is the extreme wealth gulf we see now.  Clearly, nothing has trickled -- remember the Clinton economy?  He raised taxes modestly on the highest brackets, and zoom, off it went.  The reason for that is both simple and obvious: an economy only works if the money in it actually moves.  Under trickle-down, it's encouraged to stagnate into huge, inert pools.

Certainly before Carter, the economy was already crummy -- I remember 'stagflation' and 'Whip Inflation Now!' buttons -- and he doesn't deserve blame for what he inherited.  But also working against Carter was that in the recent post-Watergate era, I think people wanted something other than the terminally glum Nixon or feckless Ford... but neither did they want a serious Sunday school master like Carter turned out to beâ€"although that demeanor is what delivered the Camp David Accords.

Ultimately, I think what did Carter in more than anything else was that he didn't build bridges to the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.  Also, he tried to run his presidency like the governorship of Georgia writ large, and it's too complex for the kind of micromanagement he could employ as governor.  The Carter White House was at odds with the Democratic Congress far more often than they needed to be, and internally bogged down with details.
"My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution." -- Barbara Jordan

Baruch

Yes, one president does not a win/lose make.  If you don't take into account Nixon's taking the international dollar off of gold and putting it on oil ... then you aren't paying attention.  The domestic dollar had already been raped by LBJ.  We are still fighting Nixon's war for oil.  Inflation increased from 64-72 because of the Vietnam War and LBJ's complete mismanagement of the economy.  Guns and Butter.  Ford carried out Nixon's plan, and Carter inherited it, wasn't going to rock that boat.  But great instabilities were let loose until Volker tamed them.

Carter was a Trilateralist ... in the David Rockefeller camp of the Deep State.  Not a hick.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Mr.Obvious

Quote from: Blackleaf on May 13, 2018, 11:00:36 AM
Honestly, I think people underestimate Oprah's chances. A lot of people love her, and she has many years of good will built up. I think as far as female candidates go, her chances would be better than any who ran before her, and you know the chance of getting our first woman President would appeal to some people. I would prefer Bernie Sanders myself, though. It all depends on who the super delegates choose, but I really think super delegates should stop being a thing.

I don't worry about het chances. I worry what would happen Should she get there.
"If we have to go down, we go down together!"
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