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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
As silasw has pointed out, they're increasingly behind the 8-ball. They would need a sweep of all but one of the big swing states, and that becomes difficult as the deciding factors in the swing states are increasingly how many black and hispanic voters the Dems can get out.
Granted, it might be more difficult without a black man on the ticket, funnily enough, to get minorities as motivated, but hopefully Obama doesn't go Clinton on us and plugs the democratic nominee for all he's worth.
Barring that, we need some sort of catastrophe. The easiest one would be an economic meltdown (or meltdown not caused by a Republican-obstruction inspired default), since the President and his party tend to take blame for bad economy almost without thinking. Other disasters, however, would be harder to pin on Obama precisely.
Australia's got similar issues, a completely cartoonish Prime Ministers, and an "Anti-Boat People" Anti Immigration bent.
Basically anti-Immigration is a strong streak through much of the world and much of the world is currently in the hands of the Political Right or Right-Centrist ATM.
But as noted, as far as the presidency goes, the current calculus for the Presidency is very much biased towards Democrats. However, all you need is another Reagan/Dubya who appeals to the normal folks, and well.
Unemployment in the UK is actually falling
, NIMBYism isn't any more significant than the US, and house prices began a slow fall at the beginning of this year.
@Aprilla: Nobody here is smug. Far from it; we are rather desperately trying to cling to what remains of sanity in our political process. Our advantage here is that Republicans are climbing over each other trying to prove how insane they can be, and they are gradually destroying their credibility with the 60-plus percent of the population that hasn't drunk their Kool-Aid and is hopelessly lost.
With a rising economy, successful healthcare reform, no new wars, and landmark victories for gay rights under their belts, the Democrats' platform is looking pretty good for 2016. We could still fuck it up, of course, but as of right now polling strongly favors a Hillary Clinton victory and a possible reclamation of the Senate. The House is probably lost until 2022 thanks to gerrymandering, unfortunately.
edited 9th Mar '15 1:04:59 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"(Hell there is a portion of the Female-White-Republican voter base that votes Democrat because they realize their own party has gone gonzo on basic female genital medical care.)
Our purest and bitterest enemy right now is the media establishment itself, because the major networks fully buy into the story of false centrism that's causing everyone to believe in the following fairy tales:
- Democrats and Republicans are equally culpable for political gridlock and are equally extreme.
- The federal debt is a serious, even existential issue for our country.
- Inflation (rather than deflation) is a serious, even existential issue for our country.
- Scientific issues like climate change are a matter of opinion and agreement rather than fact.
- Economic issues like stimulus and interest rates are a matter of opinion and agreement rather than fact.
- Evil Terrorists are coming to destroy our families if we don't stop them with all the military might at our disposal.
- "Scandals" like using private emails at the State Department are important in any way, shape, or form.
- Obamacare is a disaster or a pending disaster.
- X (where X is something you personally care about) is under attack from Y (where Y is terrorists or government or immigrants). Basically, You Can Panic Now.
- Wealth/income inequality is a new thing, or is a matter of opinion and agreement rather than fact.
When most people are polled on their individual political beliefs, they are often surprised to find out that they reside firmly within the Democratic platform. This is because the media has very successfully obscured the Democratic platform.
edited 9th Mar '15 1:40:38 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"It is a somewhat hazy science, but we are getting some pretty lousy policy decisions.
edited 9th Mar '15 1:43:15 PM by PotatoesRock
Nnnope. Poll real economists: people who actually work in the field rather than expound on TV, and you'll find much broader agreement on fundamental issues than the media would have us believe.
Edit: I said relevant, not important. It's only important because the media wants us to care about it because they get ratings from tearing apart prominent people.
edited 9th Mar '15 1:42:10 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The point is that people who call economics a "soft science" are blatantly ignoring the vast amounts of hard data and calculation involved. It is a statistical science, made up of aggregating and analyzing data. The fact is that it satisfies all the requirements of a hard science: you can develop hypotheses, test them against past data, then use them to predict future data.
Keynesianism, in its various modern incarnations and revisions, passes those tests easily. The ideology and charlatanism that pass for economics among conservatives and even some far-out liberals aren't science by any definition.
What I think you mean is that the implications of these facts are up for debate, except we go back to the same old hard data that I was just talking about. It is conclusive at this point that wealth inequality is a primary cause of social and political disruption.
The only reason that these facts are up for debate in any way whatsoever is that those wealthy people have a perverse self-interest in using their wealth to dominate media in order to obfuscate the issue, so that they can keep accumulating wealth.
edited 9th Mar '15 1:55:36 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"edited 9th Mar '15 2:00:35 PM by PotatoesRock
You mean the ideal wealth levels to maintain politically and socially stable societies that maximize freedom and opportunity? We haven't ever had such a society, but we've come awfully close in many places, and we do have a lot of data about what doesn't work.
There is a fundamental problem in that humans may be too inherently short-sighted and herd-minded to ever maintain such a society, but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and stop trying.
edited 9th Mar '15 2:03:39 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The problem with this thread is that folks who disagree with the consensus tend to get banned, which sounds bad on the surface, but having been a regular poster in here for a few years and having seen a few people come and go, it's a fairly objective process by which the dissenters get discouraged.
I don't have a particular smugness about the Democratic party, myself. Demography doesn't lie and the Republicans aren't willing to put candidates out there who have sane policy answers, or when they do, those people *get* insane to get through the primary. See the Character Derailment of John McCain and Mitt Romney, aka the guy who friggin' piloted the ACA at the state level!
There's a difficult line to draw here. Part of the problem is that the kind of conservatism that is represented in the Tea Party ideology is inherently impervious to the kinds of fact-based discussions that we encourage here.
None of the people banned from OTC have had that happen because of their political views per se — aside from obvious things like raging homophobia or misogyny — but rather for poor argumentation style, refusing to accept competing evidence, and/or throwing out blatant strawman or ad hominem arguments. That this is a hallmark of what passes for debate in right-wing circles is their fault, not ours. We have also tossed people for extreme arguments on the other side of the spectrum — anarcho-communism for example.
What we want, first and foremost, is for this to be a pleasant place to discuss political topics. It's hard to do that when people are shouting at each other or waving flags in each other's faces. We are always open to evidence contradicting our beliefs. I've changed a few beliefs myself over the course of my years here, but if you're going to come in and assert something, you'd better be prepared to back it up.
edited 9th Mar '15 2:21:07 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
