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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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There is an argument to be made that Obama and the Democrats of 2008-2010 were too timid with their supermajority and should have pushed for stronger reform.
Though given the varies things that varies Blue Dog Democrats fought the president on at the time (like how Joe Liberman infamously killed the chance of a public option coming to the ACA) there likely wasn't too much more that could be done.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:14:49 AM by Mio
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As I said earlier, Congress can override Trump's veto of any budget bill, but it requires that some Democrats join in said override. Ironically, this forces Republicans to craft a budget bill that isn't so odious that it will lead to Dems refusing to do that.
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Septimus, I think it should be obvious, but just in case it isn't, any general statement I make about particular voting demographics is never intended to imply that all such people feel that way. Even in the WWC, only 60-some percent voted for Trump as I recall, meaning that the remainder were not "brainwashed". Any time we're discussing belief systems, it should be read to apply to the people who hold those belief systems. Otherwise we have to append five paragraphs of statistical disclaimers to every post.
This is exactly the point. Obama considered both single-payer and a public option for PPACA as potential actions, but there were not enough Democratic votes in Congress to pass them. He can't work miracles. He was in fact one of the most transformative Presidents we've had in decades, but any time you act as a transformative force, you get pushback, and it so happens that a large bloc of Democrats simply rolled over and played dead against said pushback.
Obama wasn't responsible for the swathes of Democratic members of Congress who campaigned against Obamacare in 2010.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:17:51 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"RE: Racists voting for Obama
Okay, something people need to understand—you can be ragingly racist and still vote for the black guy. Something we've been over before is that society has done a good job of convincing people that racism is bad, but a terrible job of explaining what racism is. People don't want to think of themselves as racist, even as they come up with one excuse after another for why blacks/Natives/Hispanics are inferior to them.
So, for a number of white people, voting for Obama became the ultimate "I'm not racist" badge. It became a defense against accusations of racism in other parts of their lives. "So what if I think black culture is to blame for their poverty. I voted for Obama."
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That's precisely the point though; very few people are so bloody minded in their prejudices that they cannot be convinced to vote contrary to them in the right circumstances. The democrats are unlikely to be able to "win back" working class whites, or whites in general in the foreseeable future, but the argument is that going forwards, more competitive splitting of those votes can be achieved without compromising on the party's commitment to social justice. Obama's election being a prime example of how its done.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:24:42 AM by CaptainCapsase
Ok this forum needs to stop fucking eating my posts out of fucking nowhere god fucking dammit
Anyways from what I remember from exit polls, polls and as it was explained best by Vi Hart, while levels of education and socioeconomic standing (even IQ) quite accurately predicted level of support for Clinton over Trump, actual exit polls pointed that the key difference between Trump voters and Clinton voters was...age.
There are several keywords here: Exit polls are done after the votes in voting areas. Polls are done before the voting. So imagine your thanksgiving dinner, with the crazy racist uncle shouting racist af stuff and everyone else on the table barely tolerating his shit. Out of all those people in the table, only one of them actually voted: The crazy old racist uncle. The rest were less likely to vote, but more likely to vote Clinton.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes![]()
I don't get it Capsace. Obama is apparently a raging sellout to the establishment, but at the same time his campaign is held up as a model of how you get the WWC to vote for a Democrat. Which is it?
edited 21st Apr '17 8:26:52 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
That's not what I'm arguing. My position was that he was far from perfect in regards to how he governed once in office. Not bad or even sub-par (comfortably above average was my assessment), just not particularly exceptional. His campaign for election on the other hand (particularly the first), was nothing short of a masterpiece.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:30:35 AM by CaptainCapsase
As Donald Trump's campaign was a masterpiece of appealing to base, reactionary prejudice?
I can't help but feel that we have a double-standard here. Being very good at telling people what they want to hear has virtually zero correlation with how good one is at actually accomplishing those things.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:45:53 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Not really; Trump did so many things wrong that's its honestly quite surprising he actually won; I think 538's final rating of him at odds of about 1:3 was more or less spot on.
As far as the lack of a casual relationship between campaigning and governing, that's correct, but for an elected official, it doesn't matter how good you are at the actual task of governing if you aren't able to win elections.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:35:27 AM by CaptainCapsase
I wasn't shocked, just surprised; going off the numbers a Trump victory was always a realistic outcome, just not the most likely one. Had a genuinely charismatic and intelligent demagogue come along, there's very little anyone could've done to stop them; the political climate for such a person's rise has been there for a long time, but thus far nobody's really been able to fully capitalize on it. McCarthy was too much of a brute, Nixon was too much of a crook, and Trump is seemingly too much of a clown.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:38:13 AM by CaptainCapsase
I find it hard to believe that the majority of people who voted for Donald Trump actually voted for Donald Trump. I think it's a far more reasonable explanation that the people who voted for Donald Trump voted for the Republican Party, or against Hillary Clinton.
In other words, they voted Trump cuz' they thought the Republican Party could control him, or simply because they disliked Hillary Clinton and voted for him as a "WELL WHAT OTHER OPTION DO I HAVE".
edited 21st Apr '17 8:38:19 AM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesWhat I'm seeing is a pattern of disillusioned voters chasing after any candidate who promises them the moon and "speaks to them" at a gut level, only to be constantly disappointed when their unicorn fails to magically transform the system. Then they angrily turn on the people they elected and fall passionately in love with the next smooth talker.
"What's the common element to all of your failed relationships?" "What?" "You."
edited 21st Apr '17 8:43:08 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Proposal: exactly 1 cent of a Bolívar
for the wall and a real budget for useful stuff.
@Azsur: If anything it just proves how toxicly anti-democrat many Republicans have become at this point, that even if many if not most of them thought he was an absolutely horrid candidate during the primary, there was still no way they would vote for Crocked-Hillary or that communist.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:50:14 AM by Mio
Well, look at it from the point of view.
The options where the following: Hillary Clinton is an establishment's representation. She has been in politics her whole life, she's lived in politics her whole life (as far as the average dumb voter's concern) she is about nothing but regular old politics.
On the other side there is this rambunctious madman who says what he wants and somehow gets away without being lynched.
Who is more likely to bring about a change they feel desperate for?
ANY change?
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes@Fighteer: So, what's the game plan here? How do we finally get it through people's heads that meaningful and benevolent change takes time and constant effort, and it isn't something that magical fairies can just poof into existence instantly? Because with how the GOP gutted our educational system, I highly doubt that mandatory civics classes will even happen, let alone work at this point.
In fact, is it even possible to fix things anymore?
edited 21st Apr '17 8:51:14 AM by TrashJack
"Cynic, n. — A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." - The Devil's DictionaryYou know that wall nonsense would almost be useful if it led to that border hyperloop showing up when future administrations have to figure out what to do with a half-finished monument to bigotry.
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives

Well there's also the fact that there has been significant brain drain in the Rust Belt. Younger people, more likely to vote Democrat, are just simply leaving because why stay somewhere with opportunities when you have a degree?
So the stupid people are behind and they still vote for the scummy party because their stupidity.
edited 21st Apr '17 8:15:58 AM by NoName999