US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3652

On April 21 2016 08:42 Naracs_Duc wrote:


There's a lot of issues with him, yes. But, for the most part, when we are talking about symbols of american identity (and not whether you pass fail a knowledge test) then having someone who is representative of the importance we place on equality and civil rights trumps the person who was responsible for genocide. In the future, when America doesn't mind genocide anymore, we can put him back on a pedestal. But this makes sense as a narrative of american identity way more than what you're saying.

On April 21 2016 09:35 Epishade wrote:
Let's put Jesus on the twenty dollar bill!

On April 21 2016 01:01 Godwrath wrote:

Ok, so first i will apologize for my shitty english, because it's obvious i am failing at getting my point accross. What you are implying is that you don't need any kind of support from the democratic party to start running for president, which i may be ignorant on it, but i think both Hillary and Obama had while Sander's has been really thin if any, correct me if i am wrong . Second, i am not only talking about the democrat party, but the democrat electorate aswell, as they feel more compelled to accomodate third party options as their own to be able to defeat the republicans. You know, politics as usual.

On April 21 2016 01:01 Godwrath wrote:
And i didn't say that they shouldn't right now and close that door, but if they don't feel represented in the general election, then they obviously shouldn't if they really want to get their point across. If that flies over your head, i don't know how else to tell you that it goes both ways, because then you are being a hypocrat if you think Sander's supporters should vote for Hillary while you are not willing to get a compromise with them, which of course, it has to be seen in the general elections, not now.

On April 21 2016 01:01 Godwrath wrote:
As i said before, if that's how you currently feel about being un-represented, if you want things to change you, voting is your strongest tool. Neglecting yourself to use it towards your own interests in how you want the goverment to be, in fear of short term issues (which with Obama's administration, even Bush administration clumsy actions had been proven to be elastic enough to be able to flip them over time).

On April 21 2016 01:01 Godwrath wrote:
Edit - Also, someone pointed earlier that young people are more likely to vote with the heart, while older people with the brain. I am not taking a punch at you or anything as i know you said it with a grain of salt, but if anything, older people just tend to be reactionaries, while younger people tends to be more liberal. It's not about the brain in both cases.

On April 21 2016 17:37 Kickboxer wrote:
Put Kim K. on the dolla!

On April 21 2016 08:20 Stratos_speAr wrote:
As much as I am in support of Tubman being on the money as opposed to Jackson, the lack of historical knowledge in this thread is disappointing.

Andrew Jackson is indeed considered one of the better presidents in U.S. history (almost always in the top 10). Yea, he did some bad things, but pretty much every major historical figure has, just like Monochromatic pointed out. It's pretty lazy historical revisionism to just say, "He's a racist! Horrible person! Bad president!". That kind of shit would get you laughed out of any serious discussion about historical scholarship.

Regardless of what happens between now and the GOP convention, there is little doubt that Donald Trump has undermined our understanding of primary politics. It will probably be years before political scientists fully understand the Trump phenomenon, but much of his appeal seems to stem from the image he has cultivated that he is “not a politician.” Voters, the claim goes, can’t trust politicians, particularly to keep their promises. But they can trust Trump. The problem with this claim? It gets reality almost exactly backward.

In framing the choice this way, the Trump campaign is tapping into a widespread belief Americans have about politicians: They lie. A Rasmussen survey in 2014 found that just 4 percent of likely voters that year believed that “most politicians” kept the promises they made on the campaign trail, while 83 percent did not. (The remaining 13 percent were undecided.) Similarly, when The New York Times asked respondents in 2009 if President Obama would be able to keep his promise not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $250,000 a year, 56 percent said no.1 More broadly, the General Social Survey in 2012 asked people whether they agreed that candidates elected to Congress try to keep the promises they made during the election — a majority (59 percent) disagreed.

It turns out, however, that in this case, the majority is wrong.

Political scientists have been studying the question of campaign promises for almost 50 years, and the results are remarkably consistent. Most of the literature suggests that presidents make at least a “good faith” effort to keep an average of about two-thirds of their campaign promises; the exact numbers differ from study to study, depending on how the authors define what counts as a campaign promise and what it means to keep it.

George W. Bush promised tax cuts and education reform, and within the first year of his administration had delivered on both. Barack Obama promised to focus on the economy, health care and the environment. Once in office, he pushed first a massive stimulus package and then the Affordable Care Act through Congress, and he has worked with China and others in the international community on climate change, despite strong legislative opposition. As for the promises that get abandoned, many have more to do with changing circumstances than a lack of principles. (Think of Bush, an ardent free-marketeer, signing the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill during the first tremors of the Great Recession.)

In recent years, the fact-checking website PolitiFact has been paying close attention to this question, and its numbers are largely in line with what scholars find. Examining more than 500 promises President Obama made during his two presidential campaigns, PolitiFact finds that he has fully kept or reached some compromise on 70 percent of them. Similarly, Republican leaders made, by PolitiFact’s count, 53 promises before taking over Congress in 2010; 68 percent of these have been partially or fully kept.

This pattern isn’t unique to America. Scholars in Canada and Europe have examined the phenomenon and found their politicians to be, if anything, even more trustworthy. (The gap probably reflects added incentive — and increased opportunity — politicians have to carry out their policies in a parliamentary system where one party controls both the legislative and executive branches of government.) Across both time and borders, then, the data in this case is fairly clear.

On the one hand, it makes perfect sense that politicians would work to keep their promises — after all, re-election is a powerful motivator, and if you hired a contractor to remodel your kitchen and she had the construction crew put a Keurig machine where she told you the dishwasher was going to go, you probably wouldn’t hire her again when it was time to redo the master bath. On the other hand, though, it’s easy to understand why voters feel ignored. “Read my lips: no new taxes” and “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” are dramatic moments that both command greater media attention and loom larger in our minds than the hundred quieter ways in which presidents (and other politicians) work to do what they said they were going to do.

But there is perhaps a double irony to Trump benefiting from this misperception. He, unlike many of those he criticizes, really doesn’t seem to be interested in keeping his promises. Obviously, we can’t (yet) compare his rhetoric to his performance in office, but we can examine how well his rhetoric lines up with the plans his campaign has released and with his own past actions. And the mismatch is striking.

When he released his tax proposal, for instance, he claimed that it would raise taxes on the super-rich (“it’s going to cost me a fortune”), a claim he reasserted this month in an interview with the Washington Post. But more than one independent assessment has found the opposite — by one estimate, the after-tax earnings of the top 0.1 percent would increase by an average of $1.3 million. Similarly, he has suggested that the government has an obligation to guarantee universal access to health care coverage, but his health care plan returns to insurance companies the right to refuse sick applicants, a power denied to them since Obamacare became the law of the land. Even on his signature issue of immigration, Trump’s own past, in which his company used undocumented workers on a building project, is at odds with his current position. (Trump claims not to have known the workers were undocumented, but the judge in the case held his company responsible.) And that’s not to mention the hundreds of times Trump or his businesses have been sued for not meeting their contractual obligations.

In fairness, Trump too would probably attempt to keep his biggest promises were he elected in November. His plans to build a wall on the Mexican border, for instance, have probably been too specific and repeated too often for him to walk away from them, either as part of a general election strategy or in office. But on many other issues, it is difficult even to say what promises observers should score him on, as his rhetoric on the stump doesn’t match the official plan published by his campaign. Trump, then, is right to say he is not a typical politician: The best evidence we have suggests that the bulk of his promises really are as unreliable as voters wrongly assume his peers’ to be.

On April 21 2016 23:08 Incognoto wrote:
Cooperation during that time period was pretty much a ridiculous notion. To be quite fair, when you look at the world today, cooperation still sounds pretty stupid. Look at Israel / Middle-East, or the current war in Syria, etc.

Human beings just have a lot of trouble getting along. No need to get hung up over that and ignore the rest of the things which Jackson did. Being someone who actually paid off the US debt is something considerable. I wish there were a politician who could do that today (I wish there was* ?).