|
Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
Lowering the cost of living would help. Also, some people don't realize how much the standard of living has improved since their parents and grandparents days. I do'nt know what % that applies to though.
hard to tell what each person's individual cases are; but in general, part of the issue is things have simply changed, and a refusal to accept that just doesn't work. but there's always someone willing to lie and say there is an answer and dupe you with it.
There are some things gov't could do better, but that'd require a highly skilled thoughtful approach to policy, which isn't happening.
legal -> I strongly recommend you stop using "inner cities" in the way you are, as that way is contrary to the long-standing typical definition of "inner cities" and will likely result in confusion/misunderstandings which will slow down conversations.
what does one mean by a "living" wage. living to what standard? many people around the world live on far less.
|
On November 13 2016 08:53 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2016 08:50 Nebuchad wrote:On November 13 2016 08:47 mahrgell wrote:On November 13 2016 08:42 Sermokala wrote:
The real thing that should keep you up at night is the advent of self driving cars and how it kills trucking in america. That won't just drive the largest employee group into extinction but all the industries that support truck drivers across america. Gas stations havn't made much money on the gas in a long while and what money they do make comes from people coming in and buying things in the stores. Diners will die out by the thousands as they lose traffic. these jobs never paid enough to retire on reasonably and you'll have people who have no other marketable skills and will be too old to transision into anything else. So what do you suggest? Go full luddite vs. self driving cars? Well the ultimate solution is most likely basic income. The trouble is we don't hit automation everywhere at the same time and it's still way too early for basic income, so we're gonna have some really wonky solutions in the meantime. Well, we almost always get back to this "basic income" discussion. The real problem is when people are worried about more than just subsistence, but about having a real living wage. That's two very different groups and basic income can't possibly cater to the latter; it would probably make things worse for them in fact.
It's interesting that you think that, to me when we discuss truckers being obsolete and diners losing their clients, that puts us squarely in the subsistence category.
|
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On November 13 2016 08:58 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2016 08:53 LegalLord wrote:On November 13 2016 08:50 Nebuchad wrote:On November 13 2016 08:47 mahrgell wrote:On November 13 2016 08:42 Sermokala wrote:
The real thing that should keep you up at night is the advent of self driving cars and how it kills trucking in america. That won't just drive the largest employee group into extinction but all the industries that support truck drivers across america. Gas stations havn't made much money on the gas in a long while and what money they do make comes from people coming in and buying things in the stores. Diners will die out by the thousands as they lose traffic. these jobs never paid enough to retire on reasonably and you'll have people who have no other marketable skills and will be too old to transision into anything else. So what do you suggest? Go full luddite vs. self driving cars? Well the ultimate solution is most likely basic income. The trouble is we don't hit automation everywhere at the same time and it's still way too early for basic income, so we're gonna have some really wonky solutions in the meantime. Well, we almost always get back to this "basic income" discussion. The real problem is when people are worried about more than just subsistence, but about having a real living wage. That's two very different groups and basic income can't possibly cater to the latter; it would probably make things worse for them in fact. It's interesting that you think that, to me when we discuss truckers being obsolete and diners losing their clients, that puts us squarely in the subsistence category.
Truck drivers could lose their jobs and then maybe find the equivalent of "working at McDonalds" to survive. But "truck driver" pays a fair bit more than just subsistence wages, it pays the kind of "lower middle class" wage that semi-skilled or unskilled people aspire to. They're not looking for subsistence pay, they want to make enough to live on.
On November 13 2016 08:55 zlefin wrote:
legal -> I strongly recommend you stop using "inner cities" in the way you are, as that way is contrary to the long-standing typical definition of "inner cities" and will likely result in confusion/misunderstandings which will slow down conversations.
what does one mean by a "living" wage. living to what standard? many people around the world live on far less.
Ultimately this turns into the kind of semantic game that really doesn't benefit anyone. You should know damn well that these terms are meant in the same (vague, but targeted) manner as the politicians who used the terms in their own campaign - for those two usages, Trump and Sanders respectively. I don't think there's any confusion when we're looking to discuss in brief rather than provide very specific policy suggestions in an unambiguous legal document.
|
On November 13 2016 08:44 hunts wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2016 08:38 LegalLord wrote:On November 13 2016 08:25 On_Slaught wrote:On November 13 2016 08:09 hunts wrote:On November 13 2016 07:59 Blisse wrote:https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-classWhat So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
-snip-
Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”
“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.
Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
-snip-
Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.
Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.
-snip-
Found an opinion piece that I really enjoyed. so those people want high paying jobs that don't require any degree or knowledge or intelligence. Do they not realize those jobs will never exist again? No matter what they are promised, no one will ever pay $20 an hour for someone to stand at a line and work in a factory, when we can just have those jobs be automated and only have to pay for the machinery and energy. Pretty much this. The vast majority of jobs that were lost are not coming back. They are either jobs that Americans refuse to do, are obsolete, or are jobs replaced by the microchip not Mexico. This is why the platform of bringing jobs back is one that Trump is almost bound to fail on which will piss off a large majority of the people that voted for him. This will be especially true for people thinking that coal is coming back or those car factories in places like Detroit. You say "the jobs are not coming back" and that may be true - but what happens next? The answers do exist, but there's not a single one that doesn't involve some obscenely expensive infrastructure expansions across the entire nation, and some very painful and not very pleasant coercive measures that force companies inward towards those forgotten "inner cities" to build new businesses. Earlier I gave an example of Soviet/Russian development and how it took painful sanctions to get businesses and legislators to start to consider how they would take internal expansion seriously and what needs to be done to clear the way for that. This is far from the only historical precedent for sanctions forcing a nation to develop its own industry - the US had the same issue 200 years ago with the French-British conflicts and its decision to sanction both of them. Solutions exist but they basically go against the tide of every economic force that would exist in a vacuum. Politically this can be a truly unpalatable exercise that turns into a no-win scenario. What happens next? Perhaps those people can stop being entitled and learn that they are no better than the urban people that are also skilless and uneducated, and go work fast food or retail. The people living in urban areas that don't have useful skills or degrees don't magically get to be middle class, they have to work fast food and retail and other bad jobs where they barely get by. Why should those rural people who are skilless and uneducated be considered special and be helped in ways that the urban people aren't?
I guess you can say goodbye to their votes forever if your party says this. Even if their jobs won't come back because of robots, they'll still want those fancy automated factories in the US instead of somewhere else, so they'll vote against a globalist politician whenever someone like Trump is available as an alternative. It doesn't help them in any way that the economy is supposedly growing every year and globalism is saving the world.
|
True, they want that. but what if that's not an option?
I want to be emperor, but it ain't gonna happen.
What do you propose Legal, in terms of actual specific policies to fix the issues?
|
On November 13 2016 09:03 zlefin wrote:
True, they want that. but what if that's not an option?
I want to be emperor, but it ain't gonna happen.
What do you propose Legal, in terms of actual specific policies to fix the issues?
You mistake people having a solution to being really afraid and angry beacuse there is no solution and there isn't anything they can do about it.
|
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On November 13 2016 09:03 zlefin wrote:
What do you propose Legal, in terms of actual specific policies to fix the issues?
Infrastructure development, including roads, utilities, schools, and the like. Coercive measures that include forcing companies to abandon their ideas of building outside the US and instead build inward into the countryside. The end of trade deals like the TPP and TTIP which hurt the peasant class even when they benefit the wealthier class. Technological investments into the countryside area.
That I would instantly get voted out by pushing such an agenda by losing the business class and a lot of the city vote, unless there were some truly existential crisis afoot like an impending war, should give you some idea of how hard it is to push an agenda that would actually do something.
|
On November 13 2016 09:08 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2016 09:03 zlefin wrote:
What do you propose Legal, in terms of actual specific policies to fix the issues?
Infrastructure development, including roads, utilities, schools, and the like. Coercive measures that include forcing companies to abandon their ideas of building outside the US and instead build inward into the countryside. The end of trade deals like the TPP and TTIP which hurt the peasant class even when they benefit the wealthier class. Technological investments into the countryside area. That I would instantly get voted out by pushing such an agenda by losing the business class and a lot of the city vote, unless there were some truly existential crisis afoot like an impending war, should give you some idea of how hard it is to push an agenda that would actually do something.
the coercive measures amount to protectionism, which have deleterious long-term effects.
all that does is make everyone poorer. if you want to subsidize people with a wealth-transfer it'd make more sense to do it more directly.
so I would not agree to that.
more infrastructure is fine, and is indeed something the US is underspending on at the moment. I'd agree with that.
also, it's not at all clear that the trade deals do in fact hurt the so-called peasant class.
|
On November 13 2016 08:38 LegalLord wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2016 08:25 On_Slaught wrote:On November 13 2016 08:09 hunts wrote:On November 13 2016 07:59 Blisse wrote:https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-classWhat So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
-snip-
Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”
“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.
Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
-snip-
Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.
Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.
-snip-
Found an opinion piece that I really enjoyed. so those people want high paying jobs that don't require any degree or knowledge or intelligence. Do they not realize those jobs will never exist again? No matter what they are promised, no one will ever pay $20 an hour for someone to stand at a line and work in a factory, when we can just have those jobs be automated and only have to pay for the machinery and energy. Pretty much this. The vast majority of jobs that were lost are not coming back. They are either jobs that Americans refuse to do, are obsolete, or are jobs replaced by the microchip not Mexico. This is why the platform of bringing jobs back is one that Trump is almost bound to fail on which will piss off a large majority of the people that voted for him. This will be especially true for people thinking that coal is coming back or those car factories in places like Detroit. You say "the jobs are not coming back" and that may be true - but what happens next? The answers do exist, but there's not a single one that doesn't involve some obscenely expensive infrastructure expansions across the entire nation, and some very painful and not very pleasant coercive measures that force companies inward towards those forgotten "inner cities" to build new businesses. Earlier I gave an example of Soviet/Russian development and how it took painful sanctions to get businesses and legislators to start to consider how they would take internal expansion seriously and what needs to be done to clear the way for that. This is far from the only historical precedent for sanctions forcing a nation to develop its own industry - the US had the same issue 200 years ago with the French-British conflicts and its decision to sanction both of them. Solutions exist but they basically go against the tide of every economic force that would exist in a vacuum. Politically this can be a truly unpalatable exercise that turns into a no-win scenario.
No doubt you're right that there is a (painful) solution out there. I was merely commenting on his campaign promise which, while politically expedite, will most surely bite him in the end.
|
United Kingdom13775 Posts
It'd be interesting to study to what extent protectionism does and doesn't hurt the development of an economy. Selective protectionism can indeed work for allowing an industry to develop the means to become competitive. Yet at this point the discussion is mostly in terms of broad platitudes, and I'm not whitedoge enough to be interested in getting bogged down in that line of debate.
You're right, though, that I am basically advocating some degree of protectionism at the core of my strategy. And while it is true that protectionism can be harmful, it doesn't have to be. Not if it's done right.
On November 13 2016 09:17 On_Slaught wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2016 08:38 LegalLord wrote:On November 13 2016 08:25 On_Slaught wrote:On November 13 2016 08:09 hunts wrote:On November 13 2016 07:59 Blisse wrote:https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u-s-working-classWhat So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class
-snip-
Understand That Working Class Means Middle Class, Not Poor
The terminology here can be confusing. When progressives talk about the working class, typically they mean the poor. But the poor, in the bottom 30% of American families, are very different from Americans who are literally in the middle: the middle 50% of families whose median income was $64,000 in 2008. That is the true “middle class,” and they call themselves either “middle class” or “working class.”
“The thing that really gets me is that Democrats try to offer policies (paid sick leave! minimum wage!) that would help the working class,” a friend just wrote me. A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. WWC men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want is what my father-in-law had: steady, stable, full-time jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to the 75% of Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need.
Understand Working-Class Resentment of the Poor
Remember when President Obama sold Obamacare by pointing out that it delivered health care to 20 million people? Just another program that taxed the middle class to help the poor, said the WWC, and in some cases that’s proved true: The poor got health insurance while some Americans just a notch richer saw their premiums rise.
Progressives have lavished attention on the poor for over a century. That (combined with other factors) led to social programs targeting them. Means-tested programs that help the poor but exclude the middle may keep costs and tax rates lower, but they are a recipe for class conflict. Example: 28.3% of poor families receive child-care subsidies, which are largely nonexistent for the middle class. So my sister-in-law worked full-time for Head Start, providing free child care for poor women while earning so little that she almost couldn’t pay for her own. She resented this, especially the fact that some of the kids’ moms did not work. One arrived late one day to pick up her child, carrying shopping bags from Macy’s. My sister-in-law was livid.
-snip-
Understand How Class Divisions Have Translated into Geography
The best advice I’ve seen so far for Democrats is the recommendation that hipsters move to Iowa. Class conflict now closely tracks the urban-rural divide. In the huge red plains between the thin blue coasts, shockingly high numbers of working-class men are unemployed or on disability, fueling a wave of despair deaths in the form of the opioid epidemic.
Vast rural areas are withering away, leaving trails of pain. When did you hear any American politician talk about that? Never.
-snip-
Found an opinion piece that I really enjoyed. so those people want high paying jobs that don't require any degree or knowledge or intelligence. Do they not realize those jobs will never exist again? No matter what they are promised, no one will ever pay $20 an hour for someone to stand at a line and work in a factory, when we can just have those jobs be automated and only have to pay for the machinery and energy. Pretty much this. The vast majority of jobs that were lost are not coming back. They are either jobs that Americans refuse to do, are obsolete, or are jobs replaced by the microchip not Mexico. This is why the platform of bringing jobs back is one that Trump is almost bound to fail on which will piss off a large majority of the people that voted for him. This will be especially true for people thinking that coal is coming back or those car factories in places like Detroit. You say "the jobs are not coming back" and that may be true - but what happens next? The answers do exist, but there's not a single one that doesn't involve some obscenely expensive infrastructure expansions across the entire nation, and some very painful and not very pleasant coercive measures that force companies inward towards those forgotten "inner cities" to build new businesses. Earlier I gave an example of Soviet/Russian development and how it took painful sanctions to get businesses and legislators to start to consider how they would take internal expansion seriously and what needs to be done to clear the way for that. This is far from the only historical precedent for sanctions forcing a nation to develop its own industry - the US had the same issue 200 years ago with the French-British conflicts and its decision to sanction both of them. Solutions exist but they basically go against the tide of every economic force that would exist in a vacuum. Politically this can be a truly unpalatable exercise that turns into a no-win scenario. No doubt you're right that there is a (painful) solution out there. I was merely commenting on his campaign promise which, while politically expedite, will most surely bite him in the end.
It's the same promise everyone makes, from Obama to Romney to McCain to everyone else. It's much easier to pay lip service to the idea of reviving the rural communities than to commit to a truly massive structural reorganization of the economy. But it is possible to make a policy that would help them. Usually you need a war to get that to happen though. And not a bad war like Iraq that just makes everyone poorer, a good war like WWII that puts people to work.
|
America is in general, rich enough and developed enough, that protectionism will not be beneficial. beneficial protectionism (at laest in the economic sense) tends to occur in underdeveloped nations which need to get some local industry rather than just being an agricultural source.
protectionism can help in the social sense of providing social stability; but it comes at an economic cost. there's also risks from the political need of that group growing as they're unsound. much like a common issue with gov't systems: when they're going poorly the answer is to ask for more money rather than improve efficiency. can lead to poor dynamics that make things worse in the long run.
edit add: ww2 didn't magically make everything better. there were also many other factors that contributed ot that. also, part of ww2 amounts to is a massive stimulus spending, which was done already.
I'd gladly fix the issues, but as usual, i'm not in charge and am unelectable, so I'll never have to prove it.
I question your claims of protectionism being done right not being harmful in the context of a developed nation like america.
|
United Kingdom13775 Posts
I thought it would be quite obvious that a world war as a policy suggestion is obviously both overly simplistic and not serious. Guess it wasn't.
Anyways, I'd probably advocate for certain forms of selective protectionism, which would require control over how open the markets can remain. Trade deals actively oppose that process and I would not support them. The cities and urban areas may be "developed enough" but not all of the country is.
But I'm gonna cut that off here, since I'm not really in the mood to discuss the specifics of how a protectionist policy could work in the best interest of the nation. Some degrees of protectionism would certainly be helpful, but until I'm writing a policy platform with the help of an economic advisory I'm going to be quite disinclined to spend quite that much time hammering out the details of how exactly it would have to work to be viable. Nevertheless, some degree of protection from global competition (for labor and from imports) does help develop an underdeveloped industry and that factor would play a large role in rural development.
|
United Kingdom13775 Posts
On another note, sounds like the Hillary campaign is in the "blame James Comey" phase of coming to terms with their loss. I expect Darth Vader, Julian Assange, the Russians, and Nelson Mandela to be next in her crosshairs.
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton blamed FBI director James Comey for her stunning defeat in Tuesday's presidential election in a conference call with her top campaign funders on Saturday, according to two participants who were on the call.
Clinton was projected by nearly every national public opinion poll as the heavy favorite going into Tuesday's race. Instead, Republican Donald Trump won the election, shocking many throughout the nation and prompting widespread protests.
Clinton has kept a low profile since her defeat after delivering her concession speech on Wednesday morning.
Clinton told her supporters on Saturday that her team had drafted a memo that looked at the changing opinion polls leading up to the election and that the letter from Comey proved to be a turning point. She said Comey's decision to go public with the renewed examination of her email server had caused an erosion of support in the upper Midwest, according to three people familiar with the call.
Clinton lost in Wisconsin, the first time since 1984 that the state favored the Republican candidate in a presidential election. Although the final result in Michigan has still not been tallied, it is leaning Republican, in a state that last favored the Republican nominee in 1988.
Comey sent a letter to Congress only days before the election announcing that he was reinstating an investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information when she used a private email server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2012.
Comey announced a week later that he had reviewed emails and continued to believe she should not be prosecuted, but the political damage was already done.
Clinton told donors that Trump was able to seize on both of Comey's announcements and use them to attack her, according to two participants on the call.
While the second letter cleared her of wrongdoing, Clinton said that it reinforced to Trump's supporters that the system was rigged in her favor and motivated them to mobilize on Election Day.
Source
I'm sure "the Democrats" will eventually get to the core of this issue as soon as they have some time for soul searching. Clinton herself, I'm not so sure. While many people rightly don't like Colin Powell, I do really like his one statement that "Hillary Clinton ruins everything with hubris." It's so very prescient in explaining how she always manages to make things work out badly.
|
the other places aren't developed enough because it's not worth developing them to that level. protectionism might benefit the locals, but would not be a net benefit for the nation.
you are also simply incorrect about how I talked about ww2. my point was that it's functionally equivalent to a large stimulus spending package in terms of economic development.
it's rather unfair of you to compare her blame of comey to those other people you mention.
blaming comey is FAR more justified, and there's a very decent case for it.
|
United Kingdom13775 Posts
The failure of her campaign to appeal to the potential voters against the least popular presidential nominee in history is more to blame than James Comey. She failed to see the voterbase that she should have been appealing to and that's what really cost her.
I might be biased since I have my own reasons that reach well before this election for having a favorable disposition towards Comey, but if Clinton and Comey were pitted against each other in the court of public opinion I'm not sure that she would win out. She should just drop it and focus on the deeper issues.
|
On November 13 2016 09:54 LegalLord wrote:On another note, sounds like the Hillary campaign is in the "blame James Comey" phase of coming to terms with their loss. I expect Darth Vader, Julian Assange, the Russians, and Nelson Mandela to be next in her crosshairs. Show nested quote +NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton blamed FBI director James Comey for her stunning defeat in Tuesday's presidential election in a conference call with her top campaign funders on Saturday, according to two participants who were on the call.
Clinton was projected by nearly every national public opinion poll as the heavy favorite going into Tuesday's race. Instead, Republican Donald Trump won the election, shocking many throughout the nation and prompting widespread protests.
Clinton has kept a low profile since her defeat after delivering her concession speech on Wednesday morning.
Clinton told her supporters on Saturday that her team had drafted a memo that looked at the changing opinion polls leading up to the election and that the letter from Comey proved to be a turning point. She said Comey's decision to go public with the renewed examination of her email server had caused an erosion of support in the upper Midwest, according to three people familiar with the call.
Clinton lost in Wisconsin, the first time since 1984 that the state favored the Republican candidate in a presidential election. Although the final result in Michigan has still not been tallied, it is leaning Republican, in a state that last favored the Republican nominee in 1988.
Comey sent a letter to Congress only days before the election announcing that he was reinstating an investigation into whether Clinton mishandled classified information when she used a private email server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2012.
Comey announced a week later that he had reviewed emails and continued to believe she should not be prosecuted, but the political damage was already done.
Clinton told donors that Trump was able to seize on both of Comey's announcements and use them to attack her, according to two participants on the call.
While the second letter cleared her of wrongdoing, Clinton said that it reinforced to Trump's supporters that the system was rigged in her favor and motivated them to mobilize on Election Day. SourceI'm sure "the Democrats" will eventually get to the core of this issue as soon as they have some time for soul searching. Clinton herself, I'm not so sure. While many people rightly don't like Colin Powell, I do really like his one statement that "Hillary Clinton ruins everything with hubris." It's so very prescient in explaining how she always manages to make things work out badly.
Pretty pathetic, even by Clinton standards.
And will the Democrats do enough soul searching to find the result? Hillary is just the bow of the DNC Hubris. Dems were always content to blame Trump supporters for their lack of intelligence and racism (permissive attitude towards racism?) instead of trying to talk to voters thinking of voting Trump. Look no further than this thread that still thinks Trump is some kind of monster, making his voting base some kind of monster-enabler. He manipulates people with fear and hate, don't you know.
|
legal -> you are biased. blame can occur on multiple layers for multiple reasons. each have varying degrees of acceptability/justifiability, which also depends on their type.
the case against comey is reasonable and must be considered.
just because she may be less popular is not AT ALL a good reason not to do a case against comey.
danglars -> don't describe "the thread" as a whole, the thread has many people of many different views, ascribing some view to "the thread" in general doesn't make sense, given how you are a part of "the thread" as well, and clearly are more pro-trump.
|
On November 13 2016 10:17 zlefin wrote:
legal -> you are biased. blame can occur on multiple layers for multiple reasons. each have varying degrees of acceptability/justifiability, which also depends on their type.
the case against comey is reasonable and must be considered.
just because she may be less popular is not AT ALL a good reason not to do a case against comey.
The case against comey is a really complex series of events that forced a decision that was lose-lose with either side having huge political effects on the election.
Can you imagine the outrage if the leaks happened as they did and he confirmed them afterwords? That the FBI didn't announce the reopening of an investigation that it had already made public that he had closed?
You could make the argument that he should have never made comments about the investigation from the get go but even then you'll have to imagine a world where the last month of the election had the right argueing about the bill clinton tarmack conversation tainting the FBI investigation into the emails.
|
yes, I can, and am well aware of the complexity of the situation. none of which counters the points I stated in my post.
|
I guess we just have different definitions on whats reasonable or justifiable blame on someone.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
