2008 US Presidential Election - Page 41

On March 08 2008 13:00 Funchucks wrote:

How about the racial supremacist card?

This is his church: http://www.tucc.org/about.htm

On March 08 2008 12:31 Servolisk wrote:


Which nafta comment? *confused* :o

... Mr. Brodie downplayed those concerns.

"Quite a few people heard it," said one source in the room.

"He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry." ...

... CTV News President Robert Hurst said he would not discuss his journalists' sources.

But others said the content of Mr. Brodie's remarks was passed on to CTV's Washington bureau and their White House correspondent set out the next day to pursue the story on Ms. Clinton's apparent hypocrisy on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Although CTV correspondent Tom Clark mentioned Ms. Clinton in passing, the focus of his story was on assurances from the Obama camp.

He went to air on Feb. 27 with a report that the Democratic front-runner had given advance notice to Canadian diplomats that he was about to engage in some anti-NAFTA rhetoric, but not to take it too seriously. ...

On March 08 2008 05:39 Funchucks wrote:
Who really thinks he has a shot in the popular election?

Can you imagine any candidate having a hope in hell if he went to a church that openly advertised racial exclusivity? Do people think this is just not going to come up?

Just look at their nuttiness and racial divisiveness: http://www.tucc.org/about.htm

For that matter, "Mrs. Clinton: Why elect a President, when you can elect a President's wife?"

Argblarbalrbg... ISN'T THIS SHIT OBVIOUS TO THEM?

On March 08 2008 13:26 Servolisk wrote:


So what?

John McCain sucked up to the evangelical nutjobs.

Though irrelevant to what others will make of his church, I personally get the feeling Obama is really more of a honorary atheist. That is just the vibe I get, like he is one of the guys who goes to church but doesn't really believe. In either case, he hasn't made any of those things regarding his church a matter of policy, he is a secularist.

On March 08 2008 13:26 Servolisk wrote:


So what?

John McCain sucked up to the evangelical nutjobs.

Though irrelevant to what others will make of his church, I personally get the feeling Obama is really more of a honorary atheist. That is just the vibe I get, like he is one of the guys who goes to church but doesn't really believe. In either case, he hasn't made any of those things regarding his church a matter of policy, he is a secularist.

On March 08 2008 23:07 HonestTea wrote:
I don't want to make any assumptions about you Funchucks, but do you know how race and religion work in the US?

99% of all churches are attended by a single race. I don't know why, but there are black churches, Korean churches, Irish churches, Armenian... and so on and so forth. Most church-going Americans are members of a race-oriented church.

The Trinity UCC is an accepted mainline black church in the greater Chicago area. The UCC is a very widespread church, with ties to both Harvard and Howard University, and it counts among its members many current politicians.

Obama's preference of church will not be an issue.

On March 08 2008 23:07 HonestTea wrote:
I don't want to make any assumptions about you Funchucks, but do you know how race and religion work in the US?

99% of all churches are attended by a single race. I don't know why, but there are black churches, Korean churches, Irish churches, Armenian... and so on and so forth. Most church-going Americans are members of a race-oriented church.

On March 08 2008 23:30 HonestTea wrote:
All I'm saying is that the Trinity UCC produces politicians in Chicago, and that the UCC in general has many current senators and congressmen in a number of different states. In terms of religious organizations, the UCC is as politically harmless as they come.

On March 08 2008 23:07 HonestTea wrote:
I don't want to make any assumptions about you Funchucks, but do you know how race and religion work in the US?

99% of all churches are attended by a single race. I don't know why, but there are black churches, Korean churches, Irish churches, Armenian... and so on and so forth. Most church-going Americans are members of a race-oriented church.

The Trinity UCC is an accepted mainline black church in the greater Chicago area. The UCC is a very widespread church, with ties to both Harvard and Howard University, and it counts among its members many current politicians.

Obama's preference of church will not be an issue.

The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates. Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain - i.e., "Hillary is seen as the one who can get the job done" - but nothing about how she actually could. Is she planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The memo does not say.

The reason it doesn't say is that Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.

That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama's. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.

Clinton's justification for this strategy is that she needs to toughen up Obama for the general election-if he can't handle her attacks, he'll never stand up to the vast right-wing conspiracy. Without her hazing, warns the Clinton memo, "Democrats may have a nominee who will be a lightening rod of controversy." So Clinton's offensive against the likely nominee is really an act of selflessness. And here I was thinking she was maniacally pursuing her slim thread of a chance, not caring - or possibly even hoping, with an eye toward 2012 - that she would destroy Obama's chances of defeating McCain in the process. I feel ashamed for having suspected her motives.

Still, there are a few flaws in Clinton's trial-by-smear method. The first is that her attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he'd endure in the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they come from within one's own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He's inexperienced, lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly's Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message. If Obama's the nominee, he won't have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain's message every day.

Second, Obama can't "test" Clinton the way she can test him. While she likes to claim that she beat the Republican attack machine, it's more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage. Clinton is a wildly polarizing figure, with disapproval ratings at or near 50 percent. But, because she earned the intense loyalty of core Democratic partisans, Obama has to tread gingerly around her vulnerabilities. There is a big bundle of ethical issues from the 1990s that Obama has not raised because he can't associate himself with what partisan Democrats (but not Republicans or swing voters) regard as a pure GOP witch hunt.

What's more, Clinton has benefited from a favorable gender dynamic that won't exist in the fall. (In the Democratic primary, female voters have outnumbered males by nearly three to two.) Clinton's claim to being a tough, tested potential commander-in-chief has gone almost unchallenged. Obama could reply that being First Lady doesn't qualify you to serve as commander-in-chief, but he won't quite say that, because feminists are an important chunk of the Democratic electorate. John McCain wouldn't be so reluctant.

Third, negative campaigning is a negative-sum activity. Both the attacker and the attackee tend to see their popularity drop. Usually, the victim's popularity drops farther than the perpetrator's, which is why negative campaigning works. But it doesn't work so well in primaries, where the winner has to go on to another election.

Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.

Some Clinton supporters, like my friend (and historian) David Greenberg, have been assuring us that lengthy primary fights go on all the time and that the winner doesn't necessarily suffer a mortal wound in the process. But Clinton's kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually damaging. Not only is the opportunity cost - to wrap up the nomination, and spend John McCain into the ground for four months - uniquely high, but the venue could not be less convenient. Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn't create a more damaging scenario if you tried.

Imagine in 2000, or 2004, that George W. Bush faced a primary fight that came down to Florida (his November must-win state). Imagine his opponent decided to spend seven weeks pounding home the theme that Bush had a dangerous plan to privatize Social Security. Would this have improved Bush's chances of defeating the Democrats? Would his party have stood for it?

On March 09 2008 05:03 fusionsdf wrote:
your trolls are better when they arent obvious

go back to what you were doing before

On March 09 2008 05:19 Funchucks wrote:

I'm not trolling.

If you've got an uncynical enthusiasm for any presidential candidate in a mainstream party, you need a reality check.

There's a whole process leading up to the candidacy that's not unlike a season of Survivor. See, the parties are full of ambitious career politicians. Each one wants to be on top, yet they must cooperate to survive the group competitive process.

So the really desirable leaders, the totally honest, informed, intelligent, principled men... they get spiked as soon as possible by the masses of ordinary political scum. The people above them don't want to be replaced. The people below them don't want an impenetrable ceiling.

It is in every miserable, disgusting politician's interest to only cooperate with their equals or inferiors, and to band together to tear down their superiors.

In the end, the people are always left with an unpalatable choice.

I'm not sure of the appropriate metaphor here... can you put lipstick on a pig in a poke?

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edit: For the record, I don't know anything about Barack Obama. I've never even seen a video of him talking. I know even less about McCain. My comments on them are based on extremely superficial, casually gathered information. I'm pretty much going on principle here that since they're high-ranking politicians, they must be hypocritical scum, and nothing they say can be trusted to have any connection to their honest feelings or plans.