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Obama, for the win. (pg. 35)
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| thesauce23 |
do you guys HONESTLY, and i mean truly honestly, believe that any of these politicians are concerned about the general public's well-being? aside from a tax cut here or there, do you really think they will benefit the majority of people- that being the middle and lower classes?
maybe I'm being naive here but I have NO faith in American politics. I'm interested in hearing how you guys feel about it. |
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| RJT |
Much like how some people think of religion, I guess the only answer I can give isn't going to be satisfactory - but I believe it, in whatever small and ed up way, because I have to.
There's no future to hope for if you don't have at least some faith - once that's lost, what's the point of even trying?
So yeah - my "hope" or "faith" in the political process is necessary not because it absolutely exists, but because without hope of a possible world where it does, I don't really see a reason for anything but fear and despair. |
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| thesauce23 |
| quote: | Originally posted by RJT
So yeah - my "hope" or "faith" in the political process is necessary not because it absolutely exists, but because without hope of a possible world where it does, I don't really see a reason for anything but fear and despair. |
but thats exactly our current reality. 'hope without action is just a fallacy'.. but i see your point where your action is that you do believe in the process. |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Originally posted by thesauce23
but thats exactly our current reality. 'hope without action is just a fallacy'.. but i see your point where your action is that you do believe in the process. |
I do believe there are people taking action to make significant change in the political process, namely Barack Obama.
The foundation and validity of this belief may well be a matter of debate, but it is a belief I hold none the less. |
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| thesauce23 |
| quote: | Originally posted by RJT
I do believe there are people taking action to make significant change in the political process, namely Barack Obama. |
see what irks me is that not a whole lot is done about the lower classes. the people who are so far away from being or even reaching the middle class status. the extremely hard working ones who make maybe $8-12/hour and literally work so hard just to live, not enjoy life, but just to survive. i mean a true democracy represents all and i feel (its also evident) that those people are rarely even thought of. |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Originally posted by thesauce23
see what irks me is that not a whole lot is done about the lower classes. the people who are so far away from being or even reaching the middle class status. the extremely hard working ones who make maybe $8-12/hour and literally work so hard just to live, not enjoy life, but just to survive. i mean a true democracy represents all and i feel (its also evident) that those people are rarely even thought of. |
Well part of me wants to respond that such representation goes both ways, and that inevitably the group you are discussing is one of the groups who engage in the democratic process the least. It certainly seems reasonable to suggest that it might be their current disillusionment with the system is why they don't vote, but that's just an excuse for inaction, not an adequate reason to reject the process.
Part of the reason I think I have the faith I have in Obama is because I think it's a far greater possibility that a quote en quote "outsider" will try to make more substantial changes than another politician who is the product of the Washington political process. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by thesauce23
see what irks me is that not a whole lot is done about the lower classes. the people who are so far away from being or even reaching the middle class status. the extremely hard working ones who make maybe $8-12/hour and literally work so hard just to live, not enjoy life, but just to survive. i mean a true democracy represents all and i feel (its also evident) that those people are rarely even thought of. |
I think Obama is a unique counter-example to this. Prior to running for Senate he was merely a lawyer who devoted a lot of his time to community activism on the south side of Chicago - an area that certainly ranks among the most impoverished and under-privileged in the country. You can say he was just doing it to pad his resume, but really, I don't believe that. Nobody thought this guy had a political future - even when he declared that he was going to run for US Senate he was dismissed as some community activist with no real national experience. He was up against a strong primary opponent and a Republican incumbent who basically had it locked up (until his wife went public on his forays into swinger clubs). For his entire political career Obama has been an underdog - until now. So I have no real reason to believe he was merely paying lip service to the lower class when he donated his time on the weekends to that kind of activism. |
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| RJT |
http://www.newsweek.com/id/119010
Note: This is a blog, there's not anyone checking this fellows "math" - so as I said, take it with a grain of salt:
| quote: |
Hillary Clinton won big victories Tuesday night in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island. But she's now even further behind in the race for the Democratic nomination. How could that be? Math. It's relentless.
To beat Barack Obama among pledged delegates, Clinton now needs even bigger margins in the 12 remaining primaries than she needed when I ran the numbers on Monday—an average of 23 points, which is more than double what she received in Ohio.
Superdelegates won't help Clinton if she cannot erase Obama's lead among pledged delegates, which now stands at roughly 134. Caucus results from Texas aren't complete, but Clinton will probably net about 10 delegates out of March 4. That's 10 down, 134 to go. Good luck.
I've asked several prominent uncommitted superdelegates if there's any chance they would reverse the will of Democratic voters. They all say no. It would shatter young people and destroy the party.
Clinton's only hope lies in the popular vote—a yardstick on which she now trails Obama by about 600,000 votes. Should she end the primary season in June with a lead in popular votes, she could get a hearing from uncommitted superdelegates for all the other arguments that she would make a stronger nominee (wins the big states, etc.). If she loses both the pledged delegate count and the popular vote, no argument will cause the superdelegates to disenfranchise millions of Democratic voters. It will be over.
Projecting popular votes precisely is impossible because there's no way to calculate turnout. But Clinton would likely need do-overs in Michigan and Florida (whose January primaries didn't count because they broke Democratic Party rules). But even this probably wouldn't give her the necessary popular-vote margins.
Remember, Obama's name wasn't even on the Michigan ballot when voters there went to the polls. Even if he's trounced there (and Michigan, won by Jesse Jackson in 1988, has a large African-American vote in its primary), Obama would still win hundreds of thousands of popular votes. This is also an argument for why Obama may end up preferring a primary to a caucus in Michigan. (Obama has done better in caucuses).
Florida, with its heavy population of elderly and Jewish voters, might be a better place for Clinton to close the popular vote gap. But even if you assume she does 5 points better than her double-digit win there in the meaningless February primary (where no one campaigned), she would still fall short.
I'm no good at math, but with the help of Slate’s Delegate Calculator, I've once again scoped out the rest of the primaries. In order to show how deep a hole she's in, I've given her the benefit of the doubt every week. That's 12 victories in a row, bigger in total than Obama's run of 11 straight. And this time I've assigned her even larger margins than I did before in Wyoming, North Carolina, Indiana and Kentucky.
So here we go again:
Let's assume that on Saturday in Wyoming, Clinton's March 4 momentum gives her an Ohio-style 10-point win, confounding every expectation. Next Tuesday in Mississippi, where African-Americans play a big role in the Democratic primary, she shocks the political world by again winning 55-45.
Then on April 22, the big one—Pennsylvania—and it's a Clinton blowout: 60-40, with Clinton picking up a whopping 32 delegates. She wins both of Guam's two delegates on May 3 and Indiana's proximity to Illinois does Obama no good on May 6. The Hoosiers go for Clinton 55-45 and the same day brings another huge upset in a heavily African-American state. Enough blacks desert Obama to give North Carolina to Hillary in another big win, 55-45, netting her seven more delegates.
May 13 in West Virginia is no kinder to Obama, and he loses by double digits, netting Clinton two delegates. Another 60-40 landslide on May 20 in Kentucky nets her 11 more. The same day brings Oregon, a classic Obama state. Ooops! He loses there 52-48. Clinton wins by 10 in Montana and South Dakota on June 3 and the scheduled primary season ends on June 7 in Puerto Rico with another big Viva Clinton! Clinton pulls off a 60-40 landslide, giving her another 11 delegates.
Given that I've put not a thumb but my whole fist on the scale, this fanciful calculation gives Hillary the lead, right? Actually, it makes the score 1,625 to 1,584 for Obama. A margin of 39 pledged delegates may not seem like much, but remember, the chances of Obama losing state after state by 20-point margins are slim to none.
So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. What happens then? Will Democrats come together before the Denver Convention opens in late August?
We know that Clinton is unlikely to quit. This will leave it up to the superdelegates to figure out how to settle on a nominee. With 205 already committed to Obama, he would need another 200 uncommitted superdelegates to get to the magic number of 2025 delegates needed to nominate. But that's only under my crazy pro-Hillary projections. More likely, Obama would need about 50-100 of the approximately 500 uncommitted superdelegates, which shouldn't be too difficult.
But let's say all the weeks of negative feeling have taken a toll. Let's say that Clinton supporters are feeling embittered and inclined to sit on their hands. It's not too hard to imagine prominent superdelegates asking Obama to consider putting Hillary on the ticket.
This might be the wrong move for him. A national-security choice like Sen. Jim Webb, former senator Sam Nunn or retired general Anthony Zinni could make more sense. But if Obama did ask Clinton, don't assume she would say no just because she has, well, already served as de facto vice president for eight years under her husband. (Sorry, Al).
In fact, she would probably say yes. When there's a good chance to win, almost no one has ever said no. (Colin Powell is the exception). In 1960, when the vice presidency was worth a lot less, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson gave up his powerful position to run with John F. Kennedy.
How about Clinton-Obama? Nope. The Clintonites can spin to their heart's content about how big March 4 was for them. How close the race is. How they've got the Big Mo now.
Tell it to Slate's Delegate Calculator. Again. |
It is what it is - and I think that is "wishful thinking."
We can always hope - Jeff, insights? |
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| Abercrombie |
Anyone post this yet?
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by RJT
http://www.newsweek.com/id/119010
Note: This is a blog, there's not anyone checking this fellows "math" - so as I said, take it with a grain of salt:
It is what it is - and I think that is "wishful thinking."
We can always hope - Jeff, insights? |
Yeah, that's a lot more generous than any of the math I've seen. I think Obama sealed it on Feb. 12th by winning Virginia and Maryland by the margins he did - both states were considered early in the race to be in the bag for Hillary, but it really widened the pledged delegate lead, and that's when we began to see her lead in superdelegates start to slip as well.
If she had lost Texas outright on Tuesday it would have been over, but she managed to eke out at least a stalemate there, which has allowed her campaign to continue on the assumption that she can continue to close the gap. But in reality, she probably can't. The starting point that guy uses varies a bit from source to source (since many states take some time to confirm the actual delegate split after a primary, ensuring that every vote is indeed counted), but in a nutshell Obama's lead is pretty much insurmountable. Barring a huge aberration in the way the superdelegates are breaking (and since Feb. 5 the majority of them have gone for Obama), this race is, and has been for some time now, over.
/my opinion |
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| RJT |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
Yeah, that's a lot more generous than any of the math I've seen. I think Obama sealed it on Feb. 12th by winning Virginia and Maryland by the margins he did - both states were considered early in the race to be in the bag for Hillary, but it really widened the pledged delegate lead, and that's when we began to see her lead in superdelegates start to slip as well.
If she had lost Texas outright on Tuesday it would have been over, but she managed to eke out at least a stalemate there, which has allowed her campaign to continue on the assumption that she can continue to close the gap. But in reality, she probably can't. The starting point that guy uses varies a bit from source to source (since many states take some time to confirm the actual delegate split after a primary, ensuring that every vote is indeed counted), but in a nutshell Obama's lead is pretty much insurmountable. Barring a huge aberration in the way the superdelegates are breaking (and since Feb. 5 the majority of them have gone for Obama), this race is, and has been for some time now, over.
/my opinion |
I know you're just this kid on tranceaddict.com/forums with a degree in political science who lives in D.C. - but reading that really made me feel much better following this past week.
:)
You are very good at taking a complicated process and making it easier to digest for simple folk like me. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
Just to add to that, I'm kind of torn on whether I want Hillary to drop out though.
On the one hand, she (or more accurately, her campaign director, Mark Penn), has shown a propensity to go negative, something that could really hurt Obama come November. Some of the attacks are justified and would be launched Day 1 of the general election campaign, but others are basically handing the McCain ticket carte blanche to tee off on him. Just today Penn made the argument to reporters that Hillary and McCain, unlike Obama, are qualified to be Commander-in-Chief and the race should come down to them as the most experienced. Like... does he not realize that the McCain campaign is going to play that quote over and over all summer?
On the other hand... as I've alluded to before, the infrastructure being developed in all 50 states is stunning. The Democrats have always struggled to be as organized on the ground as their Republican counterparts - that's one of the reason that the GOP has done so well on election night the past two times around - they mobilize their base extraordinarily well through superior party infrastructure across key battle-ground states (cough Florida and Ohio cough). However... this time around the Democrats are duking it out in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, etc., and McCain is largely sitting back and waiting. Both the Obama and Clinton camps are stellar organizations, and have driven out tons of votes that haven't been seen in recent years. The most stunning example of this is in Texas on Tuesday. John Kerry received 2.4 million votes there in 2004. Between Obama and Clinton, over 3.8 million votes were cast in the Democratic Primary there. That kind of organization on the ground could put a state in play that had been all but written off by Democrats since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. And it wasn't just Texas. In Minnesota over 200,000 people turned out for an hour-long caucus - only 40,000 had turned out in 2004, which had been a record at that time. New Jersey Democrats out-voted their Republican counterparts 2:1. We're talking about a feasible 50-state strategy here.
Now there's talk of re-doing the primaries in Florida and Michigan. Howard Dean and the Democratic National Committee cleared the way for it today, provided the states come up for the funding to run things. That remains to be seen, but I hope they do. Hillary won big there the first time around, but only because she was the only candidate on the ballot. Obama would likely take Michigan on the strength of the Detroit vote alone, and Hillary would likely take Florida. So strategically speaking the primaries would be a wash. But I would love to see the campaigns develop an infrastructure in Florida that looks like they have elsewhere. By putting in place a system of election officials, precinct captains, and grassroots organizers, they can make the Republicans spend an awful lot of time and money on states they had on lock in 2004.
Furthermore, the longer the Democratic race goes, the longer Democratic issues are in the spotlight. People will continue to discuss universal health care, anti-poverty measures, a more diplomatic foreign policy, and environmental sustainability. Those, and not fear-mongering things like immigration and terrorism will become the predominant issues of the general election by extension.
McCain is being denied his podium to energize his base and win back the conservatives. And I've got no problem with that. |
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