(formatting is my own)

No, we voted McCain trying to avoid paying large sums of money to provide health care and other life support to ILLEGAL immigrants among others. Government sponsored slavery of the "day laboring" illegals does not get my vote.

It's a shame that many people so eager to blindly support Obama. Yes, McCain was a bad candidate too, but at least he won't sell America into Socialism.

Now, when can I quit my job and get some of those handouts???

Because that's definitely the biggest problem facing the United States today. Come on, get real.

Wow. Obama is going to sell America into Socialism?

I pondered for a while even responding to this. And to start out, I do appreciate hearing your side of it, as I am always curious as to why people vote for someone.

With that out of the way, I'm going to be a bit blunt. Feel free to tell me off for this, but I would hope that this discussion remains in a civil format, and can proceed in a way that allows people on both sides here to understand the other side a bit better.

First off, I find myself a little disappointed with people who vote for a candidate based on a single reason on either side. To me, I don't want to ever apply a political label to myself, as they constantly shift anyhow, and one label never seems enough to properly describe everything a person stands for. My biggest complaint with our process today is that the election does come down to just two viable candidates and parties. That system just allows for very black and white campaign promises in a world that isn't that simple.

But clearly, many people including yourself are happy to just stick a label on a person and vote against them because of some notion that the label is bad. Socialism is a complex topic, and using it as a label really doesn't have much effect without proper context. To me, the $700bn bailout could be seen as a form of socialism. The public school system could be seen as socialism. Hell, get right down to it, and the interstate system could be seen as socialism. So why exactly is it a bad thing that Obama wants to spend $50 to $65bn on improving healthcare of Americans, to allow them to be healthy, lead productive lives, and overall improve the workforce of this country? To me, thats a great idea, compared to throwing $144bn at Iraq every year. War money that is either coming from our taxes now, or being piled on the debt for future taxes to pay off. If he manages to end the war somehow, his "scary socialism" healthcare plan is more then paid for without changing a thing in the tax system. Oh, and I can't find a single place that says Obama's health care plan will be extended to any illegal immigrants.

McCain just didn't convince me that he would distance himself from the decisions that have led us here today. With his voting record on the war in Iraq, Bush's budgets, and many other issues, those actions spoke louder then his campaign speeches. If he was truly opposed to out of control government spending, he should have voted against the budgets, and chosen to criticize them much sooner then when he was running for president. Obama didn't seem to contradict himself nearly as much when comparing his voting record to his campaign promises.

With that said, just because I voted for Obama (on a provisional ballot in a very shady polling place) doesn't mean I'm giving him a blank check. I will be just as critical of him and his actions in office as I have been of the previous administrations.

Observant as ever, Jim summed it up nicely

Thanks for the welcome, people. Nothing new on my side, actually. I kind of drifted off; a month or two of too hectic work when the BBS stops being daily routine, then return as a lurker... Well, perhaps a touch of middle-age depression; nothing unusual, really.

More to the topic, seeing Jim allowing himself a bit of optimism really raised my spirit!

Cheers!

Bonzi

Well, obviously, in several months. Be sure to let us know and report how is it to bask in splendor of welfare while poor managers of Goldman Sachs toil for you.

Cheers!

Bonzi

His “catch word” was much better – “Change” as opposed to “Maverick”

Maverick congers up thoughts of an old 70’s crap ass Ford, a cigarette or an old “B” western.

Plus old white dudes just aren’t cool anymore, if they ever were.

Looks to me like they were cool for, oh, 219 years or so.

I'm not sure I'd call any of JGK, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Dubya an old guy when they were first elected as POTUS.

Reagan? Cheney? McCain? Definitely!

I thought of a few different ways to reply to your comments about where your tax dollars go, but as I was getting ready to post, I came across this blog entry which says it better than I ever could.

I have a problem with this part


That's a pretty black and white statement and it doesn't always play out so simply. Even if it did, the government doesn't always do what the people who put them in place want them to do. But the piece on a whole is decent. I don't think it will make any difference for the people you might want to target though.

Rational arguments and thought might as well have been completely out the window for this last US election. The bottom line was that anyone who voted McCain had their heads rammed very far up their asses. Same for the last two elections with regards to Bush really. In 2004 I didn't initially think Kerry had a chance of losing unless he raped or killed someone the night before the election. Even then...

Do you really need to take this discussion to that level to make your point?

Do you think your statement will convince someone who voted for McCain to say “Boy you are so right, thanks for calling me a shit head. I now see your point and I was wrong”

Maybe you should just get your buddies together with some pitch forks and torches and kill everyone who had a McCain sign in their yard. That would show those shit heads!

Well said.


That's one thing that always puzzled me about "New Deal bashers": FDR probably prevented a revolution, and an ugly one.

Bonzi

Agreed, like I said before, like my friend said four years ago, that kind of thinking doesn't get us anywhere. Even if I might personally think they're shitheads for believing the things they believe, it's important for me to at least try to understand why they believe it. Yelling at them for being shitheads doesn't bring us any closer.

Those who are thinking, "we control Congress and the White House now, we don't need to cater to the Republicans any more, screw 'em, we'll just fix everything now and not listen to them", aren't looking at the future and are just fueling the existing divisiveness that brought us here in the first place. History will be doomed to repeat itself if the urban liberals continue to misunderstand and ignore the rural Republican mindset.

..thereby demonstrating the harsh truth behind Bruno's rather crude comments..

No, I don't. But I didn't say "shithead" - that's completely different than having one's head up one's ass.



I don't think any statement, logic or reasoning will convince someone who voted McCain to reconsider their actions. If it were possible, they wouldn't have voted for McCain in the first place. A sane and rational person would have been convinced by the last 8 years of Bush policy that voting Republican this time around was the wrong thing to do.



It's the McCain supporters that buy and sell all the pitch forks. I would just like to live next to a neighbor country that isn't *constantly* starting wars and generally screwing every other country on the planet while doing so.

There are several problems with this logic.

First off, the idea that somehow divisiveness and hyper-partisanship got us into this mess is misguided. Divisiveness implies both sides were working equally hard at each others' throats to obstruct progress. In fact, Democrats capitulated and acquiesced to Republican demands consistently during the 109th and 110th Congresses. There are many examples of this on everything from the various Iraq war supplemental budget bills, to the hideous FISA bill, to the Defense of Marriage Act.

One perfect example of this is the Senate Intelligence Committee report on pre-war Iraq Intelligence. This was Congress's half-assed effort to look into what went wrong with pre-war intelligence that led us to wrongly invade Iraq. From 2003-2006, the Senate Intel committee was run by Pat Roberts (R-KS) who stonewalled the report for years, going so far as to split it into two phases to kick the can down the road. Then, when the Democrats took over, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) took over, and what does he do? Sits on Phase two of the report, out of respect to the minority party. In other words, bipartisanship is the problem, not the solution.

One more example. When Democrats were the minority party, they used the filibuster only to block the most objectionable legislation, whereas when the Republicans were in the minority, they destroyed the filibuster record.

I'm all for the notion that "We should be the change we hope to see in the world," but the fact is, we can't fiddle while Rome burns just to pacify a minority party that's been sticking it to Democrats for years, going way back through the Clinton years. Truly progressive, liberal policies simply have not been tried in this country for decades, and believe you me, I don't see Obama and the Democrat-controlled congress reaching anywhere near where I'd prefer they reach, or even anywhere close to where the true "center" of public opinion is right now.

So, please, olive branches are awesome, and I love singing kumbaya around a campfire, but elections do indeed have consequences, and when elected representatives disagree about stuff, the best thing for them to do is fight for what they believe in (and what their constituents sent them to fight for.) Anything else is an abdication of their duty, and I will not shed a tear if a few feewings are huwt because the conservatives can't dish it in the way they dished it out.



I don't know what you mean by "rural Republican mindset" but I assume you're talking about social issues (gun control, abortion, gay rights, etc.) There are many factions in the Republican party that we've all talked about before, and the "theoconservative" bloc is the only one I identify with rural geography.

If that's the case, what exactly is it you think the scary Democrats are going to do to alienate these voters? When was the last time guns were taken away from anyone in this country? What percent of Americans do you think support a federal ban on abortion? How many of them want a federal law banning gay marriage?

I guess what I'm saying is I don't get why we're suddenly so concerned about Democrats "over-reaching" when Repblicans over-reached way beyond what a majority of Americans want (that's why they voted the Democrats in!) And, all of this concern before any of the new Dems have even taken office!

It's similarly depressing how in 2004, Dubya won by 3.5 million votes (34 EVs), which was largely hailed as a "mandate", but Obama wins by 7 million (and counting!) votes (201 EVs) and everyone wants him to govern from the center. What do Democrats have to do to get the same carte blanche as the Republicans have had for decades?

Oh, I'm not saying the democrats shouldn't fight for what's right. I'm just saying that, as a whole, at least trying to understand where the Republican *citizens* are coming from is a helpful exercise. Republican politicians? Should be fought tooth and nail.

And although you make good arguments to the contrary, I still honestly do believe that the divisiveness and hyper-partisanship (Edit: the parts of it that were created by the republicans) really did get us into this mess in the first place. The republican party, to achieve its more traditional aims, perpetuated a false dichotomy, starting way back in the "moral majority" days and leading up to today, deliberately fueling fires and drawing imaginary lines in the sand, just to position themselves as being somehow morally superior and thus electable. I believe many of the truly bad things that the Republican party did were a direct result of this strategizing and weren't necessarily because those things needed to get done. For example, I believe one of the reasons the war in Iraq was started was simply because the Republican party wanted yet another rallying cry.

Admittedly, without the deliberate partisanship, a lot of the crap would have still happened. I think there's a lot more crap and worse crap because of their twisting of the party's goals just to strategize the next election. I'm glad to see it finally backfired on them.

I see your point, but my argument is that the Democrats were not sufficiently partisan in their response. Had the Democrats stuck together and fought tooth-and-nail once it was clear that the Republicans were never going to play ball, a lot of the damage could have been avoided. And, now that Republican policies have led to disaster, it's not the time for Democrats to let their guard down and get punked again. It's hard enough for them to pull together a truly liberal coalition out of all the twisted factions of Democrats in the House and Senate without trying to appease the party that's been rejected strongly by the voters in the last two elections.

A lot of Republicans are even saying now that their party needs some time in the wilderness to get things together and win back the trust of voters. Democrats would do well to let them focus on those efforts rather than letting them undermine progressive change.

Agreed.

Heh.. ironically, this is because they are democratic.. at least in name.

I suppose there is no accounting for "relative objectionableness" of each party's propositions.

No, but here's a hint. Every bill that comes out of congress has to get past a Presidential veto. In most cases, the bills being filibustered by the minority Democrats during 2000-2006 were ones the White House supported (congressional Republicans have been lock-step with Bush throughout his presidency) whereas the bills blocked by minority Republicans in 2006-2008 are ones that the White House probably opposes.

Knowing that, which ones do you think were more objectionable?

Looks like Obama overshot and pulled in 53% of the popular vote....

So I suppose he over-spent getting that last unnecessary 2%.
Though "mandate margin" is probably money well spent in terms of laying some political capital into the bank.

To further stoke hybrid8's ire, I will note that if a mere 4 million of the 120 million people who voted had voted the other way, then McCain would have won the popular vote.

A VERY long way from his dream of a 90% mandate.

But to ease his pain, I will point out that, based on the Wikipedia pages that Bonzi linked earlier, it looks like
in the past couple hundred years (if you ignore 1820), about the biggest margins ever seen were about 60/40.
And that includes 1984 when Reagan won the electoral vote of 49 out of the 50 states!
And Clinton never got 50% of the popular vote.
So Obama has far exceeded Clinton in that regard.

So Obama won a (relatively) crushing electoral victory of 2 to 1, but the Democratic congresspeople are quite aware
that if they use their quite substantial mandate so injudiciously as to tick off a few million citizens, they could lose quite a few seats in the mid-term elections in 2 years.

So I'm not saying that they shouldn't absolutely go in and do exactly what their constituents elected them to do...
but those up for re-election in 2010 in 50/50 districts will tend to be a bit more bi-partisan in their approach
than the Pelosis and Feinsteins who have absolutely no chance of losing their seats no matter what they do.

(And Pelosi is even preaching the gospel of bi-partisanship at this moment. Though that may be mostly in an attempt to try to get some stuff done during the upcoming lame duck session.)

Out of interest, why is states' rights a Republican plank? Doesn't a desire for small government and reduced spending, pull against the idea of duplicating huge amounts of governmental structure? If I didn't know, I'd have guessed enthusiasm for states' rights to be a Democrat thing -- AFAICT the nearest equivalent over here, devolved government for Scotland and Wales, is less begrudged by the Labour party than by the Conservatives.

Peter

I've always seen "states' rights" as a dog-whistle of support for conservative positions on social issues (guns, gays, abortion, and friends.) In the absence of a federal law restricting gun ownership, states decide how to regulate guns. Ditto on gay marriage and abortion. It was also used as a codeword for support of segregation by Dixiecrats in the late 1940s.

I can also see the argument that states would be more efficient at handling certain governmental functions, and in those cases, your argument that consolidating things at the federal level would save money may not hold water. Obviously the feds should have a role in policing illegal immigration, but states are probably in a better position to handle the issuing of drivers' licenses, naming of state highways, etc.

Really, the term has so many meanings that it's virtually meaningless without some kind of description of what "rights" are involved.

Leadership is doing what's right, not what's required to get re-elected. Yes, of course the makeup of your district determines how much you can get away with, but with the electoral map looking like a few globs of red in a vast sea of blue, now is a great time for congressional Democrats to ride the wave and give their constituents some tough medicine. As long as their solutions work, constituents will reward them with re-election, and the districts will suddenly look blue instead of purplish-red.



I think it's clear that Nancy's going to swing things back towards the middle. She and Reid tried to do that in the 110th Congress, but Bush loyalty made the Republicans a bad dance partner. Now, I think you're going to see a lot of Republicans in purple states/districts start to suddenly remember how to reach across the aisle. A lot of attention is being paid to getting 60 votes in the Senate, but I can imagine scenarios where Senators like Collins, Snowe, Specter, and Lugar flex their own bipartisan muscle to help Democrats override filibusters.

Speaking of bipartisanship, Digby does it again with a perfect illustration of how hypocritical the media has been with their sudden demands that Obama fill his cabinet with a bunch of Republicans:

To add to Tony's response, this is a line from the US Constitution:


In particular, that is the Tenth Amendment, the last of the "Bill of Rights" that was passed at the same time the Constitution was accepted. It was a necessity to get the Constitution accepted, as the United States back then operated far more like the European Union does today, with the incorporated political entities being fairly independent.

Republicans often use that amendment as a basis for not overreaching the power of the federal government. That is not to say that they don't ignore it when it suits them, or that they would be more in favor of increased government at the state level. It's merely a cudgel. That said, it is what the Constitution says, and there has been a lot of legitimate debate about expanding federal powers by stretching the notion of other elements of the Constitution fairly thin, especially the Commerce Clause, which, to be fair, is the Democrats' cudgel.

I think it ties into the idea of a small(er) Federal government.
The idea is that states can go their own way on issues where regional consensus varies dramatically across the US.
Although, as Bitt points out, both sides have been picking and choosing on this topic for a long time.
Lately, Republicans seem to be all for states rights when you talk about guns or abortion, not so much when you talk about environmental regulations or gay marriage....

The funny thing about this is the worst aspect of socialism is the high taxes. When you count all the taxes we pay (federal, state, sales, property, car, gas, utilities, etc...), we pay far more than socialist states and get virtually none of the benefits.

I would like either the benefits or way lower taxes...

Add up all the different taxes you pay. You'll be pleasantly irritated. My cpa told me to stop doing this.