• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

PoliGAF 2014 |OT| Kay Hagan and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad News

Status
Not open for further replies.

Chichikov

Member
Reagan was the product of the nation's times. It was only a matter of time before Americans became distasteful of social democracy because it helped those dirty browns and blacks.

The same could be said with Clinton. Only a "centrist" could win the presidency in '92. America had already changed by then. If Reagan didn't take the mantle at best case scenario America's march toward the right would have been a bit more gradual.
The march toward the right was in regard to social issues, you didn't have to go all voodoo economics for that.
Had best Bush won in 1980, the world would've been a very different place.
 
The march toward the right was in regard to social issues, you didn't have to go all voodoo economics for that.
Had best Bush won in 1980, the world would've been a very different place.

Only to a point. Call me a cynic but I believe that neo-liberalism was only a matter of time.
 
Basically the water drinking incident screwed any chance of Rubio building a public personality to sell, and the failure of immigration reform screwed his chance of building a resume to sell. He has absolutely nothing left to differentiate himself over any other republican. All he has is a bit of name recognizably from the hype of the past.

The "water drinking incident" is entirely irrelevant, and only people who spend way too much time reading political blogs even know what that is.

Rubio has flamed out because his entire appeal was based on the assumption that hispanics would flock to a republican candidate solely because he was also hispanic, and ignore all the usual hateful rhetoric that comes along with the republican position.

Rupublicans have tried this before with other minorities, and it worked about as well. Rubio never actually gained any more traction with mainstream hispanics than Herman Cain or Alan Keyes did with mainstream black voters, or women with sarah palin.
 
The "water drinking incident" is entirely irrelevant, and only people who spend way too much time reading political blogs even know what that is.

Rubio has flamed out because his entire appeal was based on the assumption that hispanics would flock to a republican candidate solely because he was also hispanic, and ignore all the usual hateful rhetoric that comes along with the republican position.

Rupublicans have tried this before with other minorities, and it worked about as well. Rubio never actually gained any more traction with mainstream hispanics than Herman Cain or Alan Keyes did with mainstream black voters, or women with sarah palin.

The whole "Black people will vote for a black candidate because he's black!" Or "Hispanic people will vote Rubio because he's hispanic!" is so mind boggling racist thinking it's insulting.
 

Chichikov

Member
Only to a point. Call me a cynic but I believe that neo-liberalism was only a matter of time.
I'm not a huge fan of speculative history, but fuck it, I'm not a huge fan of waking up at 4am to watch football and I'm doing it, so here goes -

I believe there would've been a push to neo-liberalism, there are too strong of an economic incentives in that, but Reagan, man, he was the perfect shitstorm, he was charismatic and he got lucky on several fronts (both on the economy and foreign policy) and that granted credence to that stupid ideology that it would've found hard to get otherwise.
Just compare the US to the UK.
 

Diablos

Member
Rubio's done, Christie's done, it's Jeb Bush Time, baby!

Bush 2016
Mars, bitches. And no gays settling down.

I just don't think many people take him very seriously anymore. He's the Jindal of his time.

Which means Jindal is way past his time lololol
lol that's not fair. Jindal is a legit creep. Remember when Newt Gingrich would go on TV and practically get horny about the guy? Hilarious.

But yeah. Even Rubio has more of a shot still. Even if he ultimately doesn't.
 
Basically the water drinking incident screwed any chance of Rubio building a public personality to sell, and the failure of immigration reform screwed his chance of building a resume to sell. He has absolutely nothing left to differentiate himself over any other republican. All he has is a bit of name recognizably from the hype of the past.
Nobody remembers or cares about the "water drinking incident" outside of liberals. Rubio is toast due to immigration, not due to some superficial "gaffe" that has no bearing on anything.

Scott Walker and Rand Paul will be the last two candidates remaining IMO, and I'd guess Walker will receive the nomination.
 

120v

Member
I don't know if i'd put a fork in christie just yet. but he's probably done

rubio's star has faded but they may go to him as their default guy

paul ryan seems to be running, fwiw.

and i think all the jeb bush talk is People magazine stuff
 
I don't care if Jeb is more "moderate" there's no way the US is electing another Bush.
What about George P Bush, he can speak Spanish!

Christie might survive this but he has to be telling the truth. If not he's fucked. Considering one of his cronies is asking for immunity before testifying...yeah.
 
A Republican once proposed all of these things

In the social sphere the platform called for
A National Health Service to include all existing government medical agencies
Social insurance, to provide for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled.
Limited injunctions in strikes.
A minimum wage law for women.
An eight hour workday.
A federal securities commission.
Farm relief.
Workers' compensation for work-related injuries.
An inheritance tax.
A Constitutional amendment to allow a Federal income tax.
The political reforms proposed included
Women's suffrage.
Direct election of Senators.
Primary elections for state and federal nominations.
However, the main theme of the platform was an attack on the domination of politics by business interests, which allegedly controlled both established parties. The platform asserted that
To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.[7]
To that end, the platform called for
Strict limits and disclosure requirements on political campaign contributions.
Registration of lobbyists.
Recording and publication of Congressional committee proceedings.
And said this:
"The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now."[1]
 

Piecake

Member
Fight Poverty By Giving Poor People Money

Interesting article by Yglesias. Its all something that we already know, but the study done is interesting because it follows how the Cherokee casino windfall impacted young people. Young people in poverty who received that windfall were less likely to be involved in crime, more likely to graduate from high school and have better mental health. The earlier they received that money, the better off they would be. I think the convincing part is that there was no improvement in the youth who were middle class or above.
 
I'm not a huge fan of speculative history, but fuck it, I'm not a huge fan of waking up at 4am to watch football and I'm doing it, so here goes -

I believe there would've been a push to neo-liberalism, there are too strong of an economic incentives in that, but Reagan, man, he was the perfect shitstorm, he was charismatic and he got lucky on several fronts (both on the economy and foreign policy) and that granted credence to that stupid ideology that it would've found hard to get otherwise.
Just compare the US to the UK.

I saw your edit
LOL

and also who's surprised at a Republican saying something insane
 
I believe there would've been a push to neo-liberalism, there are too strong of an economic incentives in that, but Reagan, man, he was the perfect shitstorm, he was charismatic and he got lucky on several fronts (both on the economy and foreign policy) and that granted credence to that stupid ideology that it would've found hard to get otherwise.
Just compare the US to the UK.
Also Reagan was arguably the most intellectually limited President in American history so it was pretty much his advisers and cabinet running the show.
 
What's 2 million+ dead folk when you got some Medicare y'all.

And a whole generation of young American men was destroyed as well.

But to be honest if LBJ never had escalated Vietnam and focused on domestic issues he would've been a better President than FDR, and we would've avoided things like inflation, high crime and urban decay.
 

Diablos

Member
Also Reagan was arguable the most intellectually limited President in American history so it was pretty much his advisers and cabinet running the show.
JGG4AFE.jpg
 

KingK

Member
A Republican once proposed all of these things


And said this:

Teddy Roosevelt, right? That's his 1912 Bull Moose Progressive party platform I think.
edit: ah, yep, it's Teddy. Dude was a badass.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/01/27/140127fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all

Interesting profile of Obama from the New Yorker, among the highlights is him saying he wouldn't let his son play pro-football, and saying that marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol.

Hopefully we'll get some drug war related policy at the SOTU.

I'm reading that right now. I'm at part VI. Regarding drug policy, I do get the impression that Obama's been dropping hints of "evolving positions" there, and public approval has spiked to 50-55 percent for recreational pot use in the most recent couple rounds of polling. I would imagine they want to wait and make sure there aren't any big problems with CO and WA efforts before coming out in support of major changes. But I don't anticipate any major problems occurring there, and this whole process is feeling very reminiscent of the buildup to the explosion of gay marriage support. I think it's quite possible we could see some significant changes rapidly over the next 5-10 years in this area. I mean hell, even in a state as red as Indiana the Tea Party governor signed a sentencing reform bill that wasn't too shitty. It reduced incarceration and sentencing for low level drug offenses.
 

Wilsongt

Member
3 gay Republicans trying to make election history

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Dan Innis' husband persuaded him to run for the U.S. House.

It didn't matter that Innis, a former business school dean, faced an aggressive Democratic incumbent, GOP colleagues who oppose his right to marry, and history — no Republican ever has been openly gay when first elected to Congress.

"He said, 'You've got to do this,'" recalls Innis, running in the 1st Congressional District, which covers most of eastern New Hampshire. "He said, 'You need to take this opportunity and see if you can make a difference.'"

It's nice to see an openly gay Republican, but I highly doubt these three will make it very far. Not with the super homophobic GOP base right now.
 

K-19

Banned
What do you think about some lawmakers making assumptions about Russia involvement with Snowden. They recently argued that the vast majority of the files he took have to do with the american armies capabilities and programs aiming mainly foreign country. The high technical nature of some intel stolen are also quite troubling for some considering Snowden's skill, although he might just have taken as many as possible in his whiteknight crusade. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Comittee, seems to be convinced. Would be amazing if Russia was really behind all that. Putin was a KGB operative from 1985 to 1990, his main job was to recruit assets in West Germany. So much poetry.
 
At this rate, you don't even need to go back to Teddy to get Republican's saying "liberal" things. I'm sure there are Dubya speeches that if you told people Obama said it in a speech would be lambasted by Republican's.
 
At this rate, you don't even need to go back to Teddy to get Republican's saying "liberal" things. I'm sure there are Dubya speeches that if you told people Obama said it in a speech would be lambasted by Republican's.

Pretty much, Obama's climate change plan? Recycled from Bush's. Immigration? Recycled. Auto-bailout? More conservative than Bush. Healthcare plan? Recycled from Heritage Foundation.

Worst socialist ever.
 
At this rate, you don't even need to go back to Teddy to get Republican's saying "liberal" things. I'm sure there are Dubya speeches that if you told people Obama said it in a speech would be lambasted by Republican's.

I posted it because that went much farther than any republican after him.

He literally endorsed redistribution and called it great. He advocated large government intervention in the economy, worker's rights, campaign finance reform and expanded welfare. He challenged the status quo, which politicians did much more back then.

It wasn't just that he endorsed things that turned out to be liberal ideas the entire political environment and country as a whole was much more conducive to that. People had organized and were exerting their political power. the Reagan revolution destroyed this. Now we have two parties who argue over on what is more important to undo rather than change anything there's no sense of the 'future' or better society, its just about trying to maintain the existing order and system. Its quite depressing.
 
I was also underrepresenting the human cost of the Vietnam War and its related conflicts.

Congratulations. I said that Vietnam was the worst thing done by a Democratic President in the 20th century. I don't know if you're blaming LBJ for Nixon's escalations but you shouldn't if you are. It is also stupid to use Vietnam to overlook what in my opinion amounts to the greatest domestic policy of the century. Also I think it was silly to use Medicare in your post to represent his achievements when the civil rights and voting acts wouldn't have happened without him.
 
So my brother (the same one who believes that 9/11 is a conspiracy) now believes that Sandy Hook is a conspiracy. Source? Youtube.

I'm not a huge fan of speculative history, but fuck it, I'm not a huge fan of waking up at 4am to watch football and I'm doing it, so here goes -

I believe there would've been a push to neo-liberalism, there are too strong of an economic incentives in that, but Reagan, man, he was the perfect shitstorm, he was charismatic and he got lucky on several fronts (both on the economy and foreign policy) and that granted credence to that stupid ideology that it would've found hard to get otherwise.
Just compare the US to the UK.

I was under the impression that the UK is just USA but with free healthcare, slightly higher minimum wage, but with even more private schools? Also didn't UK have more room to fall? I recall it was far more left than the US was prior Thatcher.
 
So my brother (the same one who believes that 9/11 is a conspiracy) now believes that Sandy Hook is a conspiracy. Source? Youtube.

That is sad. The whole conspiracy theory thinking thing annoys me so much, but it is extremely common all over the planet. There are lots of theories as to why. Maybe it is because we just don't want to think that the world is quite random and chaotic so we want to believe in conspiracy theories since they let us know that at least someone is in charge instead of things being chaotic, even if those people in control are bad. Or maybe it is just a short-cut to intellectualism. Instead of spending years of hard work studying & learning, people adopt conspiracy theories and thus quickly feel they are smarter than everyone else because they have this 'secret knowledge' that all the common people don't know about.
 
I'm not a huge fan of speculative history, but fuck it, I'm not a huge fan of waking up at 4am to watch football and I'm doing it, so here goes -

I believe there would've been a push to neo-liberalism, there are too strong of an economic incentives in that, but Reagan, man, he was the perfect shitstorm, he was charismatic and he got lucky on several fronts (both on the economy and foreign policy) and that granted credence to that stupid ideology that it would've found hard to get otherwise.
Just compare the US to the UK.

The UK is doing absolutely atrocious right now, it's arguable that the slump they experienced from 2011-2012 was worse than anything they had in the Great Depression.

The NHS and areas of the public sector like the Royal Mail are being sold off for bargain bin rates, Goldman Sachs bought up the Royal Mail and the NHS' supply of blood plasman was sold off to fucking Bain Capital, and getting benefits and unemployment aid is far more difficult than in the US.
 
The UK is doing absolutely atrocious right now, it's arguable that the slump they experienced from 2011-2012 was worse than anything they had in the Great Depression.

The NHS and areas of the public sector like the Royal Mail are being sold off for bargain bin rates, Goldman Sachs bought up the Royal Mail and the NHS' supply of blood plasman was sold off to fucking Bain Capital, and getting benefits and unemployment aid is far more difficult than in the US.

All the Gaffers in the UK politics thread seem to love the Tories though.
 
I was under the impression that the UK is just USA but with free healthcare, slightly higher minimum wage, but with even more private schools? Also didn't UK have more room to fall? I recall it was far more left than the US was prior Thatcher.

It was extremely farther left than the US ever was, areas like transportation, utilities like electricity and water, telecommunications and whole swaths industry like mining and shipbuilding were run by the government, and largely it delivered peace and prosperity up until Heath's government in the early 70s.

Also in the early 80s the Labour Party experienced a massive shift leftward because of an almost Tea Party like hard left movement led by Tony Benn, I've always wondered how the US media would react to something like that in the US.
 
Also in the early 80s the Labour Party experienced a massive shift leftward because of an almost Tea Party like hard left movement led by Tony Benn, I've always wondered how the US media would react to something like that in the US.
Well during Occupy Wall Street they accused the protesters of being lazy college dropouts who didn't want to find jobs and didn't lay out clear goals for the movement, in spite of numerous occasions of Occupy Wall Street protesters laying out clear goals for the movement.
 
It was extremely farther left than the US ever was, areas like transportation, utilities like electricity and water, telecommunications and whole swaths industry like mining and shipbuilding were run by the government, and largely it delivered peace and prosperity up until Heath's government in the early 70s.

Why did the U.K. roll back on its leftism?

And how did Thatcher succeed so much on the first place?

That is sad. The whole conspiracy theory thinking thing annoys me so much, but it is extremely common all over the planet. There are lots of theories as to why. Maybe it is because we just don't want to think that the world is quite random and chaotic so we want to believe in conspiracy theories since they let us know that at least someone is in charge instead of things being chaotic, even if those people in control are bad. Or maybe it is just a short-cut to intellectualism. Instead of spending years of hard work studying & learning, people adopt conspiracy theories and thus quickly feel they are smarter than everyone else because they have this 'secret knowledge' that all the common people don't know about.
This is pretty much how politics work in general. Everybody thinks they are an "expert" because they get information from bogus sources. I was once arguing with a doctor that Obama isn't a socialist. He then linked me to this. I could imagine the thought of him "Stupid liberal, you never read the NEWS!" Its unbelievable how uneducated the average American is.
 
Why did the U.K. roll back on its leftism?

And how did Thatcher succeed so much on the first place?

A combination of factors, like I said, from the mid 50s to the early 70s Britain enjoyed relative peace and prosperity, and for the most part governments that were both Conservative and Labour respected the welfare state and nationalized industries created by the 1945-1951 Labour government.

As with all the other Western economies, Britain experienced a particularly hard economic slump in the 1970s, and the decade was pretty much marked by industrial strife and the relations between the labor unions and the governments. In the winter of 1978-1979 a large number of labor unions went on strike in what's known as the Winter of Discontent. This made Jim Callaghan's Labour government extremely unpopular and led to a vote of no confidence and an election held in the spring of 1979, which Thatcher won.

Thatcher was so successful because of infighting between the Labour left and right in the early 80s, which debilitated the opposition from posing a major threat and led to the Conservatives election victory in 1983, and the North Sea oil, which turned around the economy and led to their second victory in 1987, and she used the cover of a strong economy to privatize much of the public sector, like utilities, industry and transportation. She had pretty much fundamentally changed Britain's economy from an industrial one to a service one, with a strong financial sector.

With this the opposition had to change as well, Labour largely gave up socialism and pursued more moderate, center left, social democracy after 1983.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom