Vice-President Picks

OBAMA = TOTALITARIAN COMMUNISM!

Who is this woman?

 

One DESPERATE politician, AM!

 

Porn for dittoheads.

 

So you are against obama also? He is, by far, the blindest, most idealogically rigid ignoramus running after all

Chandos are you blind? Independents ARE the only reason that mccain is the republican candidate. Just look back during the primaries, he was WAY back from the top until the independents got behind him.

 

The lastest Newsweek Poll shows Obama ahead of McCain 49%/41% among independent voters. Different polls may show different results but that is my source, atm. It's probably the "Palin" effect. Maybe she and Todd can find a reality TV show after she loses (if the current trending holds). There's always a demand for high-drama and comedy, even if it is unitended....

http://www.newsweek.com/id/165570?tid=relatedcl

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/10/27/palin_confidence/index.html?source=rss&aim=/mwt/feature

 

I think you are right, Marty, but McCain has veered quite a bit to the right since the early primaries (or at least, has been perceived as such, he might have had such beliefs in the first place) he had to do a lot to be "accepted" by the Republican base, which might have been disliked by the undecided voters. I think one of the biggest issues on which he lost some of them was the selection of Palin, though some of his actions/comments in the beginning of the economic crisis didn't help much, either. Also, now he is competing for the center (and many independents are imo centrists) not with the likes of Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee, but with Barack Obama - who I'd say is a favourite of independent voters himself.

So yeah, McCain will still get a fair few independents, and perhaps a few disgruntled HRC voters (ironically, since according to at least some surveys Hillary is even more staunchly "liberal" than Obama is). However, I doubt they would break nearly as favorably for him as during the primaries.

I wonder if there won't be suspicions of voter fraud - perhaps valid - yet again. Republicans have ACORN, democrats have the voter roll purges... imo the second may be more dangerous, but either way the losing party may have some reasons to protest.

 

Ah yes, of course.

Well, obviously I was referring to Sarah Palin (probably because of this thread). A little peculiar that I completely ignored McCain in this. Oddly, he appears less and less relevant - to his own party he looks like a dead man walking, with young, impudent Palin impatiently waiting for an opening. McCain looks as if he has aged three years since June. It might just be the campaign stress, but probably it's because he knows he's losing (which, obviously, is how things look like).

As if McCain and his neo-kook ideologue advisors wouldn't be bad enough - it's Palin and her chance to be president that really scares me.

We here will have to live with whatever people the US elect and suit ourselves accordingly. As for the D's, which seems to be what you appear to be interested in, if they are bad - the R alternative is pure horror show. I have said before that I 'm not really happy with Biden. I dislike his stance on Russia and Georgia and think it imprudent. But I put some hope in Obama who appears to be the most intelligent presidential candidate the US has seen since Nixon. After eight years of hardliner rule in DC - the folks who don't negotiate with evil but defeat it (not) - the mere hope to see thinking people entering the Whitehouse is in itself appealing, no matter what party they're in.

Palin is just the opposite of thinking people, and in many ways she is worse than Bush. Palin is all gut-feeling. It's not that she is stupid. Her great deficiency is that she is a know-nothing and proud of her ignorance. That means that, while she is capable of learning, she is unwilling to do so because she feels she knows all that she needs to know already. Her certainty, solely rooted in faith, is only making her more scary to me. As I said, the R's, once upon a time, were far more cerebral and appreciative of knowledge than both Palin and her base. For Palin and her followers, knowledge is elitist stuff - they ridicule it. Thinking of fruit flies - genetic research they likely find silly, if not inherently blasphemous.

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Ragusa - Palin's negatives are high with the general public. While she is adored by the hardliners within her own party, almost everyone else thinks she's pretty much what you just described. You would expect that she would get that. But, even in the Mac campaign, insiders have commented that she is a "diva," and has no desire to take much advice lately. She's pretty much off on her own, and has even marginalized Mac these last few days before the election.

She can't see enough past her own ambitions to realize that she is the one who is bringing down the ticket. I've been commenting that had Mac chosen someone less polarizing, he would still be in this race. He should have had the good sense to dump her weeks ago, and pick-up his old fellow neocon buddy Lieberman.

 

I always thought Leiberman would be a terrible choice, for the exact opposite reason behind the Palin choice: it would have alienated the base while appealing to independents (besides, pretty much everyone thinks Joe Leiberman is a putz, even his own constituents). Likewise, Palin has electrified the base while turning off the middle, and the middle is what made McCain the most viable candidate among this year's crop of GOP hopefuls. The smart play for McCain was to pick someone acceptable to both sides but the first choice of neither.

I thought back then and still think his best bet for a VP would have been Huckabee. Very likable, very well liked among much of the base, certainly a genuine conservative (but not a total wingnut like Palin is), and young enough to be a realistic contender for 2016 (or 2009, depending on McCain's health). McCain must have considered him unacceptable for some reason; maybe the rumors about their visceral dislike of one another had some truth to them. Maybe McCain resented how many votes Huckabee kept getting after it was clear McCain had locked it up. Maybe he thought his lack of experience undercut his "Obama has no experience!" argument and he ruled him out early on, burning the bridge. Who knows.

 

The fear is that, if Obama is elected, there will be an assasination attempt within a few months. I suspect that, if McCain is elected (heaven forbid), Palin will make an assasination attempt of her own.

(Notes:
1. Despite the tone of this post, I don't take lightly the very real possibility of an attempt on Obama's life.
2. I hope the FBI isn't monitoring this thread. )

Hopefully, Obama's intelligence doesn't make him think he's above the law, unlike Nixon.

 

I do not think this is related to the intelligence of the president. As far as I know, it's hard to argue that Bush Jr. is among the most intelligent US presidents, but he has often put himself above the spirit, if not letter of the law. Signing statements, executive priviledge, and all the other BS Gonzales and others came up with - I don't know how bad Nixon was, but I do not think this is how the president of a democratic country would act.

 

Where exactly do people get the idea that Palin is so ambitious? Mind you, my slow internet has kept me from seeing most of the videos posted, but everything I've seen says she's taking what seems like a good opportunity offered to her. Her current moves, which seem to be almost against McCain, may well be because she sees McCain as playing soft with no real message and essentially handing the election to Obama, while she refuses to do so. I'd also like to take this opportunity to point out that Biden said many things similar to what Palin has said (from a policy disagreement standpoint, not a content one) and no-one batted an eyelash. Of course, that was Biden.

 

Nixon was an intelligent man - Not that smart though: He ruined a very successful presidency with his paranoia and grandiose ideas that he was running an imperial presidency. Bill Clinton was smarter, a Rhodes Scholar, he took on the entire ultra-conservative establishment - and won.

 

Actually, I think the smartest president since Woodrow Wilson was Jimmy Carter. Clinton was certainly no slouch either (at least when his pants remained zipped -- but I guess that's true of any man ).

 

T2, I know this will come as a shock to a Navy man such as yourself, but, ah, some men? Yeah, they like to have sex with other men.

I kid because I love.

EDIT: wait, my kidding doesn't make any sense, because I misread your post. Darn.

 

LOL AMaster.

 

I would think that anyone running for Pres or VP would, by necessity, be ambitious. It's pretty much in the job description. I'm not singling Palin out here. I believe that Palin, McCain, Biden, and Obama are ALL ambitious, as was Bush and Cheney, and Kerry and Edwards, and Gore and Liebermann, etc. If you want to be "the man" (or in the case "the woman") ambition is very much necessary to get to the top. I'm not even sure I'd site it as a character flaw in this instance. I'm just confused as to why you believe she is NOT ambitious.

 

What makes you say that? I've heard Carter described as a honest and religious man, but there don't seem to be many comments on his intelligence.

 

Well, ambition seems to me to require a certain personal attempt. She wasn't really hunting for the VP slot at all, she just took the opportunity she was offered. That doesn't sound like ambition to me. For example, if something horrible were to happen and Obama, Clinton, and Biden were killed, and the DNC was casting around for someone who could seriously contend against McCain at this point in the game, and they came to you (pretending here, let's assume they decide average joe has a ring this year... are you average joe-ish?), would it be your ambition if you accepted or would you be thinking, 'What the hell, at worst everyone will know my name. I may even get some nice TV gigs out of it.' I get the impression Palin was more the latter than the former. Now, seeing what's happening and how the campaign's being run, I think she's decided (and a strong part of me wants to agree with her here) that McCain's strategy is to play dead and hope the Obama administration is a nice one, and she's actually going to try for it. It's not like she has much to loose at this point.