Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[FearfulJesuit]

There's still a way. Perhaps we could get Obama re-elected as a senator, and become president pro temporae? That oughta still ruffle some feathers .

Would he be eligible for the Supreme Court?

Yep. Taft became Chief Justice after his term in the White House.

[mastahcheese]

There's still a way. Perhaps we could get Obama re-elected as a senator, and become president pro temporae? That oughta still ruffle some feathers .

Would he be eligible for the Supreme Court?

Yep. Taft became Chief Justice after his term in the White House.

Welp, I vote for Obama for Supreme Court.


...We do vote on that, right?

[kaijyuu]

* kaijyuu looked up Elizabeth Warren.

I like her.

[RedKing]

My main beef with Hillary Clinton is that (before Obama), just the surname alone was sufficient to get conservatives to crawl across broken glass to vote against her. She is utterly vilified by a large segment of the population. Granted, that segment is probably unlikely to vote for any Democrat. But they might be less motivated to vote period if the Dem nominee were someone else.

Beyond that, the stuff other people said -- establishment candidate, kind of a centrist semi-liberal.


I like Warren, I just can't see her possibly winning a national election. Unless the GOP nominated a ROFLcopter candidate like Santorum, Perry or Cruz.

I suspect that if Warren were on the table, that would really hurt Clinton's chances.  Clinton has a lot of ties to the establishment but Warren simply excites people in a way that Clinton can't.

Replace Warren with Howard Dean and Clinton with John Kerry, and you have 2004. We saw how that played out.

[mainiac]

I like Warren, I just can't see her possibly winning a national election. Unless the GOP nominated a ROFLcopter candidate like Santorum, Perry or Cruz.

I think she would have a cakewalk if she was the nominee in 2016.  Largely they swing votes are determined by the direction of change of the economy in the year before the election.  That is almost certain to favor democrats in 2016.  The economy is depressed enough that we have plenty of room to grow for the next three years without even reaching full employment.  So just as Obama easily coasted to victory on a mediocre economy, any democratic candidate can expect to have a wind at their back.

But there is more then a wind at their back.  Republicans voters are really, really concentrated in the south and a few other places.  They were able to gerrymander the house due to winning the 2010 elections but that doesn't work on the presidential level.  So any republican candidate is going to face a disadvantage due to the electoral map because a tied popular vote means a clean democratic win in the electoral college.  Warren could afford to loose Florida, Ohio and Virginia and could still win.  She just needs to squeak by in places like Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire, which are just gonna be even more liberal in 2016 then in 2012.

Maybe an inspiring, centrist republican could change this up like Eisenhower did, but I'm not aware of any of those existing these days.

tl;dr, 2016 presidential elections are a democratic lock unless the economy really, really screws up.

[Max White]

That or we find out Obama was sleeping with a secretary. I hear that will sink a ship.

[Chaoswizkid]

That or we find out Obama was sleeping with a secretary. I hear that will sink a ship.

BarackxMichelle

[GlyphGryph]

Clinton, policy wise, has nothing going for her except "not completely incompetent" and "not voted a Republican".

She voted for war in Iraq. She's voted to increase subsidies given to wealthy business. She supports extrajudicial assassinations. She has come down as opposed to single payer healthcare or any healthcare plan that cuts out insurers. She wants to expand the drug war, actively maintain the embargo against cuba, wants to censor the internet and prevent sale of "obscene" materials esp. video games. she supports the security state and the NSA and the TSA, and has said she wants to expand such programs.

"On November 15, 2007, when asked "[is] national security more important than human rights?" Clinton responded, "I agree with that completely." "

She supports Guatanamo, wants to make flag burning and other expressions of "disrespect" against the US government illegal, she thinks whistleblowers should be prevented and the president should not have to answer to the American public, she supports three strikes both in drug laws and internet use, supports the death penalty, voted for No Child Left Behind.

Honestly, it's just... bah, it's everything I didn't like about about Obama, but moreso, and without any noticeable compelling reasons to support her. She believes the president should rule with an iron fist, and that the primary responsibility of government is enforcing morality and insuring security at all costs.

The ONLY issues where she could be said to have policies I agree with (and even on the environment she's... lackluster) are issues I don't really care about that much.

I don't hate her, but I would never, ever vote for her.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I like Warren, I just can't see her possibly winning a national election. Unless the GOP nominated a ROFLcopter candidate like Santorum, Perry or Cruz.

And you rule this out because....

I mean, really, we just had the whole government shut down for a month because the Tea Party is willing to go for the gold at every possible juncture. They're rising in popularity amongst hardliner conservatives while crashing hard for everybody else. They honestly believe their own rhetoric. The setup is pretty clear.

It could not happen, but the moderate Republicans don't have party control anymore.

[RedKing]

I like Warren, I just can't see her possibly winning a national election. Unless the GOP nominated a ROFLcopter candidate like Santorum, Perry or Cruz.

And you rule this out because....

I mean, really, we just had the whole government shut down for a month because the Tea Party is willing to go for the gold at every possible juncture. They're rising in popularity amongst hardliner conservatives while crashing hard for everybody else. They honestly believe their own rhetoric. The setup is pretty clear.

It could not happen, but the moderate Republicans don't have party control anymore.

They don't have party control in day-to-day operations. But the establishment still has their finger on the money spigot. Come campaign time, I think the Tea Party is going to reap what it has sown.
The 2016 GOP primary won't be half as entertaining or as long as the 2012 one was. The party machine isn't going to make the mistake of waiting that long to see what candidates shake out. They're going to be privately wrangling to make their choice starting NOW, so that by the start of the primary season, they already have their anointed chosen and can pump money into him and start working the PR charm offensive while the Democrats are tearing each other apart in their own primary.

At least, that's what I'd do if I was them.

[FearfulJesuit]

The thing is, though...even all the money of Wall Street can't stop an army of raving gun nuts with primary ballots. And if the delegates all bail on the Tea Party at the last minute, the party will collapse as the Tea Partiers nominate their own candidate, with hookers and blackjack.

[mainiac]

They don't have party control in day-to-day operations. But the establishment still has their finger on the money spigot. Come campaign time, I think the Tea Party is going to reap what it has sown.
The 2016 GOP primary won't be half as entertaining or as long as the 2012 one was. The party machine isn't going to make the mistake of waiting that long to see what candidates shake out. They're going to be privately wrangling to make their choice starting NOW, so that by the start of the primary season, they already have their anointed chosen and can pump money into him and start working the PR charm offensive while the Democrats are tearing each other apart in their own primary.

At least, that's what I'd do if I was them.

The dark smoky rooms used to exist in the 60s but the parties revised the rules to make that difficult to do.  While it's true that money can be thrown to a candidate and matter a lot in a primary, that only does so much.  Remember both Romney and McCain were the establishment candidates.  That didn't help either of them to moderate their positions effectively in the general election.  And keep in mind that you can't just conjure a candidate up from nowhere, you need something to actually work with.  Christie maybe fits the bill but I have a hard time seeing him win a primary.  The best they could hope for would be Paul Ryan or Governor Perry and both of them have a lot of skeletons not even in their closet, just lying around in plain sight.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Christie has the opposite problem. He could definitely be a contender, but he's too centrist for the Tea Party by far, and even the establishment seems to dislike him.

[mainiac]

I really don't get why people automatically assume that a more socially liberal GOP candidate like Christie would automatically be a contender.  Yes Dwight Eisenhower greatly outperformed expectations more than half a century ago.  But he was a beloved national war hero who was free to stake out whatever stance he wanted.  Assuming that Christie actually wins the nomination he will probably come out with some half hearted support of gay marriage that appeals to nobody but cling to the national party line of economic issues and foreign policy.  What's going to make him an attractive candidate about that.

To clarify what I said before, I would suggest that this map shows what we should expect of the 2016 presidential election unless some sort of blowout occurs: http://www.270towin.com/2016_election_predictions.php?mapid=bDUx

It's possible for republicans to win, but only by sweeping the board and winning pretty liberal, no-very-swing states like Colorado, Iowa and New Hampshire.  And meanwhile North Carolina and Virginia just get more liberal.  Pretty soon places like Florida are going to be the least of their worries because if they need to worry about winning there, they've already lost.  A GOP victory means they need to win the popular vote by at least 3.5% or so and possibly more.  They haven't done that since 1988.

[Culise]

I like Warren, I just can't see her possibly winning a national election. Unless the GOP nominated a ROFLcopter candidate like Santorum, Perry or Cruz.

And you rule this out because....

I mean, really, we just had the whole government shut down for a month because the Tea Party is willing to go for the gold at every possible juncture. They're rising in popularity amongst hardliner conservatives while crashing hard for everybody else. They honestly believe their own rhetoric. The setup is pretty clear.

It could not happen, but the moderate Republicans don't have party control anymore.

They don't have party control in day-to-day operations. But the establishment still has their finger on the money spigot. Come campaign time, I think the Tea Party is going to reap what it has sown.
The 2016 GOP primary won't be half as entertaining or as long as the 2012 one was. The party machine isn't going to make the mistake of waiting that long to see what candidates shake out. They're going to be privately wrangling to make their choice starting NOW, so that by the start of the primary season, they already have their anointed chosen and can pump money into him and start working the PR charm offensive while the Democrats are tearing each other apart in their own primary.

At least, that's what I'd do if I was them.

Really?  A large part of the rise of the Tea Party candidates was the fact that they had their own money spigot courtesy of a handful of very rich patrons like the Koch brothers, which divorced them from the political system of patronage and permitted them to be as independent as they wanted, while still being able to force the Republican old guard to at least listen to them.  It's the reason why they've had the money to throw into massive media campaigns denigrating not only the Democratic opposition, but the moderate Republican enemies like Senator Cochran.  Mind you, I think that even that is going to wane with the economic fears that became apparent during the shutdown; the senior businessmen who were using them seem to have realized that an economic suicide pact is not good for business, and may well swing back behind the establishment as well by 2016.