US 2008 Presidential Campaign/Debate Discussion Thread #6

[anitram]

Originally Posted by VintagePunk

As I said, very, very poorly worded, but I doubt it was meant in any malicious or disrespectful way toward RFK. It sounded to me more like she was thinking aloud, which is really stupid for someone in her position who should be choosing words more carefully.

It doesn't really matter what she meant, what matters is how it was perceived.

I'd also like to point out that Obama's "bitter/guns/religion" comment was terribly worded and he clearly didn't mean to be offensive, but it was how it was perceived. And the media ran with it. And worse yet, Hillary herself cashed in on it and exploited it. Obama's campaign showed a hell of a lot more class yesterday regarding her gaffe than she's ever shown to him.

[2861U2]

President Election Polls - Presidential Candidate Polls in 2008 - Swing State Polls

Updated 5-21-2008

Hillary Clinton: 310
John McCain: 211

Barack Obama: 214
John McCain: 290

[melon]

Originally Posted by VintagePunk

I've already replied to this, but I just wanted to add that Canadian issues do get reported in great depth on Canadian news broadcasts. Canadian broadcasters do give a decent chunk of airtime to US news, though, much more than US network news broadcasts from American border town affiliates give to Canada. I'm not commenting on the equity of it one way or the other, I'm just saying it is, and it's always been that way, for various reasons.

I've been thinking about the right way to articulate this, and I'm not sure I've gotten it the exact right way I want to say this, so bear with me for a moment here.

Having been exposed to Canada for much of my life through their media, having paid closer attention to Canadian affairs over the last seven years or so based on the Canadian nationality of my partner, and considering I will be moving to Canada later this year, in addition to being an American, I feel like I have an emerging unique perspective on the two countries, although I know it will continue to evolve once I've moved there.

My initial perspective, currently, is that Canadian media devotes so much time to American news is that it serves the purpose of having Canadians feel that there's very little wrong with their country. In fact, some days watching Canadian news, I think that the media thinks that the worst thing going on is "outrage" that restaurants aren't printing nutritional content in their menus. If the news ever turns for the worse, such as some occasional gun violence in Toronto, for instance, the shift almost immediately goes to the U.S. and guns. In other words, the U.S. serves an interesting place in Canadian culture as a kind of antagonist; here's a place that has guns, greed, racism, Republicans, evil corporations, and religious fanatics, not to mention having 10x the population of Canada, an exponentially larger economy, and, in many sectors, has affected a considerable "brain drain" of Canadian talent to the U.S.

Basically, I question whether all this coverage of the U.S., in Canadian media, has the effect of telling Canadians to "shut up and be happy with what you've got" or suffer at the specter of becoming "the 51st state." In other words, just as the U.S. media bullies Americans into complacency by telling us we need to be frightened of everything from foreigners to sex offenders to the bird flu to our own shadows, the Canadian media orchestrates Canadian complacency by disproportionate attention to foreign affairs, thus sweeping most of their domestic problems under the rug.

And I do see quite a few problems to be addressed on the horizon. For one, I do notice how very concentrated and non-competitive certain economic sectors of Canada are, especially in terms of media/telecom and financials. Not only does it make things more expensive, but there's also going to be fewer options for the consumer and fewer opportunities for growth, thus fewer opportunities for employment. There's a myriad of issues related to the "brain drain," of course, but I was shocked to discover how limited in size so many Masters/Ph.D programs were in Canada, in comparison to the U.S. I often think that the U.S. has long utilized its educational system as a driver of future economic growth, often by sucking international talent abroad through them. Unless Canada rectifies this issue with Canadian higher education by expanding them considerably to not only attract more foreign students, but also retain Canadian students who get rejected, because there isn't enough room, then I think that the "brain drain" isn't going to go away anytime soon.

Anyway, I say this less to beat up on Canada here (if I didn't love it, I wouldn't be moving there), and more to say that Canadians are not immune to the kind of systemic dysfunctionality that the U.S. has. We all have our problems, and while all the cameras and attention worldwide are pointing at our presidential election, I question sometimes whether it is less about educating people about the U.S. and more about putting the spotlight away from domestic issues that would make politicians squirm otherwise. Considering that Canadian media is dominated by government (CBC, CRTC, the myriad of tax credits provided for all domestic content), CTV (CTV, A-Channel, The Globe and Mail, and 35 radio stations nationwide), Rogers (telephony, cable TV, internet, cell phones, CityTV, OMNI, Sportsnet, 70 consumer and business publications), Canwest (Global, Canwest News Service, Alliance Atlantis, not to mention its historical ties to both the Liberal Party and Israel's Likud), and Bell (telephony, internet, cable TV, satellite TV, cell phones, a 15% stake in CTV), perhaps one has to ask whether what they report--or omit--is in the public's interest or in the interest of their own self-preservation.

Just food for thought.

[melon]

Originally Posted by anitram

It doesn't really matter what she meant, what matters is how it was perceived.

I'd also like to point out that Obama's "bitter/guns/religion" comment was terribly worded and he clearly didn't mean to be offensive, but it was how it was perceived. And the media ran with it. And worse yet, Hillary herself cashed in on it and exploited it. Obama's campaign showed a hell of a lot more class yesterday regarding her gaffe than she's ever shown to him.

The American media certainly loves its "gotcha" moments. I also think that Americans, traditionally, have taken great pleasure in exposing sanctimonious individuals and organizations as "human" like the rest of us. Frankly, though, the media certainly does take this to its logical extremes to the point of absurdity.

[VintagePunk]

Originally Posted by anitram

It doesn't really matter what she meant, what matters is how it was perceived.

I'd also like to point out that Obama's "bitter/guns/religion" comment was terribly worded and he clearly didn't mean to be offensive, but it was how it was perceived. And the media ran with it. And worse yet, Hillary herself cashed in on it and exploited it. Obama's campaign showed a hell of a lot more class yesterday regarding her gaffe than she's ever shown to him.

Oh, I agree completely that it's all in the perception, and if most people are reacting on the surface of things as they tend to do, she'll probably come off badly, it'll be a minus in her column, just as Obama's comments were for him.

Since I posted that last night, I see that this isn't the first time she's made that particular comment, so it obviously wasn't a poorly thought out phrase she constructed on the fly. I still don't think her intent was malicious, though. If anything, I think that outside of the obvious, pointing out that campaigns do run that long sometimes, she may have been also attempting to associate herself (albeit in a very awkward, bizarre way) with nostalgia for the Kennedy era.

Somehow this campaign seems to have become, at least for Obama supporters, a battle of good versus evil. I still maintain though that Hillary isn't *that* bad, she's just running a fairly typical campaign, exploiting the weaknesses of her opponent. It's Obama's campaign that is more unusual, more of the "rise about this nonsense" ilk, and that's making her seem worse in comparison.

I think one of the factors when it comes to verbal gaffes on the part of the candidates is that Hillary is a known entity, whereas Obama isn't. Americans have a couple of decades of seeing Hillary in the public spotlight, and as such, I think it's easier for her supporters to pass off her comments as being a slip of the tongue, not a true reflection of who she really is. Obama is under heavy scrutiny for the first time, and people who don't follow politics closely are getting their first introduction to him. His comments might not be able to be passed off quite as easily. He's not known, so people might perceive them to be more of a part of who he actually is, even the bad, poorly worded comments.

One of the most obvious reasons I can think of as to why Hillary's campaign might be playing it the way that they are is that she has the obvious female hurdle to overcome. Acting as the aggressor in the campaign shows America that she's tough, she's not going to be sitting around clutching her pearls when the call comes at in 3 am. It's up for debate whether or not this approach was necessary, but sadly, I tend to think it probably was.

[deep]

Originally Posted by 2861U2

President Election Polls - Presidential Candidate Polls in 2008 - Swing State Polls

Updated 5-21-2008

Hillary Clinton: 310
John McCain: 211

Barack Obama: 214
John McCain: 290

this is really what all the hysterics are about

the fact that the Democratic primaries are a complete sham on the all the primary voters


that it can really make no difference on how people actually vote
because at the end of the day, voters are not the "deciders"

assholes called "super delegates" are

and they can go anyway they want


if they are smart they should look at the "electoral college" projections

and not pick a loser

is that fair?

this whole process was never fair

voters are just dumb patsies with this set up


they are holding up there "tin cups" and begging










"please sir, can I have some Obama"

[VintagePunk]

Originally Posted by melon

I've been thinking about the right way to articulate this, and I'm not sure I've gotten it the exact right way I want to say this, so bear with me for a moment here.

Having been exposed to Canada for much of my life through their media, having paid closer attention to Canadian affairs over the last seven years or so based on the Canadian nationality of my partner, and considering I will be moving to Canada later this year, in addition to being an American, I feel like I have an emerging unique perspective on the two countries, although I know it will continue to evolve once I've moved there.

My initial perspective, currently, is that Canadian media devotes so much time to American news is that it serves the purpose of having Canadians feel that there's very little wrong with their country. In fact, some days watching Canadian news, I think that the media thinks that the worst thing going on is "outrage" that restaurants aren't printing nutritional content in their menus. If the news ever turns for the worse, such as some occasional gun violence in Toronto, for instance, the shift almost immediately goes to the U.S. and guns. In other words, the U.S. serves an interesting place in Canadian culture as a kind of antagonist; here's a place that has guns, greed, racism, Republicans, evil corporations, and religious fanatics, not to mention having 10x the population of Canada, an exponentially larger economy, and, in many sectors, has affected a considerable "brain drain" of Canadian talent to the U.S.

Basically, I question whether all this coverage of the U.S., in Canadian media, has the effect of telling Canadians to "shut up and be happy with what you've got" or suffer at the specter of becoming "the 51st state." In other words, just as the U.S. media bullies Americans into complacency by telling us we need to be frightened of everything from foreigners to sex offenders to the bird flu to our own shadows, the Canadian media orchestrates Canadian complacency by disproportionate attention to foreign affairs, thus sweeping most of their domestic problems under the rug.

And I do see quite a few problems to be addressed on the horizon. For one, I do notice how very concentrated and non-competitive certain economic sectors of Canada are, especially in terms of media/telecom and financials. Not only does it make things more expensive, but there's also going to be fewer options for the consumer and fewer opportunities for growth, thus fewer opportunities for employment. There's a myriad of issues related to the "brain drain," of course, but I was shocked to discover how limited in size so many Masters/Ph.D programs were in Canada, in comparison to the U.S. I often think that the U.S. has long utilized its educational system as a driver of future economic growth, often by sucking international talent abroad through them. Unless Canada rectifies this issue with Canadian higher education by expanding them considerably to not only attract more foreign students, but also retain Canadian students who get rejected, because there isn't enough room, then I think that the "brain drain" isn't going to go away anytime soon.

Anyway, I say this less to beat up on Canada here (if I didn't love it, I wouldn't be moving there), and more to say that Canadians are not immune to the kind of systemic dysfunctionality that the U.S. has. We all have our problems, and while all the cameras and attention worldwide are pointing at our presidential election, I question sometimes whether it is less about educating people about the U.S. and more about putting the spotlight away from domestic issues that would make politicians squirm otherwise. Considering that Canadian media is dominated by government (CBC, CRTC, the myriad of tax credits provided for all domestic content), CTV (CTV, A-Channel, The Globe and Mail, and 35 radio stations nationwide), Rogers (telephony, cable TV, internet, cell phones, CityTV, OMNI, Sportsnet, 70 consumer and business publications), Canwest (Global, Canwest News Service, Alliance Atlantis, not to mention its historical ties to both the Liberal Party and Israel's Likud), and Bell (telephony, internet, cable TV, satellite TV, cell phones, a 15% stake in CTV), perhaps one has to ask whether what they report--or omit--is in the public's interest or in the interest of their own self-preservation.

Just food for thought.

Thanks for posting your perspective, it was really interesting to read and consider. This post will be getting into the "various reasons" I mentioned last night, but was too tired to examine.

I can see how you might have come to those conclusions regarding Canadian news reporting having seen a fairly small snapshot of it in recent years, and also viewing it from the perspective of suspicion and cynicism you probably have with your national media. It's possible that Canadian media may have devolved to the point that you're arguing, but it's been so gradual that I've not noticed it. I think though that you have to take an historical perspective to tease out the answer, and a large part of it comes from our national identity, or lack thereof (although I don't think the latter is really as true in recent years).

Consider Canada for a moment, a large landmass with approximately a tenth of the population that the US has, a relatively new nation. In comparison, the US is like this behemoth, one that is always threatens to suck us in culturally, not in a literal sense, although that looms to a certain extent, too. This especially holds true considering that the vast majority of our population, unlike yours, lives very close to the US border.

I was a young child in the 70's, and I think I was somewhat precocious regarding pop culture, but I remember a lot of it fairly clearly. I recall growing up that there always seemed to be this sense of inferiority and America-envy regarding many things, media and entertainment included. We didn't have the variety of Canadian television broadcasters that we do now. Certainly, the same can be said for you guys, you've vastly increased as well, but when the numbers are shrunk down proportionally, you still had a lot more than we did. We essentially relied on the US for entertainment. In the area of music, I can remember a handful of homegrown Canadian artists, but that's about it. Of course, that's what led to the development of the much maligned Can-Con rules by the CRTC in the early 70's (I can't remember that specifically, but I do remember what we had at the time, and what the ensuing decade or so was like). From that time on, our music scene has flourished, and despite the criticism that Can-Con receives, I can't help but think it created positive change. Would the industry have developed on its own without the help of government rules? Probably, but I think it would have taken a lot longer. My digression aside, my point is essentially that in the area of media and entertainment, you guys were the giants we relied on until the government intervened, and forced Canadians to be exposed to Canadian entertainment.

In television, and in news broadcasting specifically, in the 70's (the dark ages, before the advent of remote controls, when you had to get up and physically change the dial on the tv) when we watched American television, I suppose some people would have gotten their main exposure to American network news by turning on the channel to view whatever was on after the news finished, not necessarily out of a specific interest in US news. I'm sure many others though, specifically sought out Canadian networks to view their news on.

As for the sheer amount of American coverage on Canadian-based news networks, I have a feeling it's partly to do with the vast size of your nation, in terms of population, thus, the amount of news generated, as well as the great impact that America has on world events overall, along with our close proximity to you. As I alluded to earlier, you may be right, there *may* be an element of "look at them, we don't have it so bad, do we? Now sit down and shut up" implied in much of the US news we receive, but I don't think that's the main motivation. I freely admit that since the Iraq war, there has probably been a certain smugness involved in some of the news about the US that originates from Canada. Sort of "how the mighty have fallen - remember when we used to envy them?" However bitchy a reaction that might be, I think that reflects more on our (mostly former) sense of inferiority regarding the US. Unlike you though, I've never gotten the impression that our news broadcasts air American news to the exclusion of Canadian news. To me, it's always been more of an "in addition to" scenario. I also think that our news broadcasts tend to be more straight-on, factual reporting, without much editorializing.

The main reason I think that Canadian events aren't reported so much on American network news, with the exception of brief mentions in border town affiliates, is mostly because of American-centricism. I don't really use that term in an insulting sense. The fact is, your nation is so large in comparison, so complex, that you don't need filler for your news broadcasts. Couple that with the trend in American news to analyze every minute detail ad nauseum, and there isn't much room for other nations to be covered in any depth.

One final thought before I have to sign off - maybe it's not that Canada spends a disproportionate amount of time covering American and other international news and events, but that America spends a disproportionate amount of time *not* covering them? During bouts of insomnia in recent months, I've had to opportunity to watch on a City-TV news channel late night broadcasts of European-based news programs from countries like France and Germany. They seem to be more equivalent to our news, in that they cover a lot of international news.

Thanks again for the discussion, it's a topic that fascinates me. I hope it doesn't get lost in the transition to a new thread.

[A_Wanderer]

Hillary Clinton is now complaining that her candidacy has been harmed by sexism. Interviewed earlier this week by the Washington Post, Sen. Clinton said the polls show that "more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American." This gender bias, she grumbled, "rarely gets reported on."

So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley and Yale – who has earned millions in the private sector, won two terms in the U.S. Senate, and gathered many more votes than John Edwards, Bill Richardson and several other middle-aged white guys in their respective bids for the 2008 Democratic nomination – feels cheated because she's a woman.

Seems doubtful. But hey, I'm a guy and perhaps hopelessly insensitive. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that her campaign has indeed suffered because of sexism.

This fact (if it be a fact) reveals a hitherto unknown, ugly truth about the Democratic Party. The alleged bastion of modern liberalism, toleration and diversity is full of (to use Mrs. Clinton's own phrase) "people who are nothing but misogynists." Large numbers of Democratic voters are sexists. Who knew?

But here's another revelation. If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.

It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election. Only if registered Republicans and independents are more open-minded than registered Democrats – only if people who lean GOP or who have no party affiliation are more willing than Democrats to overlook a candidate's sex and vote on the issues – could Mrs. Clinton be a stronger candidate.

I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. But if I ever become convinced that Mrs. Clinton is correct that sexism played a role in her disappointing showing in the Democratic primaries – and that she truly is her party's strongest candidate to take on John McCain – I might finally join a party: the GOP. At least it's not infested with sexists.

'Nothing but Misogynists' - WSJ.com

[anitram]

Obama has class:

"I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Senator Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make and I think that is what happened here. Senator Clinton says that she did not intend any offense by it and I will take her at her word on that," Obama told Radio Isla Puerto Rico.

[yolland]

Continue discussion here...

[yolland]

The Snare of Privilege

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
New York Times, May 25

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Wellesley ’69, Yale Law ’73 and the first lady of the land for eight years, is suddenly a working-class heroine of guns and whiskey shots. Barack Obama, Columbia ’83 and Harvard Law ’91, visits bowling alleys and beer halls and talks about his single mother who lived on food stamps. John S. McCain III, United States Naval Academy ’58, the son and grandson of admirals and the husband of one of the richer women in Arizona, chases after the conservative, anti-elite religious base of the Republican Party, and prefers to talk about the “cabin” at his Sedona weekend retreat rather than the Phoenix home lushly featured in the pages of Architectural Digest in 2005.

In an increasingly populist country, it’s not surprising that all three presidential contenders have been sprinting away from the elitist label for much of this primary season. But do they really expect to get away with it? More to the point, should they? Don’t voters want the best and brightest, and best-credentialed, rising to the top? Not exactly. Americans have been ambivalent about elites since the nation was founded by revolutionaries who were also, in many cases, landed gentry. And status and wealth still play an outsize role in our supposedly classless society.

Our presidential history is a case in point. Although there has long been an anti-aristocratic bent to American politics, voters have put some famous aristocrats (including two Roosevelts, one Kennedy, all Harvard men) into the White House, and have all but idolized them as well. Over the last 20 years, every president has been a graduate of Yale. In 2004, two members of the university’s rarefied secret society, Skull and Bones, ran against each other, and the more elite candidate, George W. Bush (Andover, Yale, Harvard Business School, son of a president), won.

But it’s not always easy to say exactly who, or what, constitutes the elite—especially in recent decades. In his book The Power Elite, published in 1956, the leftist thinker C. Wright Mills identified a class “composed of political, economic, and military men,” who harnessed “the major means of production” along with “the newly enlarged means of violence” created in the nuclear age. In 1975, the neoconservative Irving Kristol described the elite, or “the new class,” as he termed it, as a confederacy of like-minded liberals in a range of professions—from journalism to law—who were “suspicious of, and hostile to, the market precisely because the market is so vulgarly democratic.” Mr. Mills and Mr. Kristol shared the belief that “the elite,” however they were defined, wielded disproportionate influence. This year, these competing views remain in place. Republicans sneer at Democrats for being cultural elitists, and Democrats deride Republicans as economic elitists. But the old labels have been turned inside out.

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain have both derided Mr. Obama as “elitist” for his remarks about bitter rural voters who “cling” to guns and religion, even as Mr. Obama, in a counterpunch, mocked her courtship of gun owners, depicting her as a kind of ersatz Annie Oakley “packing a six-shooter” in a duck blind. And Mr. McCain, throwing a haymaker of his own, pointed out in a recent speech to members of the National Rifle Association that “someone should tell Senator Obama that ducks are usually hunted with shotguns.” Amid all this, some have noted that we have reached a curious moment in American history: an African-American candidate, born seven years after the Supreme Court repudiated segregation in public schools and four years before the Voting Rights Act was passed, finds himself struggling to overcome an aura of privilege. “It really is a delicious irony that the first serious black candidate for president should suddenly be described as elite,” said Tom Wolfe, the author of Bonfire of the Vanities and a longtime chronicler of the nation’s fixation on status.

One reason is that Mr. Obama holds two Ivy League degrees at a time when not all Americans accept the notion of an Ivy League education as a triumph of American opportunity. As elite campuses have become more culturally diverse, but not necessarily more accessible to many in the middle class, the perception persists that high-powered connections still matter. “Most people in America just don’t buy into the idea of a meritocracy as defined by Ivy League meritocrats,” said Nicholas Lemann, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of The Big Test, a history of the SAT and the rise of the American meritocracy. “That’s one reason why the average American buys the person who doesn’t have fancy college credentials but who built a business from scratch, like the guy who owns a Toyota dealership in Marietta, Ga., and who grew up poor.”

In a nation without a titled aristocracy, an elite education may well be the most important membership card. “American elites have a problem that the Europeans don’t, which is how to assure that their children and their children’s children retain their elevated social position,” said Jason Kaufman, a Harvard sociologist who has written on elites and American culture. “Americans do this through cultural institutions and exclusion—art museums, classical music and tremendously elitist universities.”

There may be another reason Americans are skeptical about the idea that the best rise to the top: those at the top haven’t performed too well lately. Christopher Buckley, Yale ’75, the novelist and humorist, notes that recent Iraq books contain echoes of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam’s classic account of the huge failures of the Ivy League brain trust in the Kennedy White House who propelled the nation into Vietnam. “If you loved Vietnam, brought to you by Harvard and Yale, you’ll love Iraq,” Mr. Buckley said. Consider some crucial players in the Iraq war: former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Princeton ’54; Vice President Dick Cheney, Yale dropout; I. Lewis Libby, Yale ’72; and L. Paul Bremer III, the former top American civilian administrator in Baghdad, Yale ’63, Harvard Business ’66. Mr. Bush, Mr. Bremer and Mr. Libby also graduated from Andover. Mr. Buckley recalled a famous line uttered by his father, William F. Buckley Jr., Yale ’50, who observed in the 1960s that he’d rather “be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the 2000 members of the Harvard faculty.”

Ivy League credentials aside, what matters in the end to most voters, when it comes to choosing a president, is not academic pedigree, but rather the candidates’ ability to make an emotional connection and to win trust and confidence. The most famous aristocrat-presidents of the 20th century, John F. Kennedy and Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all had that gift, and it outweighed the advantages—and drawbacks—of education, wealth and privilege. This year’s focus on the crucial swing states, and their large working-class populations, has made inspiring those voters and playing down elitist credentials a political necessity. At the very least, Mrs. Clinton’s lopsided primary victories in West Virginia and Kentucky show how much more work Mr. Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, must do with this critical slice of the electorate. “We believe in the best and the brightest, but you’ve also got to relate to ordinary people,” said Ed Rollins, the longtime Republican strategist who was the national chairman this year of the unsuccessful presidential campaign of former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas. “I think one of the problems that Obama has is that he gives a magnificent speech, he can inspire massive crowds, but he seems aloof up close.”

The lesson has not been lost on Mr. McCain, whose third-generation Annapolis lineage makes him perhaps the most elite of the three candidates and is married to a woman whose money financed his political career. In a speech last month in Inez, Ky., the Appalachian coal-mining hollow where in 1964 Lyndon B. Johnson declared his war on poverty, Mr. McCain tried to bridge the difference. “I cannot claim that the circumstances of our lives are similar in every respect,” Mr. McCain told a friendly crowd at the Martin County Courthouse. “I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours.” Nonetheless, Mr. McCain assured the crowd that “you are my compatriots,” and “that means more to me than almost any other association.”

It was a peculiarly American sentiment—hopeful, political, perhaps na�ve. But it was as old as the nation itself. “I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has,” Lincoln told Union troops assembled at the White House in August 1864, before promising them all “equal privileges in the race of life.”

[deep]

since we are going to 1000 replies before these threads close


Why not open the new one with the last 100 replies


or at least the last 2 pages of the 68 pages?

[yolland]

100 posts is a bit too much clicking and selecting for me but I went ahead and moved the last two pages.

[deep]

^ thanks




one thing that really bothers me

is all the Kennedys that are supporting Obama and suggesting Hillary should bow out?


when we have that 1980 Democratic Primary

I was 24-25 in 1980, and I do remember it.

Kennedy’s official announcement was scheduled for early November 1979. There was a prime time interview with CBS’s Roger Mudd and it was a minor disaster. Kennedy flubbed a number of the questions and couldn’t exactly explain why he was running, and the polls, which showed him leading the President by 58-25 in August now had him ahead 49-39.[5] Then the hostages were taken in Tehran, Iran and the bottom fell out of the Kennedy campaign.

Carter’s approval ratings jumped in the 60-percent range in some polls, due to a "rally ‘round the flag" effect[6] and an appreciation of Carter's calm handling of the crisis. Kennedy was suddenly left far behind. Carter beat Kennedy decisively in Iowa and New Hampshire. Carter decisively defeated Kennedy everywhere except Massachusetts, until impatience began to build with the President’s strategy on Iran. When the later primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut came around, it was Kennedy who won largely due to such impatience.

Carter was still able to maintain a substantial lead even after Kennedy swept the last batch of primaries in June. Despite this, Kennedy refused to drop out, and the 1980 Democratic National Convention was one of the nastiest on record. On the penultimate day, Kennedy conceded the nomination and called for a more liberal party platform in what many saw as the best speech of his career. On the platform on the final day, Kennedy for the most part ignored Carter.

The delegate tally at the convention was in part:

* Jimmy Carter – 2,129.02
* Ted Kennedy – 1,150.48
* 14 others – 66.5

In the vice presidential roll call, Mondale was re-nominated with 2,428.7 votes to 723.3 not voting and 179 scattering.

The popular votes in the primaries were:[7]

* Jimmy Carter (inc.) - 10,043,016 (51.13%)
* Ted Kennedy - 7,381,693 (37.58%)
* Unpledged - 1,288,423 (6.56%)
* Jerry Brown - 575,296 (2.93%)
* Lyndon LaRouche - 177,784 (0.91%)
* Cliff Finch - 48,032 (0.25%)

[Vincent Vega]

That's a point against one Kennedy, not all Kennedys.

And perhaps this one Kennedy knows why he calls for Clinton to quit.

[Headache in a Suitcase]

apparently roseanne barr is running for president

[verte76]

Originally Posted by U2democrat

I'm going to take some deep breaths before I respond to what she said about the RFK Assassination...

Me too.

[deep]

I don't know where this belongs

but this guy Lieberman

well, let's just say I hope he can not pull off a re-Election in 4 years

Lieberman to speak at conference hosted by Hagee

By ANDREW MIGA – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Joe Lieberman said Wednesday he will address a conference hosted by the Rev. John Hagee, who was spurned by Republican John McCain for his claim that God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.

"I believe that Pastor Hagee has made comments that are deeply unacceptable and hurtful," Lieberman, I-Conn., said in a statement. "I also believe that a person should be judged on the entire span of his or her life's works. Pastor Hagee has devoted much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews."

Lieberman is one of the strongest supporters of likely GOP presidential nominee McCain. He also has been mentioned as a possible running mate.

Lieberman plans to appear at Hagee's "Christians United for Israel" summit in Washington. He called Hagee's group "a vital force in supporting the war against terrorism and defending our ally, Israel."

[A_Wanderer]

Maybe they can start a new campaign to ban offensive art.

[deep]

Language in the Constitution stated that each enslaved black man be counted as three-fifths of a person
for the purposes of determining representation in Congress.





Now Howard Dead and some in the DNC want each voter of Michigan and Florida to be counted as one-half of a person
for the purposes of determining representation at the Democratic Convention?





It is 2008,
these people deserve better.