When I saw Senator Obama voting for the bankster bailout, my response to that question had to be, “…don’cha know that you can count me out…”
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I didn’t put those goalposts anywhere in the first place. Did I?
Punditry is so easy when done in hindsight.
voters are so innocently adorable.
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What you overlook, in your call to arms, is that the problem is not to find “the person”, a single iron-willed strongman who will magically solve all your problems. A representative democracy doesn’t work like that, not even a strong-executive one like the US.
The problem with Obama was exactly that: he was one person. He was popular with voters but had no power-base whatsoever; whereas Clintonites had the power-base but not the necessary appeal. The result: Obama is Commander-in-chief, but overall strategy and everyday running of the government is firmly in the hands of Biden’s and Clinton’s pals.
If you want a real shift, you don’t need one person: you need a solid power-base from which to draw your appointees, a group of people sharing a common ideology and with real weight in society as well as in the Party. Otherwise you will end up electing Mother Teresa and still be disappointed that she cannot change anything.
[EDIT: I see you said something along those lines in a following comment. I hope you understand that this overall effort is much more critical than “finding and vetting a presidential candidate”.]
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Rendering Mother Theresa ineffectual mightn’t be a bad thing, given some of her organisation’s antics…
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Some people on the left are apparently not as cynical as you are and haven’t given up entirely on the possibility of incremental improvement using the ballot.
Is that really a bad thing?
You’re giving me the strong impression that even if there was the possibility of left-friendly political reform in this country you wouldn’t want it because then you might have to stop feeling smugly superior to the people who still care and think we could do better.
Not that I’m necessarily one of those people but I’m certainly not going to put as much energy into making them feel stupid as you do.
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This smug superiority you speak of, Is that the sort of attitude that lets one tell someone else they are cynical and have given up? I bet you just see that sort of thing everywhere.
I dunno. You’ve said a lot more than I have, not even counting the words you put in my mouth. Seems you were going to, and just hadn’t realized it.
I never want someone else to feel stupid. I want them to abandon fallacious thinking patterns, and if feeling stupid is a necessary step, that’s their learning process, not mine. I want them to be less insulting, but I’m not above tossing one back over the fence if one has been lobbed at me. I have to say you aren’t above that either, so maybe don’t point those fingers unless you want to feel stupid afterwards.
Not entirely unlike holding politicians to sweeping policy changes based on a couple sentences they said in a speech once. Most of that is inside the listener. Don’t blame the other for your own bad expectations.
Mod note: Stay on topic and no personal attacks.
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So far it seems to work only as a way of enriching certain corporations and individuals. Though it may be slowly generating some heat in the population that is the source of the profits, this is unlikely to be a completely safe energy source.
This sentiment doesn’t seem to serve any purpose in this discussion except to make people feel stupid.
I’d like to hear @AcerPlatanoides’s ideas to make the situation better. That would be on topic, right?
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I can’t say I voted for him so much as I voted against the worst of the alternatives. That doesn’t make me happy, just pragmatic.
My standard metric for measuring candidates for high office is “Which one did the fewest dumb things?” Sometimes it is definitely a ‘hold my nose and pass it’ situation. Welcome to an imperfect world.
my repeatedly stated idea is to manage your expectations (of the president, of random people in internet forums, of your own self) so that you dont lash out when you are disappointed.
Quelle Surprise is a common phrase which in this usage translates to: What did you expect?
and whose fault is it that you expect sweeping change because a politician spoke about it a couple times? partly the politicians, yes, but what you choose to do with that outrage (like demeaning and insulting others who do question the cause of ones upset, or working for change without creating a scene or disrupting conversation) is on you.
The short answer; his banner didn’t read “Revolution”. They read “Change”, and a few read “Hope”. The first one never came and the second one washed away with the lack of it. His presidency has been no different than George W. Bush’s, in fact more secretive.
I mean what do you expect from a president? I am envious of people who voted for George W. Bush. They got a president that pretty much did what he said what he was going to do and did it…
You can be Obama’s apologist if you like. You can vote for Hillary Clinton and get the same thing for another eight years. I for one will call them out for the corporatists that they are…
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I based my hopes on his being less of a corrupt shithead than his opponents. I’m disappointed, for sure, but I still think it would have been way worse with a president McCain or a president Romney. The larger problem goes beyond whoever inhabits the oval office, and lies in the inherent corruption of our current system (which encompasses the government as well as civil society and corporations). I wish I knew how to fix that. A bloody revolution would certainly bring about change, but I’m not convinced it would make any of us better off. And, in the end, my hopes circle around people – all humans – being better off. Perhaps I am naive.
I recognize that this is your opinion. I disagree with this point. I find it to be a fallacious oversimplification.
You can be Obama’s apologist if you like.
Can I mention that he never promised half of what he his held to by people who use words like apologist, without myself being called an apologist? I have yet to state my opinion of him. You cannot possibly know it, though you are free to guess and be incorrect. I really won’t trouble myself to correct anyone who isn’t asking.
I for one will call them out for the corporatists that they are…
Sure, go for it. I don’t have an opinion on what anyone calls them. Though I’m not sure why you had to put those straw men arguments about Clinton and Obama in front of me in order to come to that conclusion for yourself.
I think @Cowicide is wrong about the Tea Party not upsetting the status quo. Although it seems pretty certain they were in no small part funded by big money Republicans, it also seems that those same big money Republicans are kicking themselves about it at this point. Ultimately a lot of Tea Party candidates seem to have disrupted the intentions of the big money part of the Republican party – quite contrary to supporting the status quo. I suspect @Cowicide and I agree on the desirability of the sorts of changes sought by the Tea Party but I tend to think they were actually successful in disrupting the status quo (just in an undesireable way).
So I think @toyg is pretty much right on. The best chance of meaningful left reform in the US is for the left to adopt the Tea Party’s strategy and hold what is putatively their own political party hostage – much as the Tea Party did to the Republicans. However, I think this is also problematic because I think part of the Tea Party’s success is in the consistency of their world view from person to person and the compatibility of that worldview with mainstream conservatives. The far left doesn’t agree with the center left on anything and I see that as the main problem with getting anyone besides mainstream centrist Democrats elected outside of, say, Vermont and a few districts in California and the Pacific northwest.
[Mod edit: removed unnecessary snark]
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I wanted to run an idea past you. Well, may be more of a notion. Because you strike me as a thinker.
When we were kids, one of our more common reasonings we cite to participating in many bad ideas to our parents is “everybody else was doing it”, usually responded to with “if everybody was jumping off cliffs, etc.”.
Do you think that we have gotten into the same disconnect with voting? That voting socially now in the Peoples’ mindset is more important than voting individually?
Acer, wysinwyg, please stop replying to each other. It’s going nowhere.
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