It should be noted that the Republican Primary voters who did not vote for Trump still voted for some other asshole.
Got folks clamoring on the DNC side that the voters should be ignored and polls should dictate who the candidate is too.
Sour grapes is.
Once upon a time the selection process ONLY involved party leaders, that was basically the whole point of the convention. I guess I support the idea of letting a political party set its own rules any way they want to as long as they don’t violate the Constitution.
Changing the rules after the voters return a result they don’t like is bullshit though. If the party is that broken they should just leave and start a new one.
If they oust trump that is basically what is going to happen to the GOP whether it wants do to that or not.
As much as trump is an abhorrent character, he has been a glorious chance to watch the think-tanks-and-op-eds types who purport to represent the reasoned, principled, core of the republican party(and advance the claim that such a core actually exists) utterly lose their shit.
The joke will be on more than just them if he actually gets elected; but commentators on the left have been saying that the ‘produce dangerous idiots, rob them blind while distracting them with ‘values’ issues’ strategy is going to blow up in your face for how long now?
So one thing I’m curious about, and it’s pretty much unrelated to this story. “The media” seems to always (ok, at least the last decade or so) been the enemy of conservatives, so how does that work with Trump, who, if anything, is accused of having too much exposure in “The Media” and is walking away with the conservative vote.
A conspiracy theory in the making? Trump is a libcommiemedia trojan horse?
On a side note, damn am I relieved that Cruz is out. Still consider him much more harmful than Trump, were he to get elected.
Don’t forget that it was Bill Clinton who encouraged him to run in the first place!
You know who pays attention to politics in an election
year? EVERYONE. Fucking every last grown person knows what the hell is
going on. My neighbor isn’t like, “Donald Trump? Nope. Never heard of
him. I’m afraid I’ve been sticking to sports this whole time.”
I’m not sure I agree with this. Everybody is paying attention to the race, but with no depth. I think the sports comparison is a good one. The news media are basically reporting political sabremetrics.
I don’t place all the blame on news outlets - they are serving their audience and they have a business to run. I put a big chunk of the blame on politicians and the parties.
The stupid part is that Trump is just the fruition of the Southern Strategy. As evidence, just look at all the other GOP candidates. They all stand for the same awful things - Trump is just louder. The GOP got some hefty short-term wins by dogwhistling and flat-out race baiting. Now they act shocked their rank and file are racist.
Conservatives use “The media” to say that “The media” is against them. Just about everything you know about the left and right has been filtered by “The media”.
Maybe Hollywood does have a liberal bias, but “The media” as a whole is just another business.
At a very real level the parties are defined by the candidates that they run for office. Those are certainly MUCH more important than the “party platform” which is largely a piece of busy work for party functionaries that binds candidates and office-holders not at all. So I DON’T think that it is the job of the parties to field electable candidates. In fact, the parties will often field completely un-electable candidates in districts in which they have little chance. At a deep level the pearl clutching is that Trump has redefined the Republican party from under the elites…
[quote=“Brainspore, post:4, topic:77562”]
I guess I support the idea of letting a political party set its own rules any way they want to as long as they don’t violate the Constitution.[/quote]
They’re completely extra-constitutional entities. They’re not part of the government. It’s not that different from a Sam’s Club store.
You join a club, you pay dues, you agree to let them use your signature on petitions to get whoever they end up choosing for you to added to whatever race, and since the number of people that do that is always above the legal limit, those guys always are an option when you vote. The fact that they let any voter call themselves “Republican” or “Democrat” and vote in their open primaries is a courtesy about as binding as the phone-in vote of American Idol.
I say again: parties are not actually part of the electoral process; they are a side-bid that some people run as a lead-up to the electoral process.
Disabusing voters of the illusion would cost them big for a decade, but unless Trump convinces the lich-lords that he can fall in line, it’s possible they’ll overrule the primaries.
First, they’re not changing the rules: the rules were always rigged. They rarely need to invoke the rigged half of the rules, but they were always there.
Second, if a large portion of the base suddenly decides that an established party with an established platform needs to turn on a dime “just 'cause”, wouldn’t it be a lot more appropriate to say that they need to leave and start their own party? The U.S. parties aren’t parties as parliamentary countries know them: parliamentary parties are basically special interests, whereas as U.S. parties are coalitions of such interests, more analogous to a very stable coalition government in parliamentary politics. The republicans cover a lot of interests that aren’t 100% philosophically aligned: pro-life and pro-death penalty, big military and small government, states rights and personal liberty. You don’t just have sudden populist movements redefine the entire party because they will never be the entire party.
That’s certainly the establishment read of the situation. The outsider perspective says that the veneer of American democracy has worn so thin that the holes are unignorable even to non-ideological people.
Trump is the Boaty McBoatFace of electoral politics, and to a lesser extent so is Sanders. We support these candidates not for what they “stand for”, because what they stand for is basically impossible. We support them because the system makes them impossible, because we have no loyalty to the political system and we want to see it break.
In this sense, it doesn’t matter if they win or lose, the “sour grapes” attitude remains, because we are actually sour about something much deeper.
Hey hey HEY y’all! Jeebus, isn’t this supposed to be a thread about that haughty dipshit George Will?
Anyway, I’ll just say that I loved that evisceration when I saw it at Gawker, and I really hope Will reads it. I’ve been disgusted for years over how my local fishwrap STILL dutifully carries Will’s vapid, purple-prose columns.
He’s like a lite version of W.F. Buckley. Conservatives generally seem to distrust smart-talking “ivory tower” types, but then, they sure do love them some multisyllabic word-slingers if the multisyllabic words are being slung in defense of conservative ideals.
The self-delusion that they’re losing elections due to fraud has been pretty high for a while.
I know people and have had IRL conversations wher I have to bite my tongue, with people who honestly believe that the only way Democrats ever win an election is through fraud.
As much as it pains me to stand up for Trump on anything, yes, he’s doing well by appealing to his base. He may be an asshole, but he’s an asshole’s asshole. Though it’s pretty funny to describe George Will as the elitist and the billionaire as the everyman…
The secret to Trump’s success is easy: everything he says is short enough to be a news sound byte, everything is geared towards getting a cheer out of whatever room he’s in at the moment, damn consistency, and everything he says is noteworthy, mostly because it’s such a crazy train wreck. Fun to laugh at or roll your eyes at. But he was on TV every ten minutes, every day. No one else could say that. In a certain, sad sense, that’s Presidential. Most of us don’t like our sitting President at any given time. He’s just around, on TV, making threats and promises and statements. The Trump trainwreck managed to stake out and claim that mindspace: “don’t always like him, but he’s always there.” He basically let us laugh at him until we forgot what we were laughing at.
And unfortunately many of history’s greatest monsters were put into power by a public that was more concerned with “throw the bums out!” than “wait, who are we replacing the bums with?”
Not what I mean. I mean Americans are kind of used to disliking our nominal leader. Not liking him is kind of expected. So not like Trump because he’s a lunatic isn’t any more visceral a reaction than not liking Obama for imposing sweeping changes on healthcare that most people still don’t understand.
We’re used to disliking some loudmouth who’s always on TV, talking about something that’s not palatable those few times it’s actually immediately relevant. Trump fits the very image of a modern media president.
See also: the crony, rigged functions of the Democratic SuperDelegates
