I get that there are people who hate on Obama for dubious reasons, but I’d be curious to find out how many of those people are the ones who actually voted for him as @Max_Blancke claims. I know plenty of Obama supporters who were disappointed but none who think he actually made things worse than Bush did.
I’d guess that many people who are disappointed are also on the left, and wouldn’t vote for Trump anyhow (or maybe they are because they think the only way to fix things is to utterly burn it all down first and they see voting for trump as a way to actually do that). I can’t see how so many trump supporters voted for Obama in the first place. I doubt there is really all that much overlap.
I don’t know… this election has been fucking weird and kind of scary. Not just here either. Europe is not looking good and the Arab spring has completely gone to shit at this point. I keep thinking “oh, this year has GOT to be better than last year” and before you know it, we have a guy who is courting white supremacists (or at the very least, getting the out in the election process in some numbers) and all the most influential rock stars of my youth are dying…
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That is the claim I was finding hard to fathom—that there are people who voted for GW Bush and Obama who are now planning to vote for Trump. Just what qualities would a voter have to be looking for to think those were the best available candidates?
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Maybe there are… I honestly don’t know. But from what the media has been saying, many of Trumps core supporters are first time voters. But I don’t know how true that is either.
Basically, we’re all just sort of throwing theories around as to who/what/why trump voters are. It’s probably some weird combo of all of this.
The War on Whistleblowers is something the Obama government should be extremly ashamed of.
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OK, fair but hardly a reason to support an authoritarian like Trump who promises to come down even harder.
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I agree. But nearly nothing is black and white, though many humans believe in a binary world - I think it’s mostly caused by lazyness.
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Well, I am not voting for Trump, but I did vote for Bush and Obama. I was never that big a fan of Bush, but I did not like Gore at all. Not so much his policies, but his personality. And his wife`s whole music censorship thing bugged me. I thought that Obama seemed intelligent and eloquent. It seemed to me that he gave sort of a JFK vibe. I hoped that he could pull off German style health care, and I assumed that his constitutional credentials meant that he was in favor of the constitution.
Where I live, we have a different relationship with the Federal, State, and local Government than most people do. Nobody pipes water to our houses, or plows our unpaved roads in the winter. What we require from the government is that the EPA keep people from dumping mercury or whatever into the river upstream from us, and that they keep Al Qaeda off of our lawn. Otherwise, we prefer to be left alone.
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Can you explain why that matters, because I honestly don’t understand the “I could get a beer with the guy, so I’ll vote for him” mindset? Do you think that personality is more important than what a politician actually does in office and the policies they support? Was there anything in Bush’s platform in 2000 that indicated he was going to move to the left on things like healthcare? Did you look at his policies as Texas governor and see what he actually did there?
I’m not being snarky here, but I’m really curious why people focus on the personality of politicians as opposed to their work in office and base their votes on that.
Also, not all of live in the same place you do, and would very much like to not have to go into debt to fight cancer or pave our own roads to get to work.
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I second this question.
I can see how “more likable personality” could be the final deal-breaker, but not “more important than policy stances.”
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I mean, what is the probability that any of us will get to hang out with any of these people, who move in elite circles anyway. We need to not be identifying with them, but holding their feet to the fire. Otherwise, they are unlikely to do what is in OUR best interests. As our representatives, that is actually their jobs.
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Kennedy and his “New Frontiersmen” were genuinely progressive on foreign policy. JFK admired Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese democrat (whose death the CIA “expedited” as the new president was about to assume office); he wanted France out of Algeria (again, his own CIA opposed him by supporting the Generals’ putsch in '61); he was essentially willing to concede Indochina before millions were killed; he managed to avoid WWIII over Cuba on two separate occasions!
One of the most surprising facts about this period, that I learned recently: JFK was aware that he was at risk of assassination. Within the administration, and even publicly, they talked about it sometimes. No matter what you believe about what happened in Dallas, it’s clear that when LBJ took over he set a very different course.
I don’t think we, as a country, ever really got over November 22, 1963. It is the “unfathomable” that you speak of.
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I think that there is an argument to be made that the Kennedy and Johnson administration was just as hawkish on the Cold War as any republican, even if they sought out different means to deploy American interests in the world. The deployment of soft power through cultural and people to people programs was the underside of the cold war and still operated along the mind set of modernization theory. Kennedy used that as much as Johnson did, I’d argue. But sure, we can parse out the differences between his and Johnson’s administration. I’d say that neither were soft on communism and sought to root it out. We can’t know if Kennedy would have descalated the war at the end of the day, Johnson kept much of the foreign policy apparatus that Kennedy picked - Dean Rusk as Secretary of state and Robert MacNamara as Secretary of Defense, as the most prominent examples. And of course, we can’t really know what Kennedy would have done about issues like Vietnam as he lived and been re-elected in 64. It’s all conjecture on our part.
But I think my general point about Kennedy stands - that he was as much a hardliner on communism as anyone else. I’d argue that in the late 50s and early 60s, that you HAD to be strong on communism to be considered part of the political establishment at all, much like you can’t be “soft on terrorism” today and be taken seriously by the mainstream political establishment. It’s the prevailing ideology that anyone who goes outside of or tries to bring any nuance to is immediately branded with a particular brush which means they will not get the support they need to be effective.
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Well, then, we’ve found something on which we profoundly disagree!
I honestly suspect that, were it not for the very close election of 1960, humanity might not be around anymore. Nixon at the height of Cold War tensions would have been absolutely ruinous. As in, nuclear war. Certainly, Kennedy opposed communism, but I don’t think you can say he was anywhere close to Dulles (either one of them), Nixon and all the other hardliners, on foreign policy issues. (McNamara and Rusk weren’t really part of the Kennedys’ inner circle, no? And McNamara was more of a manager than an ideologue, at least early on.)
That part, I get. Thank you, because you’re helping me to understand that better, for sure.
But I’m pretty convinced – by the new Talbot book, which I just finished – that the internal war within the Kennedy administration is under appreciated. For instance, during the attempted coup in France, Kennedy asked de Gaulle for help in identifying the people within his own government who had aided General Challe! Allen Dulles had his “Gladio” staybehind forces all over Europe, after all. Have you ever seen this documentary? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGHXjO8wHsA
I did not mean it in the way it apparently came out. I just had an instinctive dislike for Gore. I always get the same vibe from him that I get from Robert Tilton. I was pretty optimistic about Obama, but almost every other time I have voted for the person who seems like they would do the least damage to the country. My political views are what I guess you would call radical moderate, which comes from having family members who have been imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed by by both leftist and right wing regimes.
I understand that most people live in different situations than I do. I was just trying to make the point that people have a wide array of lifestyles and experiences, which can account for a diversity of political views. Even if you and I share basic principles and philosophy, our differing lifestyles could put us on opposing sides of some issues, and certainly will lead to different priorities. I hope that we would agree on the major issues, but you never know.
So you felt Bush came across as more of a moderate than Gore?
Out of curiosity, on which issues?
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Not in this case, but some of his campaign workers break your assumption.
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Well, anyone who automatically characterizes celtic crosses as racist is an ignorant bigot, BUT she’s got an 88, so she’s a fan of Dale Earnhardt, which means she’s secretly actually Hitler! The body in the bunker was a fake!
OK, sorry, I got a little carried away there.
If we assume that Salon is right and this Trump campaign worker is a neo-Nazi, thalt reinforces rather than undercuts my point, doesn’t it? I mean, she’s denying being a racist, not waving a swastika flag.
You’re missing the repeated instances of out-and-proud white supremacists making robocalls on Trump’s behalf.
Incidentally, that “gothic 88 tattoo is just because I’m a Dale Earnhardt fan” bullshit is so transparently false that repeating it makes you appear to be either disingenuous or idiotic.
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