It is not just that. McCain is not a conservative. He isn’t much of a Republican either. With the exception of his position on the war, he’d make an excellent Democrat. (Look at how many people on this board don’t have that big a problem with him) Nominating and running him will clinch the Republican party abandoning any shred of ideology and principle and turning into an organization that exists purely for the pursuit of power.
Why vote for A over B when the difference is of no substantial meaning? He was a major backer of the illegal immigrant amnesty a year ago; the backlash to that is what left his campaign dead in the water for months. Now he’s saying, first, he never supported an amnesty (which is an outright lie that nobody calls him on) and second, he’s seen the light on immigration. There’s no reason to believe that is anything other than a politican’s lie in the service of electability, and no reason he’s actually going to act against illegal immigration once elected as opposed to either trying another amnesty or just letting the current situation continue, where the Feds don’t let themselves enforce any immigration laws. Then there is McCain-Feingold. The evils that can be ascribed to money in politics are beside the point (they certainly exist, but it is not the money itself that is evil, it is the existence of buyable political influence, and what is for sale). One of this country’s founding principles is that people have the right to say what they want, particularly where politics is concerned. Making it illegal for people to express support for a governmental candidate, or to put forth their views on the candidate’s suitability, strikes at the very heart of freedom of speech. If you make it illegal for people to discuss some things in the name of reducing the influence on government from people you don’t like - well, that is a very dangerous position to take.
There’s other reasons to distrust McCain but those two are pretty representative. Basically the man’s image as Mr. Straight Talk and Honesty is opposed to the facts of what he has done. His main appeal is the military thing - which is interesting of itself, considering how people are really rather sick of Iraq. He’s not a full-blown Man On A Horse yet, but - patience. Some will be along.
Anyway it doesn’t matter. This country’s course is set for the next hundred years or so, and that course is indeed the will of its people. The only candidates this election that might have diverted it are Paul, Thompson (maybe), and Grauel, and there’s a reason they only got fringe support.
Yeah, that’s what they did in 1992. Really, I expect this year to be any Democrat in a walk like that year, based on how terrible the economy is apparently going to be come November.
Not really. Kerry was middle of the pack and ran a very conservative campaign for a Democrat.
McCain consistently votes very conservatively. Based on Rollory’s post, it sounds like he’s detested because he’s a conservative with a pragmatist, bent, not a True Believer on hating immigrants, tax cuts, and worshiping money solve everything.
Kerry wasn’t middle of the pack in any sense - his voting record was consistently among the most liberal in the Senate, and his campaign included plenty of very liberal ideas like, say, raising the minimum wage. True, he didn’t advocate universal healthcare, but then, Sicko hadn’t come out yet.
His voting record was not consistently one of the most liberal in the senate; that comes from that National Journal silly way of stack ranking the senators by cherry-picking specific votes they thought were important. See here for an overview of a better way to rank senators - you use all the votes and see who is consistently at one end of the ideological spectrum. Kerry in the 110th Senate is the 14th most liberal of the 51 democrats. This also jibes with what you’d expect from general political knowledge - Feingold ends up at #1, Sanders at #3, etc. Kerry in the 108th Senate was 21/48.
I’d say Kerry ran a significantly more conservative campaign than Gore, but that’s based on my personal memory of the two. Gore obviously didn’t have to run on “keep fighting Bush’s war but don’t fuck it up”, for one.
Papageno, your friend is an idiot but then most conservatives these days are idiots. How in the living hell of modern american politics is Romney not a backpeddling, flip flopping RINO (I really hate that term)? He was govenor of Taxechusettes for pete’s sake.
McCain has been a disappointment the last 8 years or so IMHO for the border issues, his kiss up attitude to many “conservative” evangelical types and mccain-feingold. Of course, he’s had to figure out how to court both sides of the republican party and independants and done a decent job of alientaing both. I see him as probably the better choice for republicans or anyone who doesnt want hillary in office. All the candidates have sucked this year. Huckabee isn’t very conservative either, certainly not fiscally. He seems the most likely to become GW part deux.
Also interesting there is that you can see how McCain is actually one of the more conservative senators. That’s something I’ve always known – Even back when his reputation as a straight-shooting moderate was at it’s height I always begrudgingly admired him for not always toeing the party line but knew that I would never vote for him as his views on most issues are diametrically opposed to mine.
So, again, there is some irony on the Republican side right now. If Romney had served in the Senate rather than as a governor, I suspect he would have been ranked as one of the more liberal senators. I think his inability to gain traction has partly been the result of Republicans recognizing that he has repositioned himself to play to the conservative base. McCain, by contrast, alienated that same base not because he’s not a true conservative, but because the few areas where he broke with the party line were really sensitive issues.
At the same time, in his desire to become president, McCain has compromised his integrity repeatedly to the point where he’s lost the respect of those who viewed him as a principled straight talker so he’s screwed himself from both ends.
That said, I think that reputation as a moderate with great integrity is still intact once you get beyond the small percentage of americans on both sides of the aisle who pay very close attention to politics. Most people are too busy living there lives to pay attention to the nitty gritty details that have earned McCain enmity from both sides of the political spectrum.
Right, because it is really silly to use voting record on liberal/conservative issues to determine whether someone is liberal or conservative. Far more scientific to simply assume that liberalism is the only factor in voting.
What that method determines is how often you vote with one side or the other. Since liberal/conservative isn’t the only thing that splits the senate when they vote, it really has little to do with who is more or less conservative. For example, “keep fighting Bush’s war but don’t fuck it up” isn’t a conservative stance - it is a foreign policy stance that has to do with a completely different set of ideology. The same set, incidentally, that has so much of the liberal internets on Ron Paul’s jock, despite his very conservative positions on actually conservative issues.
I was listening to NPR last night and one of the commentators pointed out that we still have spring training, 162 games, and the playoffs in baseball between now and election day 2008. As you point out, we are a long way from being able to know what’s going to happen. At this time in 2004 almost all the young people I worked with at the time were excited to vote and get rid of Bush. In November almost none of them voted.
That said, I do think the continuing Democratic slug fest could hurt them if Clinton ends up as the nominee. Young people are not excited by Clinton and a lot of independents that are voting for Obama in the primary may take a look at McCain in the general election.
Is it? The whole point is to do it where it makes a difference, in the hopes that in the future maybe they’ll listen, rather than just ignore the issues you think are important. If you only do it when it doesn’t matter, then it makes no difference.
I voted for Nader in 2000, as I was sick of the pro-business Republican-lite democrats, and felt Gore (especially after adding Lieberman) was leaning that way. At the time (pre 9/11), I didn’t care if this meant Bush got elected, as he looked likely to be ineffective, and I felt it improved the odds of a swing back the other way.
You want my vote? Then support policies I like. I feel that if you go down the lesser of 2 evils path for too long the chance of getting something you’d actually like to see diminish. I still believe that Gore (or Kerry) would have won, had they run a heartfelt campaign on issues rather than triangulating to the right in the hopes of appeasing people who won’t vote for them anyway.
??? Not sure I understand. Are you saying that the relatively high turnout for Nader in Florida didn’t pretty much make Florida winnable for W (we’ll ignore the Republican shenanigans for the moment)? And are you saying that we wouldn’t be at least a bit better off now if Gore had won there in 2000?
RE: Obama vs. Clinton-- If Clinton is the nominee, the Dems will be snatching defeat from the jaws of victory yet again. It would be idiocy. For one thing, without Obama the black voter turnout goes down by about a third at least, and Independents break decidedly toward him and not Clinton. Also, a lot of young people will hit the bars and (gasp!) stay at the video game console instead of voting. In a Clinton-McCain matchup, McCain wins, unless he picks a true wingnut for a runningmate to cozy up to the paleoconservatives.
RE: The Republican talkers’ and leading lights’ hate for McCain-- I guess they can’t stand someone who doesn’t worship at the altar of tax-cuts and immigrant-bashing, and occasionally criticizes someone with an R next to his name (the ULTIMATE CRIME!).
On practical terms, then, what the hell kind of system shows John Kerry as the most liberal senator? Seriously, Feingold has it all over him on every issue; it makes no sense.
Oh no, Rollory, governments might collect tax money to spend on the common good. de Tocqueville can suck my tocque; the aphorism you quote would be more cogent as “The American Republic will endure until the people forget the money’s theirs.” Taxes are FOR public projects – if they were anything else, they’d be nothing but the powerful practicing extortion against the weak.
