2008 Primaries Thread

do you want to keep talking about yourself?

yeah, thanks for asking.

speaking of Reagan, a perfectly obvious article on why He Still Matters.

isn't it more about how he doesnt?

from Carl Bernstein's Hillary book:

Hillary's time at Wellesley was not made easier by whatever tendency toward depression she had either inherited or developed-a tendency that surfaced again in the White House. Periodically at Wellesley she fell into debilitating, self-doubting funks. During the early weeks of her freshman semester, she was so deflated that she called home and confessed failure and an inability to cope. She had never been away from home-even for a weekend-on her own before. She missed the comfortable precincts of Park Ridge, and insisted she was incapable of adjusting to the Wellesley milieu. Whatever her anger at her father, she briefly seemed to miss him. He said she could come back to Illinois, but Dorothy said she didn't want her daughter to be a quitter. Her mother prevailed.

After Hillary decided to stay at Wellesley, she seemed to regain some of her old confidence and began making friends who would figure in the rest of her life. But even as she steadied her footing, there were stumbles and persistent signs of melancholy. In the winter of 1967, her junior year, she again experienced what she described in a letter as her recurring "February depression." Despite earning As, dating a Harvard man regarded as a good catch, and working off-campus with disadvantaged children (including a seven-year-old Negro girl she tutored and had formed a close bond with), she sometimes overslept, nodded off in her classes, and became concerned that her teachers regarded her as a washout. "Why am I so afraid?" she wrote to her high school friend John Peavoy. "Or why am I not afraid? Am I really not unique after all? Will I have a cliched life? Is life merely absurd?" (Hillary now sounded like a character in The Catcher in the Rye.) She now called herself an "agnostic intellectual liberal" and an "emotional conservative."

that explains so much

She is such a bore.

she now described herself as an "agnostic intellectual liberal" and an "emotional conservative."

lol @ college students

totes

what's wrong with hillary?

she's divisive enough to bring out the whole ant hill to save the conservative colony in the election.

she's divisive enough to basically not get any done when she's in office. she would be seen as bush has been seen to liberals. she can do no right. villified. trampled. causing no reconciliation to our country which needs some reconciliation so we can move forward.

and worse: despite all that, she's pretty dang conservative. so it's not like the liberal agenda gets much play regardless. iraq = dud. she's pro big business so any healthcare solution she's got is a joke. etc etc. like her anti-video game stances... it just shows that when it comes to things she doesn't understand, she's willing to call it bad instead of being open-minded.

eh, i'm full of shit. if it's hillary vs. mccain i've gotta laff cause i'd almost rather vote for mccain. again, like kerry, if this is the shit that rises to the top, we deserve it. it's a shame too cause we need more ladies in the mix. is this the best we can do?

m.

Rudy's campaigning in FL w/ Judi and Doody http://www.patriotsandpolitics.com/mccollumpic.jpg

also, Jon Voight, wtf

kerry would have been a fine President, and is a worse campaigner/less average-American-seeming than Hillary. but he also didn't start with her negatives.

just about everyone running this time has better political skills than those running last time

kerry's probably instinctually more liberal than hillary too

i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain i'd almost rather vote for mccain

No no no no no.

HRC is, in some ways, the worst of both worlds in terms of a candidate: She is perceived to be a liberal (bad for a GE) when, in fact, she's far more conservative than her Democratic competitors (bad for governing philosophy).

i don't think she's far more conservative than her competitors

Sully citesDavid Brooks on HRC: The White House thinks she's the best qualified to continue their legacy.

this is all rorschach to some extent. i think it's possible that edwards talks further left than he is while both hillary and obama talk further right than they are (tho right now hillary may be talking both further right and further left than she is, lol). maybe she's in actuality the furthest right, maybe not, but ultimately i don't think there are massive differences between the three.

Consider her foreign policy advisory team versus Obama's. If that's an indication of her likely governing philosophy, she's (possibly far) more conservative and hawkish than Obama.

(Articles linked upthread or on the prior thread).

Clinton may be a bit more conservative on foreign policy, but to be fair, isn't Obama's healthcare proposal a bit more conservative than hers? Krugman at least seems to think so.

Maybe. But Krugman has an unhealthy hatred for Obama.

Why is that, by the way? Was he snubbed by the Obama campaign?

obama's campaign at one point came after him for something he put in a column and he's been all over them ever since.

once again, the difference between the candidates' plans are based on different theories of which approach covers the most people, and the actual on-the-ground differences between them remain to be seen based upon questions they have yet to answer (but that can preliminarily be subject to some supposition).

Whatever Krugman's reasons are for disliking Obama, it would be lazy not to evaluate the substance of his claims. And from what I've seen, his criticisms are not necessarily easy to dismiss out of hand.

I wasn't dismissing them out-of-hand. I was making a different point.

I've been meaning to read-up more on the various health care proposals and the philosophies behind them. Any recommendations on where to start, in that regard, would be welcome.

(I've been reading Krugman's blog posts on the subject, tho not his NYT columns (I just fell out of the habit of reading the NYT Op-Ed page once the paywall was put up, and haven't been terribly interested in starting again now that they've torn the wall down)).

Friday's NYT ran a chart of the Dem and GOP candidates' various plans.

Thx.

the trumpeted 'difference' between the plans largely refers to whether they would initially impose a mandate requiring the purchase of coverage - edwards and clinton impose one, while Obama imposes one only for children, relying on cost-cutting efforts to encourage adults to purchase coverage. often unmentioned is that edwards and clinton have not said what they would do to enforce the mandate, while obama has signaled willingness to impose a mandate down the road if cost-cutting doesn't do the trick. and none of these plans rhetorically address (tho edwards often alludes to it) the problem of under-insurance.

so maybe the slight differences between the plans reflect serious ideological differences among the candidates, or maybe, you know, they're all basically the same plan with minor variations designed for rhetorical or political purposes.

This recent column by David Leonhardt seems fairly evenhanded. He prefers Obama's approach to savings incentives and his tax policy, but he prefers the healthcare mandate approach of Edwards and Clinton to Obama's plan. If the mandate really is a better and more progressive policy, but Obama is leaving it out for "rhetorical and political purposes" then who's the triangulator here?

hillary and obama essentially split the House co-sponsors of the single-payer bill. conyers, who introduced it, has endorsed obama. remember where kucinich, a vocal single-payer advocate, threw his support in iowa. but i guess these guys are just rubes, right?

some more triangulators who've endorsed Obama:

Dick Durbin (National Journal #1 liberal rating in the Senate)
Pat Leahy (National Journal #4 liberal rating in the Senate)
Diane Watson (National Journal #1 liberal rating in the House)
George Miller (National Journal #2 liberal rating in the House)
Barbara Lee (National Journal #6 liberal rating in the House)

but lol, he's a Reagan-lover

I'm sure there's plenty of reasons that a proponent of single-payer could choose to get behind either Obama or Clinton - I'm not claiming their proposals are that far apart. At this point, the proposals are just that - and the finished product that comes through Congress (if it does) would no doubt look quite different than any of the proposals at this point. I'm just saying that those looking for evidence that Clinton is "far more conservative" than Obama on matters of domestic policy need to work a bit harder. And some informed observers have actually found the opposite.

i agree that she's not far more conservative, as noted upthread. i refuse to agree that she's more liberal just because one arguably over-literal economist disproportionately attacks obama after obama took him on and failed to yell about bush enough for his taste.

The truth is that they are probably pretty close on the conservative-liberal spectrum. I wouldn't say she's more liberal than Obama just because Krugman said so. He does point to specifics though in making his claim. And if the specifics may not be as conclusive as he might hope, they do perhaps make the case that the differences between them are slight.

saw an obama speech where he said he'd give everyone a seat at a table, doctors, nurses, even insurance and pharmaceutical companies (but they could buy all the chairs cue laughter and applause). he'd lay out his plan and ask for their input. and he'd air this on cspan.

i hope he uses that on hilary during a debate.

(but they couldN'T buy all the chairs cue laughter and applause)

i really need to reread my posts before pressing submit.

i fear reagan is now permanently lodged in the “great president” category, to the point where it's really no surprise to see democratic presidential candidates pander to those who remember him fondly

similar with thatcher here in the UK (cf Blair in 96/7?)...

http://www.slate.com/id/2101842/

yeah, too bad hitchy's take on the boob doesn't stick.
m.

Yeah, I was just thinking today about how there must have been a tipping point in the last couple of years where dem. strategists decided they had lost the fight on Reagan and decided to coopt him instead.

Have Republicans always been willing to say a few nice things about JFK or is that a recent thing?

It's popular to regard him as the last 'tough' national security Dem, but I don't think there's too many people who'd want to run against the '64 map either.

heh:

One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time.

The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

This article analyzes the GOP race correctly, I think. There are three groups: Nat'l Security GOP voters (who favor McCain), Economic GOP voters (who favor Romney) and Social Conservative GOP voters (who favor Huckabee). The voters in the final two categories would likely unite against McCain if Huckabee (who can't pick up the Economic GOP voters) dropped out. And these factions, together, they would -- easily, I think -- beat McCain.

So, at this point, Huckabee = Dud.

Also, I hadn't realized that S.Car. was an open primary. Still, it gives McCain significant momentum going into Super Tuesday.

Since SC is open, does that mean independents can vote one week in the GOP primary and then come back the following week and vote in the DEM primary? Surely not.

There are three groups: Nat'l Security GOP voters (who favor McCain), Economic GOP voters (who favor Romney) and Social Conservative GOP voters (who favor Huckabee).

yes, we know

The voters in the final two categories would likely unite against McCain if Huckabee (who can't pick up the Economic GOP voters) dropped out.

likely? mccain and romney will surely fight for the social conservative vote, and romney may have a leg up, but there's still lingering distrust there, and mccain has made some decent plays in that territory. remember also that there are a fair number of Feb 5 states in which social conservatives are not a major factor.

how problematic would the latino vote be for obama? how likely is it that he would pick a latino running mate? how likely is it that would be richardson (http://www.westerndemocrat.com/2008/01/obama-richardso.html) as opposed to salazar (http://politicalwire.com/archives/2007/01/04/salazar_says_hes_available_for_veep.html)? recall where our convention is.