a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

her habit of hanging out with the Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen down here adduces the truth of party collusion.

I'm not really clear on why his numbers have tanked, unless there are really that many primary voters who were shocked/distressed by his multiple answers to various questions in the last month or so

xp

if bernie was smart and a hellraiser (not yet convinced on either myself) he'd be challenging hillary to a debate at every opportunity. it'd be somewhat unfair, i don't think the limits on debates was done at her behest (it's not like the debates is where obama emerged and surpassed her, if anything they helped her more than him), more the doings of a proactive minion, but that wouldn't matter, she'd still look like she was ducking him and that the establishment was trying to fix the race. that he hasn't gone after her and she hasn't gone after him really makes me wonder if he's been promised a cabinet post. i guess it could be they agreed to keep it clean and he's dumb enough to actually do it and she's smart enough to know attacking him isn't necessary and would have some blowback.

shakey the walker collapse actually starts a while back (pre trump even) though it's just now apparent that for whatever reason he's fucked.

i dunno, i think bernie may actually be sincere in his position that he wants to get his message out there and that "going after" hillary actually works against that. not that NOT going after hillary has led the media to aggressively cover his policy positions and avoid horse-race coverage, far from it. but it would be kinda interesting to see a candidate actually stick to a "i'm not going negative" strategy, the whole way through. just a bunch of speeches about issues and things. nice change of pace. i would also believe it if it turned out his people had run the numbers and determined that actually the people who like him like him in part because he does have the feel of someone who's running for something, and that it would diminish him or make him more "ordinary" in their eyes if he started "slinging mud" or "going on the offensive."

but it would be kinda interesting to see a candidate actually stick to a "i'm not going negative" strategy

Bill Bradley

the biggest question is the german-american vote. now that obama isn't running, where will they turn???

So...who's starting to think Kasich has a shot? He's up to like 3 percent in the polls, which in this environment means he's ahead of Walker et al. and is gaining on Bush and Cruz, though he's of course nowhere near Carson/Trump territory. If he can outlast some of the other politician candidates, I think he's got a reasonable chance of rallying the party establishment behind him.

has hillary had any substantial gaffes? the email thing has hurt her but most of that is the result of bored media determined to have some scandal to cover and some kind of drama in the democratic primary (cf biden rumors)

Yeah, if I were Hillary I wouldn't be too worried right here. I don't think anyone really cares that much about the email thing. It's still hard to imagine a scenario in which she doesn't win the nomination, and Democratic voters are going to rally around her when the time comes.

the email thing is the most boring scandal of all time

also, at the risk of being ageist i think it's also a scandal that makes absolutely no sense to a lot of people. like my mom and dad will never have any clue whatsoever what a server is or how emails can be on different servers and ...just the whole thing. it all gets boiled down to "she lied about a computer thing" to them. it's just a shitty scandal

This may be preaching to the choir a bit but I thought Yglesias really nails the weird lens that the media (still) views political campaigns through:

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/14/9300871/jeb-bush-tax-plan

at the risk of being ageist i think it's also a scandal that makes absolutely no sense to a lot of people. like my mom and dad will never have any clue whatsoever what a server is or how emails can be on different servers and ...just the whole thing.

Honestly, I have the feeling it makes no sense to a lot of the reporters covering it, who are as ignorant about technology as they are about...well, pretty much everything else. But they know that if a Clinton did it, it must be bad somehow. Even though Colin Powell, who they all fellate in their dreams at night, especially the men, did pretty much the exact same thing.

btw my deceased Catholic parents wd've gotten the ammo out vs Trump after the 'have my little cracker' comment

So...who's starting to think Kasich has a shot? He's up to like 3 percent in the polls, which in this environment means he's ahead of Walker et al. and is gaining on Bush and Cruz, though he's of course nowhere near Carson/Trump territory. If he can outlast some of the other politician candidates, I think he's got a reasonable chance of rallying the party establishment behind him.

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Monday, September 14, 2015 9:19 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is kinda plausible, like if it becomes clear that he's exciting people and jeb's not, he has the right 'feel' for an 'establishment' candidate. question is how he'll do on that 'exciting people' point - suspect he's vulnerable to some "he's not a REAL conservative!" type stuff depending which voting blocs are paying attention to what. certainly he makes more sense as a presidential nominee than most of the clowns.

kasich's about as exciting as jimmy carter post-76

the thing is he really, really looks like an establishment republican. like the exact type of white guy that looks 'presidential' in these circles, where romney looked like a mannequin with dark secrets and jeb looks like he should be the assistant manager at a food court establishment. depending how aggressive he plays the campaign i could see him as a lot of people's go-to pick for veep, in any case.

never forgot coming home drunk one Saturday night in the early '00s, turning on FOX, and seeing Jon Kasich, who looked tired and as if he'd eaten more Taco Bell than I

the email thing is the most boring scandal of all time

http://images.sodahead.com/polls/001381997/Palin20Frowning_xlarge.jpeg

i would also believe it if it turned out his people had run the numbers and determined that actually the people who like him like him in part because he does have the feel of someone who's running for something, and that it would diminish him or make him more "ordinary" in their eyes if he started "slinging mud" or "going on the offensive."

I don't think Sanders needs to go after Clinton. He needs to get his message out and build support, like he was doing at Liberty University in a remarkably heartening speech / q + a session earlier today. I think the reason the Clinton team hasn't gone after him yet is that they're not sure how, and are aware that there will be some blowback. I think it's much smarter for Sanders to make Clinton attack him out of her own weakness.

ok

won three races in a state that hadn't gone republican in a presidential election since 1984

People keep saying this but: presidential years have high turnout, and WI elects governors in the off-years. Walker beat a bad D candidate in the huge GOP wave year of 2010. Then he survived a recall, which lots of people, including Democrats, thought shouldn't have happened (i.e. lots of people think you should recall an official for being a criminal, not just for being bad at their job.) Then he beat another bad D candidate in another non-pres year. I don't think there's a soul in Wisconsin who thinks Walker would still be governor if Feingold had been willing to run. Wisconsin has had several close presidential elections and lots of GOP governors. Walker's been winning in an environment of half R half D. It's not New Jersey or Illinois or Connecticut.

yeah it's more pennsylvania, and though gop hasn't carried it since 84 it's not for lack of trying. gop clearly thirsty for that state, cf ryan veep nomination.

i wonder if ryan is kicking himself for deciding not to run and thanking god he stayed out of this mess

kasich just seemed kind of glum and indifferent and sad in the debate. kind of reminded me of mr. kruger on seinfeld.

those Liberty U kids are really something eh

Apparently Clinton coordinates with this Super PAC, which I think is a clever way of doing this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-jeremy-corbyn_55f73339e4b00e2cd5e79e11

I know the conceit of Barthes-on-Trump is inherently eye-rolling, but this is actually pretty good:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/09/14/3701084/donald-trump/

Especially combined with the photos of Trump in WWE, which I'd forgotten about.

ha, pretty good

Did trump used to weigh 300 lbs or something?
http://cdn.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/13232204/TrumpWWE1-638x432.jpg" class="noborder">

Also lol at carson now polling evenly w chump

http://cdn.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/13232204/TrumpWWE1-638x432.jpg" class="noborder">

Wtf goddamn phone

http://cdn.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/13232204/TrumpWWE1-638x432.jpg

Maybe he was hiding Doink under his jacket.

There's a good essay for somebody like TNC to write about the token-black-Republican parade, from Clarence Thomas to Michael Steele to Herman Cain and Ben Carson. (See also Allen West, J.C. Watts, etc.) At the presidential-candidate level, they fulfill a somewhat similar role for white voters as token-black-Democrats do (Obama, Jesse Jackson) -- they make people feel virtuous for supporting a nonwhite candidate. But of course there are way more black Democrats at levels below president (including in the electorate), and Democrats mostly doesn't run on or champion implicitly or explicitly racist platforms the way Republicans do. I guess what I'm curious about is the mentality of a voter who wants to support a black presidential candidate so badly that they will back somebody clearly and totally unqualified, while at the same time despising the eminently qualified and capable black president we actually have. I can intuit a lot of the reasoning that goes on, but some of that is just me projecting massive amounts of cognitive dissonance onto them. I don't know what the actual thought process is that leads someone to say Ben Carson is who I want for president.

I don't know what the actual thought process is that leads someone to say Ben Carson is who I want for president.

If that someone were pretty conservative? The thought process might be that Ben Carson, is, in objective terms, kind of the most successful, accomplished person running for the nomination. A better question is: what would be the actual thought process that leads someone who a) is really conservative and b) distrusts career politicians to prefer Scott Walker or Ted Cruz to Ben Carson? =

ins't part of it just that he's a renowned surgeon and therefore ostensibly intelligent man who is willing to defend a lot of the ignorant bullshit that much of GOP base peddles in - evolution, climate change denial, etc. i mean, he says things like this:

Carson, who was the first surgeon to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head, said, "Well, just knowing how incredibly complex our brains are – billions of neurons, hundreds of billions of interconnections, the ability to process more than 2 million bits of information in one second. That is an amazingly complex organism."

"And to say that that just came about sort of randomly by various mutations over the course of time, when as I just said mutations tend to lead to degeneration rather than improvement, just doesn’t make any sense," said Dr. Carson. "So, the very things that they claim are evidence for evolution are the very things that damn the theory."

...Carson, who was the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Craniofacial Center, said, "Well, the evolutionists look at the similarities that you see in the various life forms and they say, because this creature and this creature share the same type of digestive system or the same type of structures in their head, that clearly one evolved from the other."

"I don’t know how clear that is," he said. "Because if you have an intelligent designer, why wouldn’t he use a basic structure that works on multiple different creatures? Just like an automobile manufacturer. General Motors, same basic chassis as Chevrolet, a Buick, a Pontiac, or a Cadillac. And yet, they’re all different. And one did not evolve from the other."

smdh

that's unbelievably stupid, and surely he must know better (?), but the point is that there are lot of people looking for any sort of authority to say things like that.

Dont forget alan keyes

Yeah it is an interesting decades-old dynamic at this point

Xxp

Well, this reminds me of our discussion about the smarts of Ted Cruz, widely renowned as a legendary SCOTUS advocate.

How does carson feel about 1*1=2 tho

Xp

xpost

haha, well i think i was the only one here supporting the idea that ted cruz may actually be intelligent human being, so i doubt anyone here actually thinks that carson is intelligent

I guess what I'm curious about is the mentality of a voter who wants to support a black presidential candidate so badly that they will back somebody clearly and totally unqualified, while at the same time despising the eminently qualified and capable black president we actually have.

Excellent post.

speaking of ted, he tweeted this like 2 mins ago

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CO9KNQ1UEAAuG1w.png

that is like "you can't bullshit a bullshitter" level

is that from a Dr. Seuss book

the rise of ben carson mostly suggests that this primary is gonna end up w/ the same 'what's the crazy flavor of the month' pattern as last time. it's not worth overthinking his 'support', it's gonna be gone in 20 mins anyway.

liking a non-politician and (especially) yearning for a "good man" in politics is as old as the hills

the current prez: eminently qualified to manage the permanent war machine, and capable of expaanding surveillance and federal secrecy to historic levels

(yes, it's true the people tipsy is talking about despise O for the wrong reasons)

is cruz saying he fucks up a lot