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

but she's a lesbian, remember

what's that 6th squidfinger she has?

that's just a glimpse of her massive forearm

inexplicably managed to read that as a "DOC HOLLYWOOD"

I knew what it said and still read it once as 'DEG HEYWOOD' and 'DOC HENNESSY'

In 1980, I knew that my parents opposed Reagan and he was not in tune with our family's politics - but no one in my orbit seriously thought he was a threat to the existence of democracy, peace, love, joy, etc. He was handed a victory on the hostages, at least partly to make Carter look ineffectual by contrast, and to some extent it worked.

By 1984 the picture had changed somewhat. He was no longer a cartoonish figure but actually represented heightened prospects for nuclear war.

I don't remember us talking much about his domestic policy, or whether he was good or bad for the downtrodden. In my family, knee-jerk liberal Democratic politics were assumed with the certainty of sports loyalty - you don't really need to know WHY we root for the Cardinals, we just do.

I'm in the middle of reading Thomas Mallon's new historical novel Finale, set in the weeks during and after the Reykjavik summit, and it's fascianting reading about events that shook the world for a little while: the Daniloff spy trade, Congress overriding his veto on South Africa, Hasenfus' plane going down in Central America. Meanwhile the Beltway commentariat thought Reagan was going to Iceland as a bluff! No one thought anything would emerge from it.

Christopher Hitchens and Jimmy Carter appear in this novel. I don't know what to think. Mallon loves Gore Vidal's fiction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_yxGsWHx9o

in 1980 i couldn't believe america elected someone who had the same name as ronald mcdonald president. i was pretty young.

I hated him because my mom's family is american indian and we always had a political cartoon on the refrigerator that had a quote from him about treaties (which I now can't remember). I remember that when he won I went and wrote "SUCKS" underneath his name on that cartoon. Inexplicably my mom is now a republican. I spent the entirety of the 80's assuming I'd die in a nuclear holocaust.

xp Josh, it's a great question. I was 14 at the time and not exactly swimming in a US left milieu (unless exposure to hardcover, just a few years later, counts)....

btw "hardcover" above was unintentional auto-complete. I meant "hardcore"

https://thebrandrackley.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/hardcore122.png

looool

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU05TbCAxQM

The night Reagan won I was sleeping over at my friends house and his mom came down sobbing and apologized to us both that we were going to die in a nuclear war because adults were idiots while frantically hugging us so yeah, some people def saw him as a threat.

Thanks jjj, I am now homesick

I have no memory of how the adults around me reacted to Reagan, but my earliest political memory is being in a roomful of cheering hippies while Nixon resigned on TV (I was 8). I was 14 when Reagan came in. I think most adults around me at the time saw it as a step backwards to the Nixon years, but not a potential catastrophe.

Within the first year Reagan cut all the CETA funding and totally screwed up my stepfather's job (director of a non-profit that found employment for alter-abled people). Then I got it, I think we all did.

My parents and our neighbors weren't thrilled about Reagan. I remember the morning after, asking the next-door neighbor mom if Reagan won, and she shrugged and bunched up her face. "Yeah," in the same way you'd answer affirmative if someone asked if it was still sleeting outside. Carter Country was over.

Miss the days when the president would have summits in places like Iceland or Malta. Kinda like when my parents would meet up at the Conway McDonald's to hand me and my sister over for the weekend.

I read the book about Poppy's meeting with Gorbachev in Malta. The waters were so choppy that the summit was delayed hours because the captains couldn't align their ships close enough without tossing someone overboard, and both men wanted Churchilian moments of bravey.

*bravery

I was too young for Ronny. I remember getting into an argument one time with a kid whose Dad spoke well of Ronald Reagan. Mine didn't. After a few minutes me and this kid, who happened to go to my church, both realized that neither of us knew what we were talking about. My Dad never really talked about politicians but it was ~known~ that Ronald Reagan was probably his most disliked President. Not even my Mom knew why he really disliked him. I suspect it had something to do with unions.

Miss the days when the president would have summits in places like Iceland or Malta.

they still do this stuff though, right? read an article recently about how and why it came to be that bush, blair and aznar of spain would end up in the azores in march 2003 to hammer out the iraq war plan.

it used to seem like it mattered more somehow

It's like they remembered that the institution of government hires and trains professional career diplomats to do such things and thusly let those people hang out in the neutral zone for weeks at a time to nail things down. The chief executive can take credit from home. Saves money in about a million dimensions at once.

When two or more heads of state congregate and have their handshake photo ops it's mostly about "our underlings now have their orders to work together on the 3 or 8 specific things we can agree upon at the moment, as we already agreed, via our various emissaries, of political, professional, commercial and military stripes, and any flavor in between that seemed like it mattered at the time."

I think technology and specialization have probably rendered the multi-day presidential summit obsolete. They got other shit going on and as above, they already have people paid to do this.

I also think post-Cold-War optics are part of it - - - like both Reagan and Gorbachev gained in stature from agreeing to meet face-to-face, like it's Yalta or something - then the Big Three, now the Big Two. But without a consensus "enemy" that's recognized as being on equal standing, no President wants to look like they're meeting other leaders as true equals. Gotta be the ONE SUPERPOWER. Hence the real weird off feeling when Bush tried to pretend he had a coalition for Iraq, "You forgot Poland!" etc., it was just obviously not at all the Allied Powers thing he wanted it to come off as. An exception is made for settings where the President can appear to have personally gotten two other mean, stubborn countries to talk to each other, like America is the world's wise Solomon mediating things.

Minnesota was full of Reagan-hate.

My grandmother was hugely and vocally DFL and I can still remember her telling us 'if that broken-down cowboy actor is elected, I will never vote again', talking about his behaviour during the McCarthy era, sneeringly referring to his wife as 'Nancy Davis' and pointing out that the woman had previously distinguished herself by 'putting out' in Hollywood (my grandparents knew lots of actors from my grandfather's time in '30s LA failing to become one, and that's where their gossip originated).

I just had a fairly horrifying thought: if Rubio really does end up the Republican nominee, the party's pretty much guaranteed to insist on a real dust-farting ghoul as the VP candidate, to "balance out" his youth. So get ready for the return of Jim Baker...

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39084000/jpg/_39084040_203dickap.jpg

So get ready for the return of Jim Baker...

flinging darts in Bush's eyes

http://www.bustle.com/articles/120554-republican-candidates-want-debate-overhaul-even-if-that-means-leaving-the-rnc-out

Carson whining about "gotcha" questions. What a bunch of babies. Some of the questions weren't that good, but the main issue was that the moderators should have been prepared with the sources of the quotes they were confronting the candidates with.

The idea that has increasing appeal to me is replacing the debates altogether with something akin to a model UN sesh. Allow the candidates to preselect a handful of cabinet members, give each candidate a random issue that the POTUS might realistically be expected to face, and let them demonstrate onstage how they would handle the problem. 90% of these schmucks would be gone in notime flat.

flinging dust-fartsdarts in Bush's eyes

Radio person pointed out how extra lame it was that they complained about the liberal lamestream media bias this time around, considering the first debate was Fox and the upcoming debate is Fox Business, where they'll be among friends. Though of course, challenging these chumps on any front is tantamount to pinko treason, so I don't see why any moderator would bother taking it easy on them, post CNBC blowback be damned. I mean, fuck it, they should go at them harder, especially when a hunk of the candidates are spouting outright jibberish.

That does sound like something a radio person would say.

mods kinda blew it tbh - questions beginning w the chance to grill candidates on the viability/implementation of their wackadoo policy proposals would finish w/ some dumb shit that's just there in hopes of trolling good TV. the candidates couldn't have answered the first part but they effectively didn't have to. comic book thing a perfect example. and yeah, huge huge opportunity missed to not say "the quote is from a policy paper on YOUR WEBSITE, mr. trump." real weak.

If your going to be a moderator challenging candidates with quotations, and you don't have your sources down, find another fucking job honestly,

^^^

"newsreader"

moderators were a mess and CNBC is fucking annoying anyway

I think the moderators were fine. when the moderator asks anything but a softball question, the candidates routinely ignore it and say some variant of 'biased liberal media is being unfair to me' and the audience cheers. challenging them does not work. rubio's 'best moments' all came from non-responses to legitimate challenges to his record.

I wish there was like a solid year of public schooling in America wholly devoted to rhetorical/logical fallacies.

are you kidding? in US public schools you are now mandated to get 12+ years of rhetorical and logical fallacies

xps yeah, with a full 6-8 weeks on how people lie with statistics and how not to be a sucker, basically. i think about that a lot. honestly would be far more useful as a civics lesson than most of what you learn in civics/social studies (though i would not argue for cutting that either!).

well well

While the slides released to the press highlight Bush's Sunshine State endorsements and Rubio's lack of experience, another page for donor edification gets dirtier.

It's titled "Marco Is A Risky Bet," and it bullet-points Rubio's "misuse of state party credit cards, taxpayer funds and ties to scandal-tarred former Congressman David Rivera."

When Rubio was a state lawmaker, he used the state party credit card for personal expenses, a decision he later called a mistake. In 2005, he and Rivera jointly purchased a home that later faced foreclosure.

Another bullet point says Rubio's "closeness with Norman Braman, who doubles as personal benefactor[,] raises major ethical questions."

Braman, a billionaire auto dealer, is expected to pour $10 million into Rubio's White House endeavor, The New York Times reports. He's also paid Rubio's wife to oversee his charitable work.

The Bush team also mocks Rubio's "tomorrow versus yesterday" argument as one that would be "widely ridiculed by media" should he run against the first potential female president.

The most cryptic slight is left for last: "Those who have looked into Marco's background in the past have been concerned with what they have found."

A Bush aide says that line refers to concerns Mitt Romney's team unearthed when they vetted Rubio for vice president in 2012.

pretty sure Romney dropped Rubio as a possibility because of Rubio's financial mischief, about which I'm sure we'll learn more in a few months.

it would also be good to demonstrate to kids how news articles are structured to avoid taking sides even when one side of an issue is backed up by factual evidence and the other is built on lies

xpost

I agree with curmudgeon and Dr. C that some of the moderators' unforced errors made them look bad - where did I read that, what are the rules, oops. In future they'll be more buttoned-down and, one hopes, better prepared.

Further, I think it's reasonable to criticize questions like "The guy to the right has said you fuck goats for fun. Care to comment on these goat-fucking allegations?" They're clearly designed to incite in a "let's you and him fight" way. On the other hand, it's a primary - the whole point is to draw distinctions.

But honestly those candidates should be thrilled it went down that way. No red meat is as tasty to the Angry Right base as attacking the media. Republicans should be begging Harwood et al. to moderate MORE debates, not fewer.

as for the moderators, while i don't think they would ever get real answers out of the candidates, that doesn't mean there are no consequences to asking poorer questions than they might have asked. a not-very-selective highlight edit of this debate gives so much material for "the moderators were just looking for a cage match, cruz is right" which would not be quite so viable without the totally moronic questions or bits of questions, even if the latter are outliers. terrible answers to real questions can always be picked over later or cited in editorials and campaign speeches by the opposition: senator x was asked how his tax plan would do X when all the independent analyses have said Y. but all he could say was..."

ime viewers are pretty good at picking up on non-answers, even if they're not informed enough to pick up on bad answers to substantive questions. "hey he didn't even answer the question! they asked about how to solve the trash collection problem. and he just keeps giving the same answer about 'a thousand points of light.' guy's got no ideas!" etc. yes, obviously the supporters of said candidate will have answers to that too, "well who cares about trash collection, that's a silly question" but...i dunno, why make it easy for them?

i feel like the "let's start a fight" questions, aside from being obviously ratings-driven and looking for springer-esque brawls onstage, are also a sort of inevitable outgrowth of nobody having any idea why they call them "debates" anymore, or what to do when you have ten people on stage, at which point asking the same open-ended question of each person right down the line just means you've let each one take their stump speech, cut it up by topic, and present it in 1-2 minute blurts.

a while ago i suggested these things would better be called "pageants" and really, even with the driest possible questions, they don't actually do anything more useful than it would be to just say that on a series of randomly chosen nights, each candidate will get a bunch of uninterrupted air time to give the stump speech you would see if you went and saw them at the county civic center. maybe followed after a short break with Q&A where an expert panel, who's spent the day reading all their stump speeches and is ready to actually ask them tough questions, zoom in on the places where the speech elides some big important gap, or whatever. nobody would watch that and few candidates who weren't desperate would agree to it. but it would probably be a lot more helpful. something about the same auratic presence of the politicians getting face-to-face, that we were talking about with Presidential Summits, convinces us that there must be something special about having these people all in a room, potentially talking directly to each other from time to time. it just has Event written all over it, which is colored over frenetically in highlighter by news outlets hyping up how this one could be a GAME CHANGER like maybe the KNOCKOUT BLOW will be delivered and candidate x's MOMENTUM will be stopped in its tracks.