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

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.

anybody read this? kind of hilarious at this point considering everything that's happened this primary season

http://goproject.gop.com/rnc_growth_opportunity_book_2013.pdf

I guess my advice to any candidate who's all "This is unfair/ridiculous/hard!" in response to a debate question would be "Stop running for president, you choad."

skimming the opening sections, it's kinda fascinating. lots of common sense points about why the party is unappealing and how it needs to articulate a conservatism appealing to people under age 50. some of it fairly self-deluding stuff about reforms made by republican governors that show they can still be relevant to a wide base (skipping over the groups with whom those 'reforms' were and are totally unpopular, often the same groups they're hoping to reach out to here). also of great interest is the length of the section on hispanic concerns about the party, versus the skimpy paragraphs on african-americans, like the focus group team has just given up even trying to sugarcoat the reception they're getting. section on the youth vote is just hilarious - if only the candidates could just be more down with "pop" culture. and then you hit things like:

We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.

and it's like... but if you actually did anything about that stuff, you would basically not be a republican at this point. everything else about the party and its policies is in the pocket of the CEOs. if you're not on board with them, you should probably just switch back to being conservative democrats.

but yeah lol:

We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too. (...) If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.

keep up the good work, clown car!

more on the the 'youth' section: they recognize that romney lost the youth vote horribly, and that "for many of the youngest voters and new 2016 voters, their perception of the two parties was born during the Barack Obama era, and that perception will help determine their worldview moving forward." however they aren't willing to say: "... and specifically, if your perceptions were born during the Barack Obama era, you may well think of Republicans as a bunch of sociopathic obstructionists, racists, and conspiracy theorists with no interest in governing." so instead the problem is that "The Party is seen as old and detached from pop culture." there's hope though: the Democrats just won because Obama "was seen as 'cool' in 2008." the Democrats have old people (Biden and Clinton) but the GOP has young ones (Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Bobby Jindal, Kelly Ayotte, and teen sensation Reince Priebus). the good days are just around the corner if they can just talk about "certain social issues" the right way and do more twittering.

basically these clowns are fucked

basically these clowns are fucked
― Frump 'n' Dump (Doctor Casino), Friday, October 30, 2015 1:28 PM (56 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

basically the complete reason it's hilarious

irl lol @ teen sensation Reince Priebus

fucked as far as the presidency goes, but not so much fucked at the state and local level.

"recommendations:
1. Promote forward-looking, positive policy proposals that unite young voters,
such as the Republican Party’s education policies."

yes, when i'm on college campuses, everyone is abuzz about the charter movement

Dr. Casino otm

Specifically in re "why make it easy" and "pageants."

Romney voters
48% 59,142,004

Obama
51% 62,615,406

fucked as far as the presidency goes, but not so much fucked at the state and local level.

― Aimless

fucked until at least redistricting in 2020 right?

er, the Democrats at the local level, that is

Aimless isn't being clear there - state and local offices can definitely be flipped, it's the House that's the problem.

I know that re-districting has made this much more difficult, but there's a fatalism about House races that is a bit frustrating. The Dems controlled the House only a little over 4 years ago, yet it is taken as written that they can't compete enough to start making real inroads.

Republicans are crushing it at the state level where I'm from.

state Republican Party barely even exists where I'm from

The Dems controlled the House only a little over 4 years ago

you know what happened in the interim right

sorry that was bitchy of me, it's clear you do... but just looking at the voter composition of re-drawn districts makes it abundantly clear how effective the 2010 redistricting was. There's just no way to contest various seats now, the voters aren't there.

I barely even remember when that happened. Was there an outcry about it?

House seats are notoriously difficult to flip when the incumbent runs. Re-election rates for incumbents are historically well above 90% with very few exceptions. Ousting incumbents is not impossible, but it's hardly a fertile ground for high hopes.

2010

xp

That's a good point.

I would say that the Dems certainly are not re-taking the majority next year, but they need to be chipping away at it aggressively now rather than putting that fight off until 2020.

Hillary is trying to unveil her criminal justice platform, and people are loudly protesting her. Her lateness is embarrassing, as is of course her role in creating the problems in the first place. Wonder how this will play.

It is pretty hard to create problems that were problems even before you born.

If Hillary wins it's going to be the same exact Democrat hot shots calling the shots in 2020 that have been doing this since 1993 or whenever Bill was in.

You should see the shit show that is the Democratic party in my state right now. Our Treasurer was charged with extortion, our Attorney General might be removed from office soon over a porn e-mail scandal that she didn't even really create, our Governor is doing ok but the current budget is like 120 days over due.

stuff like this happens: http://keystonepolitics.com/2015/10/state-agency-crippling-bill-heads-to-a-vote-in-the-senate-rules-committee-today/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KeystonePolitics+%28Keystone+Politics%29

sorry, is there a thread for bitching about state politics?

Two Democrats drew our congressional districts and they all flipped GOP for the first time ever.

Granted, we have a grand total of four, but still.

Dude these people are such babies!

https://gop.com/nbc-letter/

hahaha oh man

lol at thinking 'the more we just scrimmage against ourselves and change the rules on the fly so that nobody gets hurt and nobody looks bad the better prepared we'll be when the real games begin'. the gop constructing their own echo chamber and them burying themselves further and further in it anytime reality is too harsh really makes them easy prey when they finally have to leave home. i know post-2004 nobody cares about the center but they really kill themselves in these debates and they have no idea how routine "common sense" stuff reads as batshit insane to anyone that doesn't already have redstate or breitbart or nro or dailycaller bookmarked, that it just confirms every worst suspicion anyone might have about them and feeds into narratives dems have been setting up for months. as a result when something like romney's 47% moment happens not only does it happen but it takes them a while to even figure out it's the kind of thing they need to do damage control on.

i mean ftr cnbc is pretty fucking conservative. the goddamn tea party kicked off w/ rick santelli doing an idiotic rant.

Carefully stage managing every detail in advance whenever television cameras are turned on is hugely important to these guys and they will insist on their little prerogatives, like petulant divas, because the money and power at stake magnify everything to gargantuan size.

the thing is though, they do such a good job of convincing people that government is the problem, that even when they slip, they still manage to prove their point, which doesn't get people running to be a democrat so they almost break even

the 'no taxes' campaign is just so juicy that any other thought (increased taxes, spending?) sounds just as loony to people on the right

yeah neither of those statements is borne out by any polling from like the past ten years

haha, ok. I'm not going to look that up so I'll just believe you. I think I need to tap out of here anyhow