US Politics, October 2018: next week will be even longer

Kind of wish Beto would genuinely go on the attack. His team is currently just running this plain-spoken ad denouncing the mud-slinging. Meanwhile, Cruz and GOP PACs are going to town on him on TV rn, Cruz backed out of one of the debates, and it's just so easy to get some licks in on ol' Ted. O'Rourke needs to do some nut-kicking.

re: eisenhower/nixon: the 1952 convention fight was really ugly between eisenhower's supporters and those of bob taft, who was sort of the mitch mcconnell of his age. if he was alive and in the senate now we would be devoting a huge percentage of our ire and outrage at his attempts to stall, contain, and roll back the new deal. picking a well-known conservative and commie-purger like nixon was seen as a hedge against paleocon types staying home or voting a third party. (bear in mind that eisenhower had never held office before and was even being courted for the democratic ticket at one point.) nixon was also famously an asshole, and if eisenhower wanted to basically run on being a beloved war hero that every veteran was already going to vote for, he might want someone else on the campaign providing the newspapers with the meaner, more aggressive quotes... your basic "attack dog" type deal.

Beto needs to spend all his money on turnout imo

^^ otm. attack ads would be more emotionally satisfying, but GOTV would be more effective.

everybody knows who he is at this point. If his election is hinging on turning out minority and youth vote, driving people to the polls will be more effective than ads, because those votes pretty much never materialize.

not on their own anyway

Cruz backed out of one of the debates

two now iirc? one to vote on Kavanaugh, one to be a giant crybaby pussy

re: eisenhower/nixon: the 1952 convention fight was really ugly between eisenhower's supporters and those of bob taft, who was sort of the mitch mcconnell of his age. if he was alive and in the senate now we would be devoting a huge percentage of our ire and outrage at his attempts to stall, contain, and roll back the new deal. picking a well-known conservative and commie-purger like nixon was seen as a hedge against paleocon types staying home or voting a third party. (bear in mind that eisenhower had never held office before and was even being courted for the democratic ticket at one point.) nixon was also famously an asshole, and if eisenhower wanted to basically run on being a beloved war hero that every veteran was already going to vote for, he might want someone else on the campaign providing the newspapers with the meaner, more aggressive quotes... your basic "attack dog" type deal.

― |Restore| |Restart| |Quit| (Doctor Casino), F

and the moment Nixon suggested in the Checkers speech that BOTH candidates reveal the source of their finances Ike loathed him. The way Ike dangled power and withdrew it in front of Nixon for the next eight years would be pathetic and awful if Nixon hadn't deserved it.

Many XPs

Well, yeah. That's really how his election should go, by getting enough people out to vote who wouldn't have normally. Part of why Texas has become a GOP stronghold is that the big state offices (the Govs. and Attorney General) are always up during nationwide midterms, and only GOP voters show up.

The problem is that alot of the attack stuff is shading the election against him. Talking points covered in ads and sanctioned/unsanctioned memes by Cruz/PACs are skewing dialogue towards stupid stuff from O'Rourke's past (the DWI and Burglary/Trespassing stuff) and political things of no consequence (a PAC is still running an ad linking O'Rourke as an El Paso councilman to an eminent domain deal that in reality (A) he recused himself from voting on due to his Father-In-Law's involvement in the project, and (B) ended up not happening) without counterpoint illustrations of Cruz's ineffectiveness as senator. Almost every positive thing Cruz is running on (disaster relief a big one) is something someone in his position would have been able to do no matter what party affiliation, and many voters are not getting that.

so what's to be done about these blatant and possibly illegal voter suppression techniques the GOP is flagrantly getting away with right now? do we just point our fingers and say "SEE!! I told you they cheat!!" while letting them steal (yet another) election?

My old org is doing civil disobedience on voter suppression in Florida rn, but the "democracy movement"
more broadly conceived is just way too milquetoast and bought in to decorum as a practice for the likes of Common Cause and others to really throw down on this.

politics died with the storm then?

good mourning!

This thread's dormancy yesterday delighted me.

so what's to be done about these blatant and possibly illegal voter suppression techniques the GOP is flagrantly getting away with right now? do we just point our fingers and say "SEE!! I told you they cheat!!" while letting them steal (yet another) election?

looks like it

Not really. Native Americans are fighting back..

I was hearing that several groups in Georgia were trying to combat what was happening there and saying that Kemp should stand down as Secretary of State. Or at least recuse himself during the election
I can't believe that system he's imposed and already had challenged once, this “exact match” thing whereby apparently the voter has to exactly match what the person who took their details down has entered. So forgetting to use initials one doesn't use frequently means you don't match or not having the correct amount of spaces entered gets the same result. Difficult to see that as legal .
Actually difficult to believe somebody is remotely getting away with trying to run things this way in the present day.

Georgia was also reluctant to get their election devices looked at in the wake of the Russian hacking and wound up wiping the machines used instead of having them inspected. Sounds like it's a deeply embedded problem so hope that there is some way Stacey Abrams can actually get in and reform things.

It's like they've never seen the many cinematic depictions of a bully throwing his weight around until he finally pushes his luck too far.

meanwhile global war enthusiast Bill Kristol finds his inner snark as an #NeverTrumpist

I'm excited too. I've always hoped to be on the cover of a #1 bestseller. https://t.co/GW2G1S68kz

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) October 14, 2018

Warren Harris or Harris Warren

what did that link to? i blocked twitter on my devices

it's really too bad the saudis own an entire floor in trump tower :(

https://apnews.com/a956d9e593ec44f68e40ae4f2b5d5717?

Stevo, I’m rooting for an all-woman ticket too, but it’s not gonna be Warren

Teachout / Winner: troll the cons right back

think harris and gillibrand will be up there tbh.

Stevo, I’m rooting for an all-woman ticket too, but it’s not gonna be Warren

― El Tomboto, 14. oktober 2018 17:50 (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why not?
(honest question, if it seems snarky :) )

It should be Warren

I think Harris could be potentially better as a candidate against Trump because she carries herself with a rare kind of easy authority. But Warren is the one who gets it when it comes to the problem of money in politics and the overall structural problems that have allowed the GOP to become the monster it now is.

someone I know who workedin Harris' office in SF just went off on a polemic on her complete lack of executive skills...I honestly kind of forgot she was the prosecutor in SF, she wasn't popular at the time (what prosecutors are though?).

INteresting, I wound up watching a frontline episode from 2004 earlier this week on the history of the credit card in the U.S. that had Warren turn up in her days asa law professor. I don't know enough about her to know if she had considered running for public office by that point. But interesting to see her and think this is a person cropping up on a show that hasn't got the recognition she would get later. & yeah would be interesting to see her as President after taht.
Particularly to rub it into people who've been trying to rub it into her over the last couple of years.

It’s hard to have a “good” record as a prosecutor when our criminal justice system is what it is. But apparently there were a few high profile white collar cases related to the 2008 collapse that she declined to pursue.

Xp

xpost...what are a complete lack of executive skills? She didn't have an admin connect calls for her?

what are a complete lack of executive skills?

A large part of executive skills would be picking the right people for the positions who report to you, then managing your communication with them so you understand what is happening in their area, what their deliverables are and what problems they are having in delivering them, including a way to find out what problems they are not reporting to you. If you can't do those things well, you lack executive skills.

Except for the first, FDR lacked every one of those qualities!

that's ok, the bar will be low

Sometimes the first quality can render the others mostly moot

xp If a president can pick the right people for the cabinet, and those people have good executive skills, then the prez is more or less home free, because managing the departments of the executive branch is not really the job description for a president. It's more important that good information flows up to you, so you can make good decisions for others to carry out.

Still think Obama’s main problem was a gross overconfidence in his ability to pick people.

Trying to have it both ways -- staying above the scrim of politics while making himself the essential man -- frustrated the hell out of me in 2010 and 2011.

I dreamed I was posting ITT last night but I was Speaker of the House and seeking advice from Soto

"Make a list."

One of the Teddy Roosevelts worked at my firm. He definitely lacked executive skills.

I am still crinkling my brow about someone bitching that Harris lacks executive skills.

I mean, the person who said that worked for her.

i mean i think we can all agree this is going to be one of the defining issues of the 2020 primaries, as much as it defines the state of u.s. politics in october 2018

xpost yeah, it's still really weird. I mean I guess if I had a boss from years ago that I kind of hated (I have several) and they were likely to be a candidate for higher office, I am sure I would talk about their lack of excel skills.

"Charismatic, innovative, but struggles with creating swim lanes in Visio"

his specific complaint about her was that she had shiny object syndrome where she would divert attention to other high profile things and not follow up on the day to day.

wow a boss that didn’t focus on the day to day