U.S. Electile Dysfunction 2016

[Prime95]

Oh and congratulations to me too. I won $10 on a 2 year old bet that Obama would win re-election!

[Xyzzy]

Sanity prevails!

[kladner]

rAmen!

[pinhodecarlos]

Thank God it ended. Now I can watch my cartoons.

[Zeta-Flux]

Not that anyone cares, but here are my thoughts.

Positives:
There is now a chance that detentions without legal representation will be stopped, and Guantanomo bay will be closed. (Crossing my fingers on both of those.)

Republicans will have to do something about their image with minority groups. (Crossing my fingers on that too.)

Obama will cut the military budget (back to still too big levels).

Taxes will go up a bit on people who can afford to pay them (although it will have little effect on the debt, at least it will [hopefully] diminish the envy rhetoric).


Negatives:
If any Supreme Court nominees come up, it will likely be someone who rules from their emotions and not the law.

The national debt will go up another 4 trillion. I would also have liked someone to actually close all those loopholes in the tax code, but don't hold your breath.

This campaign proves what big money in negatives campaigns can do. (Republicans really need to work on their image as the anti-birth control party.)

[xilman]

I remember sending out this back in 2000 to a friend in Florida.

Can someone ship out a few million copies please? The last batch seem to have been lost, buried in peat and recycled as fire-lighters.

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by xilman

I remember sending out this back in 2000 to a friend in Florida.

It wasn't me. I double-checked and my chads weren't hanging.

[Xyzzy]

We really expected Mister Romney to win. But, we are isolated in rural Arkansas, so the political environment is stifling and probably affected how we view the "big picture".

That said, there are a lot of very upset people around here now who are wondering what happened.

We have our ideas why Mister Romney lost but we are curious what you all think.

(We view this election as more "who lost" rather than "who won", if you know what we mean.)

The Republican Party is not like it was back when Mister Reagan was in office. Does the party need to become more centrist? The people we know want the party to become more conservative.

[Zeta-Flux]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

We really expected Mister Romney to win. But, we are isolated in rural Arkansas, so the political environment is stifling and probably affected how we view the "big picture".

That said, there are a lot of very upset people around here now who are wondering what happened.

We have our ideas why Mister Romney lost but we are curious what you all think.

(We view this election as more "who lost" rather than "who won", if you know what we mean.)

The Republican Party is not like it was back when Mister Reagan was in office. Does the party need to become more centrist? The people we know want the party to become more conservative.

Since you asked... :-)

I think Romney lost for a lot of reasons.

1) The negative advertising worked. He was painted as someone who loves money and hates the little guy, and people believed it. (His 47% remark didn't help there.) Romney did not show them the man who took a $1 salary at Bain to turn it around [compare that to the CEOs who take million dollar salaries, run a company into the ground, and then take a golden parachute check], took no salary as governor, and no salary as the turn-around artist for the Olympics. A man who gave away his inheritance from his father to charity, but then went and earned his own fortune, of which he donates a huge amount every year.

The fact that a blind trust fund put some of his money overseas (as does Obama's, by the way) somehow made him an evil man.

2) He was grouped in with wackos/zealots concerning abortion, like Akin. The biggest contributor to his downfall was the single woman vote. His position is actually quite moderate on that issue, leaving it open in cases of rape, incest, etc...

3) He went on prevent defense; and didn't even bring up Libya in the third debate. (This may have worked if Sandy had not happened.)

Concerning your second question: There is clearly a problem with Republican appeal to minorities. Republicans, whether fairly or not, have been painted as the anti-immigrant party. As supporting racist tea partiers. As gay haters. They need to come up with a popular, *kind*, and effective approach to immigration. They need to seriously reach across the aisle.

Regarding abortion, they do need to go more centrist. The Democratic platform of "abortion should be allowable anytime" is a disgrace, but so is the idea that women can prevent pregnancy during rape and that they should not have access to the morning after drugs. [Unfortunately, there was nothing the party could do to get rid of Akin. But its own platform is a problem too.]

[xilman]

Originally Posted by Prime95

I didn't vote for him this time. I had a choice of disaster #1 vs. disaster #2 and opted for #2.

Fits in with the main political cartoon in The Times a few days ago which showed two ballot boxes. One was labelled "Not Obama" and the other "Not Romney".

[bsquared]

Originally Posted by Xyzzy

Does the party need to become more centrist? The people we know want the party to become more conservative.

More conservative in what respect? For instance, I typically vote democrat, but I strongly resonant with the foreign policy views of this. There are other Republican views I resonate with as well, but don't want to get into those here.

I view the Afganistan/Iraq wars as a disaster of unimaginable proportions and believe they have more or less directly put us in the economic situation we now face, to say nothing about the cost in lives on both sides and the fostering of new generations of zealots. The sooner we as a nation withdraw from those regions and dial back our military presence globally the better, and Obama would have gotten my vote for no other reason than that he demonstrated he can and will do this. The article seems to say that a true conservative republican would want a much more conservative foreign policy, but why does it seem the opposite is true? Am I imagining it (having been perhaps irrevocably tainted by W)?; what do conservative republicans here think regarding foreign policy?

Furthermore, wouldn't a more conservative approach to reducing the deficit and debt involve prudent and proven methods: raising revenue and decreasing spending (see above re: military)? Stuff of this magnitude simply won't disappear overnight, regardless of how we got here. It will likely take several terms-of-office, and we need a sustainable long term plan to make it happen. Wading in and immediately mucking about with drastic changes to nearly every sector of the budget seems like a decidedly less conservative approach to me. I realize that I'm mixing the two meanings of conservative, but why can't a conservative agenda involve a conservative approach/plan?

I support many aspects of the conservative republican agenda, but see only extremist approaches to implementing it. Fix the latter and maybe the former will be attainable.