2016 Presidential Horse Race

[wizards8507]

I've been convinced for months that he is either 1) trolling for fun, because he has nothing better to do 2) trolling specifically to guarantee that his pal Hillary Clinton gets elected.

I don't think either one. He's far too arrogant to 1) waste his own time, or 2) be anyone's puppet.

 

[IrishLax]

Excuse me? Would you care to substantiate that insult by linking to a post here wherein an ND fan runs down "virtually any education that doesn't come from" ND? Or should I assume you're just a troll?

Pump the breaks homie, I believe he meant that tongue in cheek with the "(insert smiley face emoji)" at the end.

 

[woolybug25]

I don't think either one. He's far too arrogant to 1) waste his own time, or 2) be anyone's puppet.

Then what's his goal? He's not doing it for the money, obviously. Maybe just a fame whore?

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Pump the breaks homie, I believe he meant that tongue in cheek with the "(insert smiley face emoji)" at the end.

Sarcasm is usually intended to be funny. That parting shot was nothing but passive-aggression. But since it seems like no one else took issue with it, I'll let it go.

 

[wizards8507]

Then what's his goal? He's not doing it for the money, obviously. Maybe just a fame whore?

That's my guess. Or he honestly thinks he's as great as his shtick would indicate and that he could Make America Great Again (TM) by sheer force of will.

Excuse me? Would you care to substantiate that insult by linking to an IE post wherein an ND fan runs down "virtually any education that doesn't come from" ND? Or should I assume you're just a troll?

Classic Notre Dame girl to a Saint Mary's girl at a party: "Do you even go here?" That was a fun meme when I was an undergrad. I knew some SMC girls who had t-shirts made up that said "I don't even go here." I suggest something similar for non-alumni IE members.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I've been convinced for months that he is either 1) trolling for fun, because he has nothing better to do 2) trolling specifically to guarantee that his pal Hillary Clinton gets elected.

Either way, he has effectively killed the perception of the Republican for at least a decade, and has possibly destroyed it altogether.

It's maybe what you mean, but he's exposed a large portion of the Republican electorate.

I think it's all good for him. He's getting huge publicity. Name recognition is higher than it has ever been. He'll eventually get his show back and his net worth will go up.

 

[kmoose]

I think, when all is said and done, Trump will have made a great contribution to American politics, simply by proving that an outsider CAN poll well and DOES have a realistic chance at winning the election.

I think that pays dividends, in the future, when some other more suitable outsider decides to run............. and wins. And THAT will turn the "career politician" system upside down, and we can get down to actually getting sh!t done again.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I think, when all is said and done, Trump will have made a great contribution to American politics, simply by proving that an outsider CAN poll well and DOES have a realistic chance at winning the election.

I think that pays dividends, in the future, when some other more suitable outsider decides to run............. and wins. And THAT will turn the "career politician" system upside down, and we can get down to actually getting sh!t done again.

There's something to be said for the "outsider" perspective.

But I think we're in trouble as long as money plays such a huge role in getting votes and getting elected. I also think gerrymandering has really hurt the democracy. There are very few districts that are competitive. Politicians (in the house) only have t placate their base.

 

[kmoose]

But I think we're in trouble as long as money plays such a huge role in getting votes and getting elected.

Successful outsiders are less susceptible to the influence of money, as they made/make their money OUTSIDE of politics. It is the professional politician who is most vulnerable, because their only financial advantage is being a politician.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

Successful outsiders are less susceptible to the influence of money, as they made/make their money OUTSIDE of politics. It is the professional politician who is most vulnerable, because their only financial advantage is being a politician.

But only incredibly wealthy people have a chance to be outsiders. They still bring that worldview.

 

[GoIrish41]

I think Trump represents a relatively large chunk of angry, uneducated and faux patriot people and I am afraid of what could happen when he loses. What are all those people going to do with all that hate when they don't have a political movement to attach it to? Perhaps we should register and track them ... restrict their travel and their ability to buy guns, even. They scare me more than Syrian refugees and Mexicans looking for a better life for their families.

 

[pkt77242]

Successful outsiders are less susceptible to the influence of money, as they made/make their money OUTSIDE of politics. It is the professional politician who is most vulnerable, because their only financial advantage is being a politician.

Huh?

So only the super rich should run as outsiders? If an outsider is successful and has a good sum of money but is not super rich (lets say 2 million in the bank), they still couldn't run for President without massive donations. Presidential elections take a ton of money. They take Super Pacs backing you (unless you are so rich that you don't need it, say a billion+ and you are willing to spend it all). Sorry, Trump hasn't proven that an outsider can somewhat successfully run for President, he has shown that someone who is super rich and has one of the most recognizable names can run for President.

 

[kmoose]

Huh?

So only the super rich should run as outsiders? If an outsider is successful and has a good sum of money but is not super rich (lets say 2 million in the bank), they still couldn't run for President without massive donations. Presidential elections take a ton of money. They take Super Pacs backing you (unless you are so rich that you don't need it, say a billion+ and you are willing to spend it all). Sorry, Trump hasn't proven that an outsider can somewhat successfully run for President, he has shown that someone who is super rich and has one of the most recognizable names can run for President.

You're missing the real issue. The issue is not money for election; what's a problem in politics is money for reelection. And people who are successful outside of politics don't need to be reelected to maintain their wealth. They can simply go back to what they were doing, and continue to make money at it. Whereas; a professional politician relies on being a politician for their wealth. So being reelected is not just important; it is paramount. THOSE are the people who are vulnerable to the influence of big money. Because they HAVE to be reelected in order to maintain their income.

 

[Armyirish47]

Sarcasm is usually intended to be funny. That parting shot was nothing but passive-aggression. But since it seems like no one else took issue with it, I'll let it go.

That's mighty big of you. (insert winky emoji, heart emoji, #sarcasm)

It was absolutely tongue in cheek, but if you don't think graduates from elite private schools occasionally look down on their public school (and lesser private school) brethren then I really don't know what to say (even on the interwebs!). As a graduate of Vandy Law, even I have been laid low by this most odious behavior.

BUT you chose to focus on a throwaway joke as part of a larger discussion on what college should mean, and by expanding what we think of as college to include 2 year colleges, vocational training, etc. and further how it is important that we not let those labels dictate our assumptions on their value, no matter where we might come from. And for that distraction, I apologize.

 

[pkt77242]

You're missing the real issue. The issue is not money for election; what's a problem in politics is money for reelection. And people who are successful outside of politics don't need to be reelected to maintain their wealth. They can simply go back to what they were doing, and continue to make money at it. Whereas; a professional politician relies on being a politician for their wealth. So being reelected is not just important; it is paramount. THOSE are the people who are vulnerable to the influence of big money. Because they HAVE to be reelected in order to maintain their income.

Disagree. Most could make more money being lobbyists. It is the power that keeps them coming back.

Again you can't get elected without mone, either your own or people giving it to you.

 

[T Town Tommy]

I think Trump represents a relatively large chunk of angry, uneducated and faux patriot people and I am afraid of what could happen when he loses. What are all those people going to do with all that hate when they don't have a political movement to attach it to? Perhaps we should register and track them ... restrict their travel and their ability to buy guns, even. They scare me more than Syrian refugees and Mexicans looking for a better life for their families.

Trump is Trump... and while he has the "undesirables" as you say following him, he also has some that don't fall in to that category that follow him as well. I would never vote for Trump but I do find him entertaining. And I would guess his ability to manipulate an otherwise predictable liberal media bothers some. He is truly worth the price of admission with his tirades.

And if you feel unsafe in this great country of ours, you can always catch a plane for somewhere greener. That is... if you aren't wrongly listed on a no fly list somewhere. Either that or find a friend that would defend you from the "undesirables." They can be a pesky bunch. Enjoy.

 

[RDU Irish]

Because the homeless derelicts voting "D" for a pack of smokes is so noble yet the "angry, uneducated, faux patriots" are a problem? Makers vs. Takers is unfair to the takers? The same person lambasting anything resembling a stereotype is stereotyping a third of the Republican base. 41, you are essentially the Dem version of Trump with your rhetoric.

 

[ND NYC]

random thought...this could have been the election cycle when JFK Jr. threw his hat in for the big prize...

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The insider v. outsider narrative is a convenient distraction from much deeper structural problems with our government. When the state is huge and centralized, serious corruption is inevitable. There is no American Cincinnatus waiting in the wings who will fix the dysfunction and ride off into the sunset.

Running a competitive campaign only costs a small fortune when the office you're seeking is too powerful already. Federalism and privacy were really good ideas; we might want to try them again.

Trump leads the polls because our liberal order (both "conservative" and Progressive) is producing a lot of losers, and failing to deliver for American citizens in some very basic ways. If Trump's supporters have no place in your vision of America's future, the prospects for our union are not looking good.

 

[GoIrish41]

Because the homeless derelicts voting "D" for a pack of smokes is so noble yet the "angry, uneducated, faux patriots" are a problem? Makers vs. Takers is unfair to the takers? The same person lambasting anything resembling a stereotype is stereotyping a third of the Republican base. 41, you are essentially the Dem version of Trump with your rhetoric.

I'm not stereotyping them, they self describe as angry and distrustful of the government. Every analyst on every every news outlet describes them as angry and they have less education than other republican voters according to every poll I've seen on the topic. Every time there is a mass shooting, Trump's first inclination is to call for weaker gun laws and his support goes up. His platform is to shut out foreigners and and Muslims, and his support goes up. These are not stereotypes -- they are facts. Trump attracts the worst elements of the Republican Party and manipulates them to believe that he is going to make America great again. I want to know what period he is talking about that this "greatness" existed. What exactly is he shooting for? The 50s? The 60s or 70s or 80s? I suspect that large portions of the country would not agree that any of those time periods was so great.

 

[RDU Irish]

I'm not stereotyping them, they self describe as angry and distrustful of the government. Every analyst on every every new outlet describes them as angry and they have less education than other republican voters according to every poll I've seen on the topic. Every time there is a mass shooting, Trump's first inclination is to call for weaker gun laws and his support goes up. His platform is to shut out foreigners and and Muslims, and his support goes up. These are not stereotypes -- they are facts. Trump attracts the worst elements of the Republican Party and manipulates them to believe that he is going to make America great again. I want to know what period he is talking about that this "greatness" existed. What exactly is he shooting for? The 50s? The 60s or 70s or 80s? I suspect that large portions of the country would not agree that any of those time periods was so great.

You could be talking about BlackLivesMatter protesters, yet we are to pander to them while the angry Trump supporters are a problem.

 

[GoIrish41]

Trump is Trump... and while he has the "undesirables" as you say following him, he also has some that don't fall in to that category that follow him as well. I would never vote for Trump but I do find him entertaining. And I would guess his ability to manipulate an otherwise predictable liberal media bothers some. He is truly worth the price of admission with his tirades.

And if you feel unsafe in this great country of ours, you can always catch a plane for somewhere greener. That is... if you aren't wrongly listed on a no fly list somewhere. Either that or find a friend that would defend you from the "undesirables." They can be a pesky bunch. Enjoy.

It is funny that you find the destruction of your party and the damage he is inflicting on the country "entertaining". Always the right wing knee jerk to propose people who do t agree with them to find another country to live in. It really doesn't even merit a response.

 

[wizards8507]

It is funny that you find the destruction of your party and the damage he is inflicting on the country "entertaining".

What damage is Trump doing to the country? He has zero power. He's going to be a footnote of history. The world will little note, nor long remember, anything Candidate Trump says on the campaign trail.

 

[GoIrish41]

You could be talking about BlackLivesMatter protesters, yet we are to pander to them while the angry Trump supporters are a problem.

I saw on the news a few days ago Trump's security guards dragging a protester out of a rally, and people screaming that the protestor should be set on fire. Trump himself said on stage during another rally that another protester being removed deserved to be roughed up. Nobody is suggesting pandering to anyone, and when they suggest that someone be beaten or set on fire I'll have the same criticisms of the BlackLivesMatter protesters as I have for trump and his supporters.

 

[wizards8507]

I saw on the news a few days ago Trump's security guards dragging a protester out of a rally, and people screaming that the protestor should be set on fire. Trump himself said on stage during another rally that another protester being removed deserved to be roughed up. Nobody is suggesting pandering to anyone, and when they suggest that someone be beaten or set on fire I'll have the same criticisms of the BlackLivesMatter protesters as I have for trump and his supporters.

Black Activists Call for Lynching and Hanging of White People and Cops

 

[GoIrish41]

Black Activists Call for Lynching and Hanging of White People and Cops

These people are just as dangerous as Trump and his supporters. They are wrong headed and hateful.

 

[T Town Tommy]

It is funny that you find the destruction of your party and the damage he is inflicting on the country "entertaining". Always the right wing knee jerk to propose people who do t agree with them to find another country to live in. It really does'nt even merit a response.

I took exception to your description of a rather large portion of people in our country. You are free to have any political view you wish. But to turn your nose up to people who doesn't meet your requirement or favor your position on the issues of today is BS. Always a left wing knee jerk reaction to be critical of those that don't buy into their political leanings... pot meet kettle.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's Ross Douthat just published an article titled "The Secret of Trump's Success":

My sense of things, last night and in the cold light of morning, is that yesterday evening’s Republican debate mostly maintained the primary race’s status quo — Trump on top, Rubio and Cruz jockeying beneath, and room for maybe one more candidate to work their way into the not-Trump mix. It was an evening when Rubio and Cruz fought one another to a draw on national security and immigration, when Ben Carson continued his slow recessional, when Chris Christie stuck to selling himself as a tough-guy leader (how tough? World War III tough, Wolf) instead of mixing it up with the candidate he needs to eventually fight, when Kasich and Fiorina and Rand Paul were afterthoughts, and when nobody save Paul and Jeb Bush even tried to lay a glove on Donald Trump.

As Matt Continetti noted afterward, credit to Jeb for trying — it was his best performance, easily, and fighting with Trump, the man who basically crushed his campaign earlier this year, is as good a way as any to try to salvage his guttering hopes. But from the others, as Continetti went on, the lack of trying is a highly unusual thing:

The typical pattern is for also-ran candidates to gang up on the frontrunner. But that isn’t happening this year in either the Democratic or Republican race. The reason it’s not happening? Fear. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are worried about what will happen when Hillary Clinton is president—they don’t want to end up on her enemies list. Republican anxiety is more interesting. I think most of the Republican candidates won’t attack Trump because they genuinely do not understand him or his meteoric rise to the stratosphere of American politics. They’re afraid of the consequences—are they misjudging the moment? Do they need his supporters? Will they be at a loss for a witty comeback when Trump insults them mercilessly?

In that quest for understanding, which politicians of both parties should pursue, I recommend lingering over one particular moment from last night, when Trump returned to his frequent theme of elite foreign-policy failure, and produced a rather-eloquent monologue on America’s recent misadventures in the Middle East:

In my opinion, we’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that frankly, if they were there and if we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems; our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had, we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East, we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away, and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized. A total and complete mess. I wish we had the $4 trillion or $5 trillion. I wish it were spent right here in the United States, on our schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart.

Then, when Fiorina interrupted to first accuse him of echoing Obama and then went on a riff attacking Hillary Clinton over Benghazi, Trump responded:

Well, there’s nothing to respond to … the fact is Benghazi was a disaster because of Libya, everything just fell into place. It could not have been worse.

What do we have now? We have nothing. We’ve spent $3 trillion and probably much more – I have no idea what we’ve spent. Thousands and thousands of lives, we have nothing. Wounded warriors all over the place who I love, we have nothing for it.

This is not the kind of thing that Republican politicians can easily say, because after all the Iraq invasion was the last Republican administration’s signature idea. But it’s also not the kind of thing that Democratic politicians can easily say — and not only, as Matt Yglesias suggests, because they’re afraid of sounding unpatriotic. It’s also that much of the waste Trump is condemning happened on the watch of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: Disastrous as the invasion was, George W. Bush did hand on a mostly stabilized Iraq to his successor, and it was under Obama that our troops pulled out, under Obama that Syria went to hell, under Obama that ISIS took over the Sunni Triangle, and under Obama that Qaddafi was toppled and ISIS rushed into the Libyan vacuum.

Of course one can dispute how much of this was actually Obama’s fault, and argue over what might have been done differently. But he has been the president during these multiplying disasters, which means that his would-be successor simply cannot go on the campaign trail and issue a sweeping indictment of the last twelve years of U.S. foreign policy; she has to reach back in time and keep blaming it all on Bush. Only Trump — the freest man in politics, the third-party candidate running inside the G.O.P. tent — can just say a plague on both your houses. And that line resonates because on the evidence of everything that’s happened under the last two presidents, a plague is what both houses eminently deserve.

Which, of course, tells us nothing about what the next president should do, and there Trump’s current ideas range from the absurd (“take all the oil”) to the monstrous (kill terrorists’ families). And over the course of the actual primaries, as opposed to these preliminaries, I persist in believing that most Republican voters will end up choosing between the genuinely-different foreign policy visions that Rubio and Cruz are offering rather than taking a flyer on Trump’s Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore approach.

But for now support for Trump on foreign policy isn’t an endorsement of his policy vision. It’s more of a cathartic howl against twelve years of failure, which neither political party can quite call by its deserved name.

And though I’ve called him a proto-fascist, I’m not immune to its appeal. What do we have now? We have nothing. Watching at home, that was only line in two hours of debating that made me want to stand up and applaud.

 

[woolybug25]

For some reason, I found it funny when you wrote:

I took exception to your description of a rather large portion of people in our country. You are free to have any political view you wish. But to turn your nose up to people who doesn't meet your requirement or favor your position on the issues of today is BS.

But then wrote this:

Always a left wing knee jerk reaction to be critical of those that don't buy into their political leanings... pot meet kettle.

You literally got mad at him for stereotyping all republicans and stereotyped liberals in the same breath. lol. Carry on, gentlemen...

 

[pkt77242]

The insider v. outsider narrative is a convenient distraction from much deeper structural problems with our government. When the state is huge and centralized, serious corruption is inevitable. There is no American Cincinnatus waiting in the wings who will fix the dysfunction and ride off into the sunset.

Running a competitive campaign only costs a small fortune when the office you're seeking is too powerful already. Federalism and privacy were really good ideas; we might want to try them again.

Trump leads the polls because our liberal order (both "conservative" and Progressive) is producing a lot of losers, and failing to deliver for American citizens in some very basic ways. If Trump's supporters have no place in your vision of America's future, the prospects for our union are not looking good.

The problem isn't just at the Federal level. The cost of Governor elections is increasing as well (as are all elections) and when you give the power to the states, people aren't going to stop spending money on elections. The NRA and Unions which are both already heavily involved in state politics and will become even more so. The billionaires will just focus on state elections where they do business but they will still be spending lots of money.

Getting most of the money out of politics would probably be the best thing for the people. Once the power of special interests are diminished some hopefully people will become more responsive to their constituents instead of to their fat cat donors (both Democrats and Republicans).

ETA: It isn't a cure all but a good first step, along with some kind of term limits.