2016 Presidential Horse Race

[pkt77242]

Why Bob Dole attacked Ted Cruz - CNNPolitics.com

 

[pkt77242]

Also did anyone else cringe watching Sarah Palin endorse Trump. That has to be one of the worst speeches I have ever watched. Seriously was she drunk or high during it?

 

[woolybug25]

One opinion that states Palin endorsed Trump in a deal to become the head of the Department of Energy. I could see that... no way that she gave her endorsement without some kind of deal, and Trump afterall, wrote the "Art of The Deal". Something stinks...

Does the former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate want anything in return? Most likely, yes — Palin, who popularized the term “drill, baby, drill,” has said she’d like to be Trump’s Secretary of Energy. And Trump has said he’d be willing to give Palin a position in his cabinet, should he be elected president.
“I’d love that,” Trump said back in July during an interview with Mama Grizzly Radio, a station which offers only news about Sarah Palin.

What Sarah Palin Really Wants From Her Donald Trump Endorsement | ThinkProgress

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Speaking of Palin, The NYT's Ross Douthat just published a good article about her recent endorsement of Trump:

As a political journalist, you never forget the first time you stop just covering a politician and start identifying with her. The first time you wed your high-minded vision of what politics should be to a real candidate’s perishable breath.

My first time arrived in 2008. It lasted only a short while. Her name was Sarah Palin.

Let me explain. That spring, in between the Republican primary and the fall campaign, my friend Reihan Salam and I had published a book called “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

As the title suggests, we were calling for the G.O.P. to change, but not to moderate in the way that a lot of centrist pundits favored, returning to a Rockefeller-Republican model of fiscally prudent social liberalism. Rather, we thought the party’s opportunity (and the country’s) lay in a kind of socially conservative populism, which would link the family-values language of the religious right to an economic agenda more favorable to the working class than what the Republicans usually had offered.

Unfortunately this message conspicuously lacked a tribune in 2008. Mike Huckabee flirted with populism in the primary but never fleshed out an agenda, and the eventual nominee, John McCain, was an “honor and country” candidate who didn’t care much about economic policy.

But in Alaska, there was a young, rising-star governor. She was pro-life, evangelical, a working mom. And her record way up north was reformist in a distinctly nonideological way: She was best known for fighting a corrupt nexus of politicians and the oil-and-gas industry, tackling crony capitalism on behalf of ordinary Alaskans.

And then, shockingly, McCain picked her as his running mate.

At which point the chattering classes went temporarily insane. Or maybe I went insane, who can say? But either way it seemed like everything I hated, a mix of sneering social liberalism, fecundophobia, anti-evangelical paranoia and class contempt, was being hurled at a candidate who seemed to fit exactly with the “Grand New Party” mold.

So I defended her. I assailed her critics. And then — well, you know what happened then.

Palin gave interviews — terrible, terrible interviews. She was in over her head. Her own paranoia took center stage. She became her critics’ caricature, embracing a mix of willful ignorance and proud ressentiment. What was distinctive about her Alaskan career was subsumed into a much more conventional sort of movement conservatism, which she picked up from the professional ideologues who rallied to her during her trial by fire. And eventually the movement tired of her, the culture tired of her, and her act ceased to be interesting even as reality TV.

But now that she has re-emerged to endorse Donald Trump, uniting her brand with his “Make America Great Again” nationalism, it’s worth revisiting the original Palin, the outsider who took on a corrupt Alaskan establishment.

A lot of conservatives, especially in Ted Cruz’s orbit, have acted shocked or disappointed that Palin would endorse a figure like Trump, who has no plausible claim to be a principled conservative.

But given Palin’s Alaskan past, the endorsement makes perfect sense. Her real roots are not in Reaganism or libertarianism or the orthodoxies of the donor class. They’re in the same kind of blue-collar, Jacksonian, “who’s looking out for you?” populism that has carried Trump to the top of the Republican polls. And it’s a populism that the G.O.P. is discovering has a lot more appeal to many of its voters than the litmus tests of the official right.

Which means that in a certain way, Trump and Palin together on a stage is the closest American politics has come to offering the populist grand new party that Salam and I called for two presidential campaigns ago.

Except that it isn’t what we called for, because we wanted a populism with substance — one that actually offered policy solutions to stagnant wages and rising health care costs, one that could help Republicans reach out to upwardly mobile blacks and Hispanics as well as whites, and so on down an optimistic wish list.

Whereas Trump-era populism, while it plays very effectively on economic anxiety, mostly offers braggadocio rather than solutions, and white identity politics rather than any kind of one-nation conservatism.

I would like to tell you that this is all the fault of the Republican leadership — that had they been more receptive to populist ideas in 2008 or 2012, they wouldn’t be facing a Trumpian revolt today.

That’s roughly the argument that David Frum makes in this month’s Atlantic, in a sweeping essay on the roots of Trumpism. And he makes a strong case. A large part of the Republican donor class would rather lose with “you didn’t build that!” than compromise on upper-bracket tax cuts. It would rather try to win Hispanics with immigration reform a hundred times over than try to win them once on pocketbook issues. It prefers to campaign as though it’s always 1980, and has little to say to people who have lost out from globalization and socioeconomic change.

A critique that stops with G.O.P. elites, though, might let the voting public off the hook. Because it’s also possible that Trumpism, in all its boastful, lord-of-misrule meretriciousness, is what many struggling Americans actually want.

That is, at a certain point disillusionment with the system becomes so strong that no wonkish policy proposal is likely to resonate anymore. So you can talk all you want (as Marco Rubio’s water-treading campaign has tried to do) about improving vocational education or increasing the child-tax credit, and people will tune you out: They want someone who will arm-wrestle the Chinese, make Mexico pay for the wall, smite our enemies and generally stand in solidarity with their resentments, regardless of the policy results.

Since this is a recipe for American-style Putinism, it’s not exactly a good sign for the republic that it seems to be resonating. But those of us who want a better, saner and more decent populism than what Donald Trump is selling need to reckon with the implications of his indubitable appeal.

Maybe — hopefully — there’s a bridge from Trumpism to a more responsible alternative, as there was between Huey Long and F.D.R. or from George Wallace to Richard Nixon.

But it’s also possible that my fellow eggheads and I are grasping at a dream that’s already slipped behind us — lost back in the land of might-have-beens, where the dark fields of Wasilla roll on under the night.

Edit: What Douthat describes as "a Rockefeller-Republican model of fiscally prudent social liberalism" seems to be what GoIrish wants the GOP to be. And that's clearly what the GOP Establishment wants as well (which is why I argue there's not much difference between the two parties). But there doesn't appear to be much of a constituency for such a party in America today.

 

[wizards8507]

Whiskey, are you surprised by what's happening with Trump? I think the most recent wave of analysis that Trump's success is due to a so-called "conservative" base that doesn't know jack shit about conservatism is spot-on, but I never saw it coming. I can't fathom that ending corporate welfare might be a campaign-killing position for Ted Cruz in Iowa. I used to be outraged when I heard the Republican base described as bigots and xenophobes, but maybe that's who they are. They love taxing the rich and subsidizing Big Farming as much as any Democrat, they just also happen to hate brown people who talk funny and "steal their jobs." They don't know or care about Friedrich Hayek, the Laffer curve, or the tenth amendment.

 

[palinurus]

Speaking of Palin, The NYT's Ross Douthat just published a good article about her recent endorsement of Trump:

This is right. If people judge Trump to be a "conservative," in the more classical, Reagan mode, they are deeply mistaken. Trump's is a populist strain that is actually pretty popular with blue collar union types in my hometown of Youngstown. He sounds a lot like former, now-deceased, Youngstown Congressman (Democrat) Jim Traficant.

These guys touch a chord with people who feel kicked around but, rather than wanting the government to be more active (through regulation and soak-the-rich taxes and more social programs/free education) in preventing their being kicked around (that would be Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren stripe), they want a plain speaker who gives voice to their feeling that they're getting screwed by everyone -- government, big business, Wall Street, the "deadbeats" (i.e., for them, the snotty-nosed, entitled kids and the welfare class, to name two), the "elite" of Hollywood and academia, and, yes, the political elites of both major parties.

I don't think these Trump people really favor smaller government the way classical conservatives do; I don't think most of them have much of philosophy of government at all, except that they see themselves getting the short end of the stick and, on top of that, they interpret politicians of the left as being anti-American, at some deep level -- "we don't act aggresively against foreign enemies, we apologize around the world, we let outsiders come in illegally and take our jobs, we send our jobs to the Red Chinese, we don't stop the fat cats from exploiting the working class, etc." But you can see how some of these views echo what we hear from some on the far left.

Trump has nothing much, really, in common with more classically conservative (though arguably neo-con-influenced) presidents, like Reagan and Bush the younger (though Bush had more liberal social spending instincts), except that his outspokenness in the foreign affairs area dovetails with conservatives "take no crap" rhetoric (and, possibly, military action) and his (I think, calculated) attack on "the elites"; he thinks, privately, imo, that he's as "elite" as anyone, and in this sense is being phony. Frankly, I don't know a single conservative that favors Trump being the Republican nominee, but I also don't know a single conservative who thinks Trump is wrong, in substance (if we ignore his sincerity) in speaking aggressively about how "America is on the wrong path." This is a/the source of conflict between conservatives and Establishment Republicans: the Republican Establishment fears the polls, fears to be bold, fears to motivate those who want to involved in economic growth but feel ignored by all Democrats and the Republican Establishment. The conservatives favor the more aggressive track that the Establishment fears.

But Trump himself is seen by every single conservative I know as a blowhard, not a real conservative, a person of shallow philosophical consideration (it's hard to see a pattern of conservative conviction or belief), and, in the end, bad for America. That's not to say they don't see him as a lesser of two evils, faced with a vote between Trump and either Clinton or Sanders.

Just my reaction....

 

[ND NYC]

anyone else remember that eddie murphy standup routine, when he says at the end "He fucking won?"...I think about that line with a lot of the current field.

 

[wizards8507]

anyone else remember that eddie murphy standup routine, when he says at the end "He fucking won?"...I think about that line with a lot of the current field.

That's how Marco Rubio must be feeling. He's a good-looking, young Cuban-American from Florida who's well-liked in the party and nationally, yet he's in what, fifth place?

 

[palinurus]

One other thing about Trump that is straight out of the "hand-fighter manual" (and that these alienated people like) is this: he is always on the attack; he ignores thoughtful criticism and goes on the attack; he never apologizes for what he says; he just doesn't give a damn, even seems to like the fact, that the "elites" are after him -- if fact, it's proof of his truthfulness, as his supporters see it.

I think of two quotes -- may not be precise, because they're from memory, and that's tricky sometimes -- but two quotes, one by Jonathan Swift, the other by Harry Truman, are what's at play for his supporters, whether they know it or not:

"When a genius appears among you, you shall know him by this sign: the dunces will all be in confederacy against him."

"I don't give 'em 'hell;' I just tell 'em the truth and they think it's hell."


Sanders has a bit of this, too, except he isn't the focus of contempt from the "elites."

 

[ND NYC]

That's how Marco Rubio must be feeling. He's a good-looking, young Cuban-American from Florida who's well-liked in the party and nationally, yet he's in what, fifth place?

I think his #1 problem is that he just doesn't pass the "does he look/feel Presidential" test to most voters.

presidential politics is its own beast, and more often than not a vote is cast based on "how one feels" about the candidate.

I think people more likely to "throw out the resumes" and go with their gut in voting for the President.

 

[IrishLax]

That's how Marco Rubio must be feeling. He's a good-looking, young Cuban-American from Florida who's well-liked in the party and nationally, yet he's in what, fifth place?

What's crazy to me is that I took a sorta hybrid logic and social science class in college that focuses on game theory, voting theory, etc.

One of the topics that was explored was how the voting procedure can drastically impact the outcome and produce different results even with the same set of preferences for the voting population. And I feel like that is what is happening with the Trump "leading" thing.

If you look at the numbers, Trump is running at like 25%, Cruz is running at like 25%, then Rubio is 3rd somewhere around 10%, and then there is everyone else totaling another 40%.

The problem at hand is that while 20-25% might support Trump, if you polled the other 75-80% they all probably have Trump at the very bottom of their preferences. Trump is ideally positioned to have a small plurality of "lovers" but a vast majority of "haters."

So what happens if you did a plurality runoff? Doubt Trump wins, he probably gets killed in a landslide with whoever the other guy is that is left standing. But in this current system? He might "win" Iowa with less than a quarter of the voters supporting him and the VAST majority STRONGLY disliking him.

What I'd love to see is a poll where there are only 3 choices: Trump, Cruz, Rubio. I bet it would come out something like 30% Trump, 35% Cruz, 35% Rubio. And I bet if you asked them to rank those three 1, 2, or 3 in preference Trump would have about half the points of the other two when you counted them up.

In short, I think Trump is artificially being propped up by a really flawed voting process and the fact that all of these also-rans refuse to drop out of the race.

 

[wizards8507]

Sanders has a bit of this, too, except he isn't the focus of contempt from the "elites."

The leftist power structure can't go after him. Sanders is out there saying all of the things that the elites promise the base. He's a "true believer" of the leftist agenda. In reality, the Democrat power structure is just as bought-and-paid-for by big business as they accuse the Republican elites of being. If the Democrat elites went after Bernie for his left-wing populist agenda, they'd erode the trust the base has in them because the elites also run on the illusion of left-wing populism to keep the plebeians loyal. They hate him just as much as the Republican elites hate Trump, they just can't openly go after him without giving away the secret.

Trump has a similar advantage. It's not preventing the elites from going after him, it's just preventing it from working. Any time a conservative attacks Trump for not being a conservative, the attacker is labeled "establishment" and the base ignores it.

 

[pkt77242]

Whiskey, are you surprised by what's happening with Trump? I think the most recent wave of analysis that Trump's success is due to a so-called "conservative" base that doesn't know jack shit about conservatism is spot-on, but I never saw it coming. I can't fathom that ending corporate welfare might be a campaign-killing position for Ted Cruz in Iowa. I used to be outraged when I heard the Republican base described as bigots and xenophobes, but maybe that's who they are. They love taxing the rich and subsidizing Big Farming as much as any Democrat, they just also happen to hate brown people who talk funny and "steal their jobs." They don't know or care about Friedrich Hayek, the Laffer curve, or the tenth amendment.

I am surprised that you always bring up the Laffer Curve. It isn't really liberal or conservative and could as easily be used to push for higher taxes as it is to push for lower taxes. You might argue that we are on the down-slope of the curve but isn't it just as easy to argue that we are on the up-slope? Having said that I am aware that when the government tries to maximize revenue (by changing tax rates) that it can be detrimental to the private sector/wages and growth.

I am surprised that you don't spend more time talking about the Rahn curve? I think that the Rahn curve has some flaws but it at least seems to back up your Libertarian idea that lower taxes increases economic growth (though there is some debate about how accurate it is).

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Whiskey, are you surprised by what's happening with Trump? I think the most recent wave of analysis that Trump's success is due to a so-called "conservative" base that doesn't know jack shit about conservatism is spot-on, but I never saw it coming. I can't fathom that ending corporate welfare might be a campaign-killing position for Ted Cruz in Iowa. I used to be outraged when I heard the Republican base described as bigots and xenophobes, but maybe that's who they are. They love taxing the rich and subsidizing Big Farming as much as any Democrat, they just also happen to hate brown people who talk funny and "steal their jobs." They don't know or care about Friedrich Hayek, the Laffer curve, or the tenth amendment.

I'm not surprised, but I also take a very pessimistic view of philosophical liberalism. I fear we're witnessing the death throes of the American Republic which, just as with the Romans in antiquity, will be succeeded by a much nastier Empire. The fact that an unprincipled strongman like Trump has so much support is a very bad omen for our political system.

That said, I'm not comfortable writing his supporters off as racist xenophobic rubes. Those ugly facets are definitely present (sometimes in a big way), but these people also have legitimate grievances against the neo-liberal elites that have governed America for decades. The Washington Consensus truly has hollowed out our middle class, and our elites should be held to account for that. But I'd much prefer the "populism with substance" outlined by Douthat above to the "blood and soil" white identity politics that Trump is selling.

It's often said that America is the first nation founded on an idea. We desperately need to find ideas around which we can rebuild a genuine sense of national identity, of true patriotism, before we devolve into the soft tyranny of empire. But I don't see a clear path forward at this point.

I don't think these Trump people really favor smaller government the way classical conservatives do; I don't think most of them have much of philosophy of government at all, except that they see themselves getting the short end of the stick and, on top of that, they interpret politicians of the left as being anti-American, at some deep level -- "we don't act aggresively against foreign enemies, we apologize around the world, we let outsiders come in illegally and take our jobs, we send our jobs to the Red Chinese, we don't stop the fat cats from exploiting the working class, etc." But you can see how some of these views echo what we hear from some on the far left.

Agreed. As I mentioned above, the Trumpistas seem to be driven in large part by a Jacksonian fury against condescension from our cosmopolitan "global citizen" neo-liberal elites. And I'd say that's not only fair, but healthy. If you're not prepared to offer an irrational defense of your family and hometown at the drop of a dime, I don't want to know you (that sort of natural patriotism is very gauche within the Beltway.)

But that defense needs to be grounded in a moral vision of what is Good, True and Beautiful shared by your community. And Trump doesn't believe in anything like that. He's just an aspiring tyrant promising to "win".

 

[wizards8507]

I am surprised that you always bring up the Laffer Curve. It isn't really liberal or conservative and could as easily be used to push for higher taxes as it is to push for lower taxes. You might argue that we are on the down-slope of the curve but isn't it just as easy to argue that we are on the up-slope? Having said that I am aware that when the government tries to maximize revenue (by changing tax rates) that it can be detrimental to the private sector/wages and growth.

I am surprised that you don't spend more time talking about the Rahn curve? I think that the Rahn curve has some flaws but it at least seems to back up your Libertarian idea that lower taxes increases economic growth (though there is some debate about how accurate it is).

I wasn't bringing up the Laffer curve in terms of personal support. My point is just that I'm starting to think that the Republican base is just as politically and economically illiterate as the TMZ and E! crowd on the Left. Support or oppose, I don't think most of them even know what the Laffer curve is or have ever heard of it (or other economic concepts that illustrate the same point).

 

[wizards8507]

Agreed. As I mentioned above, the Trumpistas seem to be driven in large part by a Jacksonian fury against condescension from our cosmopolitan "global citizen" neo-liberal elites. And I'd say that's not only fair, but healthy. If you're not prepared to offer an irrational defense of your family and hometown at the drop of a dime, I don't want to know you.

Jonah Goldberg has been beating that drum for months at National Review. The mechanism by which Trump has positioned himself as a conservative is because there's been a false dichotomy created wherein a Republican is either Establishment or Conservative. Thus, by virtue of being anti-establishment, Trump *must* be a Conservative.

Think of it this way: There were Christians who were opposed to the Roman Empire and there were barbarian pagans opposed to the Roman Empire. One could, for strategic or conversational simplicity, refer to both groups as “anti-Roman” or even “anti-establishment” but that doesn’t mean the pagans should be confused for Christians or vice versa.

Trump No Conservative

 

[pkt77242]

I wasn't bringing up the Laffer curve in terms of personal support. My point is just that I'm starting to think that the Republican base is just as politically and economically illiterate as the TMZ and E! crowd on the Left. Support or oppose, I don't think most of them even know what the Laffer curve is or have ever heard of it (or other economic concepts that illustrate the same point).

About time you came around to that point. Both bases are that way and have been for a long time (and unfortunately they will most likely stay that way).

 

[pumpdog20]

.

 

[wizards8507]

About time you came around to that point. Both bases are that way and have been for a long time (and unfortunately they will most likely stay that way).

I think the thing that led me astray is that liberalism is so easy to sell. Their policy positions can all be state in two or three words. Republicans hate gays. Free college. Free healthcare. Tax the rich. Fair share. End the war. Equal pay. Abortion on demand.

Conservatism can't be sold to those who don't understand it. Free market capitalism is an elaborate beast that takes time and energy to understand. The underpinnings of liberty require an understanding of history and philosophy that can't be integrated into sitcoms or pop songs or thirty-second commercials. I just assumed that those who identified with Conservatism did so because they associated with those deeper ideas behind the philosophy, but it appears that their affiliation is just as knee-jerk as the low-information left.

 

[wizards8507]

Wither Conservatism in the Age of the Donald? | The American Spectator

Conservatives wonder how “liberal,” a word synonymous with freedom, morphed into a euphemism for soft statism. Puzzlement may soon hit regarding what their own label shares in common with William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and Barry Goldwater.

We live in a post-conservative age. Donald Trump’s popularity among people who call themselves conservative indicates this. Not knowing what they stand for anymore, conservatives flock to whoever most boldly insults liberals or becomes Satan to the Fourth Estate. The fault isn’t in the reality-TV star but in ourselves.

Trump famously labeled himself “pro-choice in every respect” in response to a Tim Russert query on partial-birth abortion and endorsed the idea of single payer, i.e., medical costs funded entirely by the government. “Everybody’s got to be covered,” he told 60 Minutes last year. “This is an un-Republican thing for me to say.” He added, “I’m gonna take care of everybody.” And “everybody” includes, he has indicated elsewhere, Planned Parenthood — just not for the abortions they perform. Certainly a billionaire businessman understands the fungibility of money. But Trump reasoned on CNN last summer, “We have to take care of women.”

Nobody who signed the Sharon Statement meant to sign up for the Nanny State and none who read The Conscience of a Conservative understood it to mean that good government treats citizens as dependents.

Surely a Who Moved My Cheese? quality colors conservative complaints over Trump. Like Napoleon Dynamite’s Uncle Rico, they pine to perpetually live in ’82. But the world spins on. Different issues animate our politics. Principles, however, should endure rather than evolve. Unfortunately, conservatives more fond of principles in rhetoric than in reality set the stage for a leader of conservatives who does not even pay those principles lip service. Always talking about shrinking government and fidelity to the Constitution yet rarely backing words with action, those who created a farce of conservatism don’t grasp their own irony when bellyaching over the man making a farce of conservatives.

A leader who speaks without restraint doubtfully sees the Constitution as a restraint. Whereas Reagan spoke the language of freedom, Trump’s lingua franca remains power. Big businessmen and big government generally make for familiar bedfellows. The favorite word of right-thinking statesmen remains “no.” One wonders if billionaire businessmen ever hear the word let alone appreciate it as the greatest the English language offers.

Voters made impotent by court decisions, executive orders, and bureaucratic whimsy all dismissing the will of the people understandably find such a figure appealing. Trump’s success in business, emperor-has-no-clothes contempt for political correctness, adept transformation of the political third rail of immigration into the catalyst for his campaign, and symbolic presence as a middle finger to a Republican establishment fond of holding up a middle finger to the party’s base combine to propel him to frontrunner status among people who fundamentally disagree not just with his stated positions but with the principles that underlie them. Ultimately, the spit-ball shooting pol represents a politics of catharsis for a justifiably frustrated electorate.

One looks without much satisfaction for Trump antecedents in the conservative tradition. “Populist,” a polite word for demagogue, comes more readily as a label. Issues definitely motivated the bimetallist monomaniac William Jennings Bryan and Huey Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement. But the issues took second stage to the dynamic personality in the spotlight. The difficulty of populists finding a clean fit on the Right or the Left speak to the primacy of the cult of personality that stirs up the masses. They tap into discontent well; they generally whiff when it comes to the hard work of implementing good policy.

Trump gives voice to a few good ideas. He recognizes that Americans increasingly feel as immigrants in their own country, articulating the majority position of tighter borders rarely articulated among the political class. He understands ISIS as an evil deserving a squashing but notes the folly of remaking their hotbeds through nation building.

One gleans that he arrived at these sound conclusions through common sense rather than by burying his nose in Russell Kirk, Albert Jay Nock, Stan Evans, or any other intellectuals on the Right. This isn’t a deal-breaker. He’s man of action rather than a man of letters, after all, as most good politicians tend to be. But he repeatedly betrays a lack of grounding in conservatism that raises suspicions of him, at least in a worst-case scenario, as a Trojan Horse solidifying Obamacare under a different label, nominating judges — like perhaps his sister — who champion those “New York values,” and raising taxes on all those terribly unpopular rich people.

He speaks in such broad terms, and without a voting record to clue us in, as to invite projection of a positive and negative sort. The Donald is nothing if not a human Rorschach test. And the reactions of Republican friends and foes suggest a similar impetus, desperation — to move on from Obama for the former or to hold on to power within the GOP for the latter — in their strong reactions to the candidate the polls say sits in the pole position.

Trump’s ascendency stands as a natural consequence of party leaders letting down party followers. A conservatism unable to conserve even itself may experience this as the ultimate defeat, a once-revered label that now taunts as a word divorced from its meaning.

But can you really blame Charlie Brown for rebuffing Lucy to kick a different football?

 

[woolybug25]

I think the thing that led me astray is that liberalism is so easy to sell. Their policy positions can all be state in two or three words. Republicans hate gays. Free college. Free healthcare. Tax the rich. Fair share. End the war. Equal pay. Abortion on demand.

Conservatism can't be sold to those who don't understand it. Free market capitalism is an elaborate beast that takes time and energy to understand. The underpinnings of liberty require an understanding of history and philosophy that can't be integrated into sitcoms or pop songs or thirty-second commercials. I just assumed that those who identified with Conservatism did so because they associated with those deeper ideas behind the philosophy, but it appears that their affiliation is just as knee-jerk as the low-information left.

It cracks me up how you honestly think that anybody that isn't a conservative, must not be smart enough to understand it.

Your argument can be spun the exact same way for conservatives, all in three words or less: No new taxes. Don't kill babies. Build a Wall. Christian Values.

All simple messages directed at the poor and uneducated. Just like the liberal one liners you posted. Both parties cater to the knee-jerk reactions of their base.

 

[wizards8507]

It cracks me up how you honestly think that anybody that isn't a conservative, must not be smart enough to understand it.

That's not what I said. My surprise is at how many dumb conservatives there are. In other words, I fully acknowledge that there are smart liberals and smart conservatives. I just assumed that most dumb people were also liberal. Call them E! viewers or low information voters or whatever you like.

(All thumbs are fingers, not all fingers are thumbs... All squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares.)

 

[EddytoNow]

Voters, both liberal and conservative, aren't necessarily dumb. They just aren't interested enough to take the time to be informed. The poor and the working class are working one and sometimes two jobs, taking their kids to dance lessons, sport practices, etc., doing their own routine household chores, and following their favorite athletic teams , entertainers, etc. They are not digging deeper into politics to find out if they are being told the truth. That's why Trump, Cruz, and the others can get away with repeating sound bites rather than specifics. Most people lead lives that are too busy to allow them to find out what Trump and Cruz are really all about. That's also why the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, remain so popular with liberals. Neither Clinton was a liberal. They were moderates who sold out liberal causes repeatedly. If the mases do watch a news program, they watch one that reinforces what they want to be true, not necessarily what is true. Viewer ratings for informative news programs are pathetically low. The general attitude of the majority of voters is "Don't bother me with the facts."

But if you repeat something enough, the masses start to believe it to be true. The educated voter makes up a very small percentage of the public. The rest aren't stupid. They just don't want to be bothered with the details. They choose to spend what little leisure time they have doing things they enjoy, and listening to a bunch of lying, thieving politicians isn't one of them. Trump and Sanders are benefiting from the distrust by portraying themselves as something different. They aren't really any different, but the majority of voters won't delve deeper to find that out.

 

[phork]

Still can't believe that you guys are going to elect Donald Trump.

 

[wizards8507]

Voters, both liberal and conservative, aren't necessarily dumb. They just aren't interested enough to take the time to be informed.

Understood. I was using "smart" and "dumb" a bit flippantly to make a quick point. Lumped in the "dumb" category was any combination of unintelligent, disinterested, preoccupied, uneducated, or lazy.

 

[ND NYC]

when 40% of people in the USA think Judge Judy is a Supreme Court Justice we have problems so big that no party can or will ever solve them.

 

[GowerND11]

Too many of the voters rely on emotion to dictate what they want instead of logic. Trump knows this and has used it to build his base.

 

[connor_in]

I am pretty sure that Trump is taking the place of what in previous years was call the "none of the above" group which has members in both of the big two parties

 

[DomeX2 eNVy]

So now the RNC has booted the National Review from being a media sponsor for their February debate because of their anti-Trump manifesto. This adds them to the NBC networks for 'not being fair to their candidates' in being banned.
I wish the Republicans were as concerned about protecting the First amendment as they are the Second. Since when did conservative values include 'state run media only'. Viva Fox!!!! - and their Australian overlord. (wait, can I say Viva without getting in trouble?) Long Live Fox and the Queen!!!

 

[wizards8507]

So now the RNC has booted the National Review from being a media sponsor for their February debate because of their anti-Trump manifesto.

Wow, that says something about how much the RNC hates Ted Cruz. Donald Trump is now the establishment candidate.