Hillary is not making it easy

PA Ram wrote:

If she picks a Tim Kaine or Tom Vilsack for VP, it would be a big FU to all the progressives. It makes no sense in a year of populist anti-establishment sentiment to pick the bankers best friend.

The only explanation is that it sends a message to the people who really matter to her. All the rest is show. It would be a huge mistake and I don’t think she realizes how huge. People are fed up and the fear of Trump will only get you so far.

She just can’t change who she is if she does this. She hasn’t done it yet but signs are pointing that way. I hope she considers the choice very carefully. Try to win, don’t wait for your opponent to lose. That’s risky strategy. It’s dumb.

Well said, PA.

The are hopelessly stuck with their MOR ethos. The GOP wins elections by appealing to their base (instincts), and they couldn’t care less what the Dems think. The Dems seem to believe they must also try to appeal to the center and the GOP. Thus making pretty much everyone upset in the process.

They need to go big, bold, left-populist, or go home.

bnw wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

The Dems seem to believe they must also try to appeal to the center and the GOP.

On what planet?

That’s all they ever do, bnw. Again, the Dems are the true “conservative” party, not the GOP. The GOP is the far-right party, and there’s nothing “conservative” about them in the slightest.

Since I became politically aware in the 1970s, I’ve seen the Dems bend over backward to compromise with the GOP, with this escalating dramatically from Reagan on. With Bill Clinton in the White House, the move was basically completed. The Dems took the center-right over entirely from the GOP, which vacated that portion of the political spectrum to move further right. Obama sustained this and expanded it, offering up a host of conservative policies to placate the GOP, while being rejected as no longer far-right enough.

I listed them before:

Obama kept Bush’s defense secretary and rehired his Fed chairman

Obama kept Bush’s TARP and TALF programs going, supported and expanded his wars, ratcheted up the GWOT, added new fronts

Obama offered Boehner deep cuts to Social Security and Medicare — Bill Clinton came close to privatizing it with Gingrich, btw, but the Lewinsky scandal intruded.

Obama and the Dems crafted the ACA from the Heritage Foundation and Romneycare plans, with the strong support of Corporate America. It was a “market-based solution” plan to a problem created by for-profit markets. And it included 150 GOP amendments.

Obama held a summit on the deficit in the middle of a recession, which no previous Republican president would have even considered. Obama froze pay and hiring in the public sector, and we saw the loss of hundreds of thousands of government jobs. Reagan, Bush Sr and Dubya all hired more than a million new public sector employees to fight recessions on their watches.

Obama was the first American president to oversee reduced government spending in the midst of a recession. Spending rose at its lowest levels since Ike on his watch.

No prosecution of Wall Street crooks after the crash.

Obama’s stimulus was 1/3rd tax cuts, a major GOP concession. He reupped Bush’s “temporary” tax cuts twice and made them permanent.

For starters.

bnw wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Obama was the first American president to oversee reduced government spending in the midst of a recession. Spending rose at its lowest levels since Ike on his watch.

Yet the federal debt DOUBLED under Obama.

BTW not prosecuting the Wall street crowd isn’t throwing a bone to republicans. It is Obama returning the favor of all that Wall Street money that was part of his over $1 billion campaign war chest.

Yes, it is. Traditional, rock-ribbed Republican conservatism has always been deeply pro-Wall Street, going back more than a century. Yes, Obama returned the favor of a ton of cash to Wall Street, which makes my point for me. He’s governed as a true conservative.

Btw, the current national debt is roughly 19.3 trillion. Obama inherited over 11 trillion from Bush. So he hasn’t quite doubled it. Obama also inherited the largest single budgetary deficit in history from Bush — the 2009 fiscal year deficit of 1.4 trillion. This should be counted against Bush, not Obama, which would bring Bush’s debt total to roughly 12 trillion. Bush left office after doubling the debt, even though he inherited the largest single surplus in American history and no wars.

BT and bnw…I took out a coupla posts that had personal barbs and flames. I figured I had posted warnings on that enough so this time I shot first. I know politics is volatile by nature but still. Other boards won’t even allow political discussion. We’re kind of an experiment to make it work. You don’t have to be forced fake civil but there are still a lot of degrees between that and openly shooting personal barbs.

My own feeling is that emotionally deeply held assumptions and a priori beliefs are behind a lot of political views, so that a lot of time, forcing the issue on this or that “fact” doesn’t touch the real thing propelling the discussion. Given that, it really does nothing but antagonize sometimes to demand answers to questions or challenges. If it were about reason it wouldn’t be human politics.

Yours sincerely, Deep Thinker Man