entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

So who are you going to vote for now, Uncle Ron?

My read on the whole thing is that the Republicans think they can run best against the Senator from New York, and everything they do should be understood in that context.

From:

Dunno. Leaning towards Edwards, but it might end up being Jeff Vogel again.

Hillary might well give the GOP a boost, but they're still running a bunch of minor leaguers. No matter how polarizing she is, though, she's definitely a pro at campaigning and she won't get caught coasting like Gore or Kerry.

From:

I hate to say it, but I suspect that Edwards is the only one of the bunch on the Democratic side who is electable without reference to a particular Republican opponent. That's ignoring Al Gore, of course; the various disembodied voices on Air America Radio seem to think he could waltz in tomorrow and clinch the nomination without much trouble.

I'm not sure how to handicap the various Republicans; it's not so much that I don't see a successful candidate there, but rather that I don't see a successor to Karl Rove.

From:

The average Democrat's obsession with Gore is ridiculous, much like the average Republican's obsession with Fred Thompson.

I wonder if GHWB's single term happened because he didn't have a Lee Atwater or a Karl Rove to crush Perot.

From:

I don't know about the average Democrat, but I suspect that a lot of Gore's standing comes from the fact that many diehards think he won the election in 2000, and wouldn't have had the Presidency stolen from him if he'd been more charismatic; now that he's evidently gotten that one little problem fixed, he's a shoo-in.

I don't know what to tell you about Fred Thompson. Perhaps he benefits from the perception that everyone who has been in power recently is dirty. Oh, and that whole being on television thing.

The Elder Bush suffered from the fact that the Atwater/Rove of his second campaign was working for Clinton.

From:

Ha, no way. Who was that? Carville?

From:

The same. I think by that time Atwater was dead and Rove was still working school board campaigns in West Texas, or whatever.

Wonder what he's up to now. Last time I heard him he was handicapping football games on Imus In The Morning.

From:

sunburn.livejournal.com

Fred Thompson benefits from not having, at current, any constituents and therefore can say what he wants about terrorists, democrats (note the comma!), and anyone else who might take offense. He really ought to whip up a book right now, so at least he can do what Colin Powell did back in 2000.

IIRC, he took Gore's Senate seat when that man did his stint next to Clinton, and Tennesseeans haven't exactly been enamored with Dems since Gore left-- probably his seniority is what kept him in.

You're right, he doesn't have the stink of government corruption about him (except in Die Hard 2 and No Way Out).

I think he ought to be VP, preferrably to someone who believes in evolution. He's got Attack Dog written all over him, the traditional role of a campaigning VP. He could eat Carville for breakfast, and he'd spit out the bones on national TV, just like he does every Friday night.

From:

also-huey.livejournal.com

I don't think I'd burn Obama to the ground for making that remark. Bush has effectively destroyed our military capability, and the short-term fix for that would actually be to add 100,000 troops or so.

Thing is, you couldn't actually commit those to "stay on the offense" against anything we're currently doing, or we'd be back in the same boat. The reason we're militarily screwed right now is because we have no effective reserve fighting force. Creating one, and then committing it? Results in "what we have now, only more of it".

From:

Bingo.

From:

divisadero.livejournal.com

Is it too much to ask Democrats to be, er, actual Democrats?

From:

racerxmachina.livejournal.com

That may be tricky, given that Democratic party philosophy has drifted bigtime over the last 15 years. Define Democrat to everyone's satisfaction and I'm sure you'll find a few milling about Congress.

From:

covertmusic.livejournal.com

Okay, I'm kibitzing from the old side of the Atlantic, but I can think of one - Bernie Sanders - and he's not even a member of the Democrats :)

From:

divisadero.livejournal.com

Yeah, yeah, pluralism and what not. Part of the problem with that shift is that it seems to have been from liberal political priciples to electable political principles, which are much more amorphous. I don't really know what the DNC currently stands for other than its own organizational survival and a general rejection of the GOP. Why not harken back to a time when Democrats had substantive (liberal even!) political convictions?

(Disclaimer: the "old" DNC may be a figment of the author's imagination.)

From:

also-huey.livejournal.com

I think that, at some point in the last six years (I dunno, but I'm guessing it was somewhere around 12 September 2001) all of the Democrats became Republicans, and most of the Republicans became insane.

From:

s/liberal/conservative/g;s/Democrat/Republican/g;s/DNC/###/g;s/GOP/DNC/g;s/###/GOP/g

It's time to pave Washington DC and start over.

From:

dr-strych9.livejournal.com

I am so with you on the "U.S. Out Of California" thing. I saw we turn the Sierra into a moat with tank traps and Russian anti-aircraft installations and petition for membership in the E.U. We'll seriously have to get our deficit under control before they'll take us, but that doesn't have to be too hard.

From:

arian1.livejournal.com

Whiner.

From:

Could you expand on that?

From:

eagle

I'm voting for Edwards. He seems like a quiet, competent, center-right (which is as leftist as US politics actually gets and still lets someone be electable) politician. He says the right things on Iraq. I wish he weren't religious, but that will help him get elected and it's not a major flaw.

He seems steady and reliable, and that's a major feature. I do not trust this surge in Obama's popularity. He's too much of a rock star, and his speeches demonstrate a lack of understanding of what can really be accomplished as opposed to what you dream about. I think he'd make a fine VP, and after four or eight years as VP may well make a good president.

I'll vote for Clinton in the general election, since despite really disliking her personally, her voting record is solidly center-right (aka as liberal as one can expect) and don't think she'll do anything idiotic when it comes to actual policy. But I'd rather vote for Edwards.

The Democrats are benefiting tremendously from the fact that the Republican nominees look like a slapstick troupe.

From:

It's going to take a lot out of Hillary to earn my vote.

From:

Can I ask why you refer to Clinton by her first name, but not to the other candidates by their first names?

From:

Peer pressure, probably. "Clinton" just sounds like Bill, even though a simple logic check would reveal that he can't run for president again.

From:

I think she's campaigning as "Hillary" rather than (scary 3-word feminist sounding) "Hillary Rodham Clinton" or "Hillary Clinton." But Ferarro didn't run as "Geraldine," and it seems to me that the conservative commentators use her first name in a deliberately condescending way.

Oh, and WSJ opinion page also had a hilarious piece about how Ségolène Royal had no chance in hell to win the election primarily because she's a too-feminist "unmarried mother of four." The unattributed piece ignored the fact that she and her partner have been together for years and have registered as a civil partnership (a sort of non-marriage tax option for French couples).

Not to flog the WSJ. I came across a copy at a coffee shop this morning and I love to read the opinion page whenever I can.

From:

The unattributed WSJ editorials are tinfoil-grade crazy.

From:

Edwards and Biden seem to be the only ones with the sole, remotely plausible solution for Iraq: divisa-ing it back into tres partes est. Biden was the first to put that out on the table, but he's not as electable as Edwards.

From:

Supposedly, the reason "we" don't want to do this is because it'll piss off our friends the Turks. The way i see it, giving the Kurds a country would get a lot of them to move out of Turkey, thus reducing their problem, so what are they going to get mad about?

From: