2004 Elections: Democratic Party Contenders

For those willing to response..................
From the beginning of this thread to the present, what do you view as the biggest surprise (Dean??)? What do you consider to be the biggest non-surprise ; anotherwords, something most folks expected.

0 Replies

the biggest 'non-surprise' is the idealists vs. the pragmatists;

the biggest 'surprise' is the continued hold on the country Shrub continues to have...and, yes, the ascendancy of Dean.

0 Replies

Two Big Surprises:

The maxs link: The media/NY/CA/intelligensia has deemed the Dem crop as unelectable, and are trying to draft Tom Brokaw.

Sharpton has seemed a more in-tuned candidate than many of the others.

0 Replies

For me the biggest surprise is that the DNC seems to have lost all control of the party. They seem to be standing by watching the flames and handing out marshmallows, when they should be stoking the fire and controlling the burn. In the end this may be better news for Democrat voters who want a chance to vote for someone who really thinks as they do, but it seals any chance the party had at taking back the White House in 2004.

They need a liberal who talks like a conservative to win. Lieberman is all they have, and they have made no effort to push him to the front of the pack. (Of course, it is still early enough for them to wake up and correct this error.)

0 Replies

Scrat
It is 16 months before the election!! The Democrats have yet to select a candidate and Bush with his lies and deceit is well on his way towards political suicide and may I add infamy.
He who laughs last-------.

0 Replies

sept 1. 1989 and then Bill Clinton went on to serve 2 terms as Democratic President:

Quote:

The Democratic Party's 1988 presidential defeat demonstrated that the party's problems would not disappear, as many had hoped, once Ronald Reagan left the White House. Without a charismatic president to blame for their ills, Democrats must now come face to face with reality: too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security.

Nor have matters improved for Democrats since the presidential election. On a variety of measures, from party identification to confidence in dealing with the economy and national security, the Democratic Party has experienced a dramatic loss of confidence among voters. A recent survey shows that only 57 percent of Democrats have a favorable image of their own party.

Democrats have ignored their fundamental problems. Instead of facing reality they have embraced the politics of evasion. They have focused on fundraising and technology, media and momentum, personality and tactics. Worse, they have manufactured excuses for their presidential disasters -- excuses built on faulty data and false assumptions, excuses designed to avoid tough questions. In place of reality they have offered wishful thinking; in place of analysis, myth.

This systematic denial of reality -- the politics of evasion -- continues unabated today, years after the collapse of the liberal majority and the New Deal alignment. Its central purpose is the avoidance of meaningful change. It reflects the convictions of groups who believed that it is somehow immoral for a political party to pay attention to public opinion. It reflects the interests of those who would rather be the majority in a minority party than risk being the minority in a majority party.

0 Replies

The Sky is falling ! ! ! The Sky is falling ! ! !

-- C. Little

heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee . . .

sometimes i just can't help myself . . .

0 Replies

WHEE!! Here's some good news AND a surprise, I think -- and I quote from the latest email from Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org:

Dear MoveOn member,

This isn't an email asking you to sign a petition or give money.

It's simply a celebration of a victory.

75 television executives from network affiliates descended on Capitol Hill yesterday to prevent the House appropriations committee from voting for a partial rollback of the FCC rule changes.

Because of you and thousands of others, Congress did something
unprecedented yesterday. Republican committee member Frank Wolf urged his colleagues to vote their conscience, and stand up to the lobbyists. And they did just that, delivering a 40-25 vote against big media.

Conservative columnist William Safire wrote in today's New York Times: "Here is what made this happen: Take the force of right-wingers upholding community standards who are determined to defend local control of the public airwaves; combine that with the force of lefties eager to maintain diversity of opinion in local media; add in the independent voters' mistrust of media manipulation; then let all thesepeople have access to their representatives by e-mail and fax, and voilà! Congress awakens to slap down the power grab."...

The rollback still has a long way to go, but this is another big step
in our march to reverse the FCC and create a more diverse, independent and skeptical media.

0 Replies

Safire the force of lefties eager to maintain diversity of opinion
well said Mr Safire and I may note that the common barb from the republicans is that those democrats cant seem to get on the same page, well yeah and here's the reason why, its called DIVERSITY OF OPINION, all in all a good american tradition. I wish the republicans understood that. But I may be wrong.

0 Replies

au1929 wrote:

Scrat
It is 16 months before the election!! The Democrats have yet to select a candidate and Bush with his lies and deceit is well on his way towards political suicide and may I add infamy.
He who laughs last-------.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything I've written, but okay. Confused

0 Replies

Scrat wrote:

In the end this may be better news for Democrat voters who want a chance to vote for someone who really thinks as they do, but it seals any chance the party had at taking back the White House in 2004.

er um, Scrat: do you think it might have something to do with the above?

0 Replies

Scrat wrote:

au1929 wrote:
Scrat
It is 16 months before the election!! The Democrats have yet to select a candidate and Bush with his lies and deceit is well on his way towards political suicide and may I add infamy.
He who laughs last-------.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything I've written, but okay.

What it has to do with is, in the post immediately preceding, you were saying this:

Scrat wrote:

For me the biggest surprise is that the DNC seems to have lost all control of the party. They seem to be standing by watching the flames and handing out marshmallows, when they should be stoking the fire and controlling the burn. In the end this may be better news for Democrat voters who want a chance to vote for someone who really thinks as they do, but it seals any chance the party had at taking back the White House in 2004.
They need a liberal who talks like a conservative to win. Lieberman is all they have, and they have made no effort to push him to the front of the pack. (Of course, it is still early enough for them to wake up and correct this error.)

That sounds very much to me as if you were saying the Democrats ship was sinking, and Au was just saying it was too early to say that.

0 Replies

snood wrote:

Scrat wrote:
au1929 wrote:
Scrat
It is 16 months before the election!! The Democrats have yet to select a candidate and Bush with his lies and deceit is well on his way towards political suicide and may I add infamy.
He who laughs last-------.

I'm not sure what this has to do with anything I've written, but okay.

What it has to do with is, in the post immediately preceding, you were saying this:

Scrat wrote:
For me the biggest surprise is that the DNC seems to have lost all control of the party. They seem to be standing by watching the flames and handing out marshmallows, when they should be stoking the fire and controlling the burn. In the end this may be better news for Democrat voters who want a chance to vote for someone who really thinks as they do, but it seals any chance the party had at taking back the White House in 2004.
They need a liberal who talks like a conservative to win. Lieberman is all they have, and they have made no effort to push him to the front of the pack. (Of course, it is still early enough for them to wake up and correct this error.)

That sounds very much to me as if you were saying the Democrats ship was sinking, and Au was just saying it was too early to say that.

Well that's fine, but (A) I was clearly expressing an opinion in response to a specific question and (B) I clearly wrote "Of course, it is still early enough for them to wake up and correct this error", so I focused on his irrational ranting about Bush rather than his decision to restate something I'd already written (while strangely choosing to express it as disagreement).

For the record, I was writing that I think the Dems' ship is sinking, but I also acknowledged that they can still do something about it. If my boat is sinking and I bail and plug the hole, that doesn't mean it was never in danger of sinking.)

0 Replies

are you bailing yet or still measuring the size of the leak?

0 Replies

I'm remembering a very wise friend who once said, firmly, "Don't futurize." He was right. Trying at this point to discern how the Dems will fare is pretty useless. Don't forget that we have, on one side, a single candidate who at the moment is being gored but who has plenty of $$$, and on the other an indeterminate cast of nine among whom one, who had been dismissed out of hand, is now at or very close to the front of the pack. We have, on the one hand, Republicans who proclaim themselves to be "troubled," and on the other a revitalized left forming coalitions, insisting on discussing issues, and raising surprising amounts of $$$. I wouldn't want to be a "pundit" at this point, much less a Republican standing back and thinking, "What th'......" Futurizing is boring, but dissecting the issues as they arise out of the campaign, such as it is, makes a whole lot of sense to me.

0 Replies

From where I sit, I am a little more optimistic about the Dem's chances than I was two months ago. Shrubleyah doesn't look quite as invulnerable for the moment.

0 Replies

snood wrote:

From where I sit, I am a little more optimistic about the Dem's chances than I was two months ago. Shrubleyah doesn't look quite as invulnerable for the moment.

I have to say that yours seems to be a reasonable optimism given the traction anti-Bush forces have gotten with this Iraq/Niger/Nuclear issue. I certainly agree that Bush is more vulnerable now than just a month ago. How well this Niger intelligence question is resolved (or how well those forces do in keeping it from being resolved) may well make the difference in 2004. The media and shrill demagogues among the left are certainly doing their best to make a tempest in this teapot. I suspect it will blow over--if not up in their faces--very soon, but a lot depends on the willingness of John Q. Public to pay attention and really understand what is going on.

0 Replies

Commentators this evening opine that Blair's speech was a humdinger for Bush and that Bush will "owe him big time." I wonder how many people listen to the speech, how many simply get a gloss from Fox and CNN and then scratch their heads and ask, "Who's that Blair?"

0 Replies

Scrat

Quote:

I suspect it will blow over--if not up in their faces--very soon, but a lot depends on the willingness of John Q. Public to pay attention and really understand what is going on

.

You are right when you talk about John Q. Public waking up. However when they do it will be to understand the damage the lying sleaze bag in the White House has done and drop him like a hot potato.
Now do you have any question what I am responding to. You seem to be having some problem in that area.

0 Replies

Scrat wrote:

The media and shrill demagogues among the left are certainly doing their best to make a tempest in this teapot. I suspect it will blow over--if not up in their faces--very soon, but a lot depends on the willingness of John Q. Public to pay attention and really understand what is going on.

but OF COURSE!

how silly of me, here we are 4 years hence from $70 million tax dollars spent on stalking the mighty arkansas clenis, and only now, with it clear that the busheviks cooked the books on US intelligence reports, and lied about the facts on going to war, a war costing the US an estimated $100 BILLION that we have "media and shrill demagogues" creating a tempest in a tea pot.

bush carries his "bidnessman" attitude and culture right to the oval office. unfortunately, his style resembles most likely that of a used car salesman, or that joe isuzu character from bygone years.

BTW what is really going on is that the US economy is in the tubes, with relief nowhere insight (and greenspan channeling the ghost of hoover with his "prosperity is just around the corner" crap) and half a trillion dollar yearly deficits expected for the next decade. what the bush economic policies (or lack thereof) has done to the long term health of this nation IS treasonous. bush is a bus driver, besotten and drunk at the wheel and about to crash the bus with us in it.

0 Replies

2004 Elections: Democratic Party Contenders

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know