Election Day Thread

To answer your previous question to me I, sadly, think it will be a very long time before we have a black president. Or a woman president, for that matter.

I think this is bad because variety is a good thing to have. Regardless of economic background, a black man or a black or white woman will have had a completely different different experience growing up and, thus, different worldview in some/many respects. I think missing out on any of this alternative, regardless of race (we can't leave out hispanics, either) and regardless of sex is unfortunate and, ultimately, holds us back as a nation.

It also continues the racist and sexist glass ceiling in the majority of American politics and business.

 

You could be right, but we'll have to see what happens over the next few years. Obama could, and I say could, end up being at the right place, at the right time in '08. Whether that happens depends as much on what Bush, and his Party, does between now and then, as much as anything else.



Keep D&D Civil!!

 

You really think the Clinton machine will let that happen?

 

What Clinton machine?




Keep D&D Civil!!

 

http://www.lnreview.co.uk/news/004550.php

George Bush? Again? May the saints and angels preserve us.
November 03, 2004

Oh America, what have you done?
You've put him back in.

Probably.

Depending upon which way the Ohio recount goes. And anyway, whatever the final tally in Ohio, the 2004 election result means one thing for certain: great swathes of America are as DUMB AS ****. Too dumb to live, let alone vote.

You stupid, good-for-nothing, hick ****s, sitting there in your stretchy trousers, wrapped in your stars and stripes, clutching at each others fat hands and singing God Bless America while your blessed commander-in-****ing-chief sells the world for a quick buck. You whooping twits, sucking up the lies like mother's milk. You stupid stupid ****s. You deserve to die. Choke on your fat-burgers you cretinous losers. **** you all. Sorry - **** y'all. Do you understand that? You cow-brained pricks.

Are you really so violently thick that you cant get beyond thinking: "Yup, we's at war, and the President he's a good man and he's gonna whip those commie Arabs" --- oh whatever --- Christ, there's no point in trying to peer into your minds, you sack of **** morons. Might as well poke a beached jellyfish with a stick.

It is almost impossible, for an outsider, or in fact anyone who isn¡¦t educationally subnormal, to imagine what it must be like to be a Bush voter. Amanda McLoughlin, a London News Review contributor, was in the States to see the madness unfold:

I'm in the unfortunate position of being on the West Coast and watching the horrific results as they come in. Who the hell are these bastards who vote for Bush? I don't understand it at all.
So, thanks to you stupid bastards, the world has to suffer another four years of Bush. How many more wars will that mean? How many pipelines? How much **** do we have to swallow?

To heck in handcart, that's where we're heading.
To heck in a big fat, red-white-and-blue, star-spangled handcart.

God bless America.


Note: the Ohio recount is being overseen by the state's two Republican Senators, Mike DeWine and George Voinovich, who issued a joint statement last night, saying: "Sen. Kerry should concede defeat and spare the country the turmoil of another drawn-out election.¡¨ Well ¡V at least they¡¦re not actually related to George Bush). And what exactly does a recount involve? Asking the computer if it got it right...?

 

just to clarify -- those arent my views above. just posting an article i read on the net

 

German Newspaper Headline:

'Oops - They Did It Again'


(posted this in another thread, but thought my broadband crashed before it posted..oh well...)

 

didn't mean to put my two-cents in the reply:

I am deeply saddend in the direction this country took in electing a president who is a pubic-hair's width less conservative than Barry Goldwater...I absolutely loathe Bush and the principles he stands for and I'm a PROUD Texas liberal..

But you know what? I would GLADLY stomp this author's guts-out for being an inflammatory prick and stuff his tea and crumpets up his limp, white Limey a$$.

That article was filth, I think I need to take a shower after reading it...

 

Nice post, wouldabeen23.

 

Yeah I am about as Anti Bush as can be...but this guy is over the line. Some of the people who voted for Bush are ignoramuses, and voted for stupid reasons...but that is true of some Kerry supporters too.

And where does he get off judging us...its not like Tony Blair is a bastion of liberal enlightened thought...hell he and GWB are always holding hands and skipping off into the sunset.

Just more Eurotrash, our country is older so we are better thinking.

 

Uh, this Clinton machine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/04/nyregion/04hillary.html

For the Moment, Mrs. Clinton Looks Like the Candidate to Beat

By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

Published: November 4, 2004


ASHINGTON, Nov. 3 - The defeat of John Kerry has left Hillary Rodham Clinton as one of the most powerful elected officials in the national Democratic Party - as well as the top prospect for the presidential nomination in 2008, according to party officials and strategists.

Many Democrats have been saying for months that a Kerry victory on Tuesday would have forced Mrs. Clinton to put off any plans she had to run for president in 2008 because Mr. Kerry would, as the incumbent, be in a strong position to win the party's nomination for a second term.


But now, even this soon after Mr. Kerry's loss, many Democrats in and out of Washington are mentioning Mrs. Clinton, the junior senator from New York, as the leading contender for the party's nomination in 2008, citing her immense popularity among Democrats, her fund-raising prowess and her formidable political operation, which was employed, unsuccessfully, in the Kerry presidential bid.

"Hillary now becomes a natural rallying point for the party," said Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant in New York. "Hillary has a national constituency, a top-tier political organization and shrewd political skills."

"The party will be looking to her," said Chris Lehane, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry early in his campaign. "Hillary is uniquely positioned."

But that said, Democratic officials cautioned that it would be unwise to count out the bench of potential Democratic stars, including Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa and, of course, John Edwards, Mr. Kerry's running mate.

More than that, Mrs. Clinton's advisers privately maintained on Wednesday that she has a far bigger hurdle to surmount before she can seriously contemplate any presidential candidacy: her own re-election back home in New York in 2006. Her aides and other strategists argue that she must win her re-election decisively - not merely eke out a victory - because it would be futile for her to begin a national campaign with a shaky base of support back home.

"She knows that she has to keep her eye on the ball, and the ball is 2006," said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton who spoke on condition of anonymity. "She's methodical and meticulous, and so she is going to focus on what's in front of her right now."

As things stand, Mrs. Clinton has done a notable job enhancing her popularity among New Yorkers in the last four years, with 61 percent supporting her in September, compared with 38 percent in February 2001, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll.

But at the same time, Mrs. Clinton and her advisers have had to contend with a stark fact of life for her: there are large numbers of voters who simply do not like her, no matter what she does.

Roughly one of three New York voters surveyed have told pollsters for Quinnipiac University that they have an unfavorable opinion of her. (This core of seemingly implacable critics is a major reason that some of her advisers had serious doubts about her presidential prospects this year.)

Mrs. Clinton's unfavorable ratings make her an enticing target for Republicans, who can count on the so-called Hillary haters to give momentum to any campaign they decide to mount against her. Indeed, some Democrats believe that one big-name Republican giving serious thought to challenging her in 2006 is Gov. George E. Pataki, a three-term incumbent who has made inroads among Democratic voters and who is up for re-election that year.

In discussing her viability as a candidate for national office, Mrs. Clinton's advisers note that over the last four years she has been able to turn so-called undecided voters into admirers. The number of people who have told Quinnipiac pollsters, for example, that they are undecided about her has dropped - to 7 percent in September from 33 percent in February 2001 - even as her approval numbers have climbed.

"Look, there's a core of people who are not going to vote for her, no matter what she does," said the Clinton adviser who asked not to be identified. "But in the last few years she has done a remarkable job of winning over swing voters."

Mrs. Clinton may face another obstacle if she decides to seek her party's nomination: The last thing the Democrats may be looking for right now is a politically polarizing Northeastern senator who is regarded as a liberal in many political quarters.

But her aides point out that since arriving in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton has staked out moderate-to-conservative positions on a host of issues, from welfare to the war in Iraq, much to the chagrin of her liberal supporters and the satisfaction of some Republicans.

Democrats say that the role Mrs. Clinton plays in national politics will hinge in large part on what President Bush does over the next four years. As perhaps the best-known Democrat in the Senate, she is naturally poised to become a spokeswoman for the party under a Republican administration that is expected to deal with a host of politically charged issues, like any Bush nominations to the Supreme Court.

"Hillary Clinton is the one who the party, the press and the public will look to to engage and respond to the Bush administration," said Mr. Lehane, the Democratic strategist.

But Mr. Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, says he thinks that the Democratic Party, in seeking to rebuild itself in the next few years, should also be looking outside Washington for its new generation of leaders.

"The power center of the party has to be shared," he said. "It can't be just Congressional Democrats or Senate Democrats. It has to include Democratic governors who are being elected in non-Democratic strongholds like the West and the South."

Finally, Democrats say that a danger for Mrs. Clinton is that if she is seen as the top contender at this point, her Democratic rivals have nearly four years to try to undercut her.

But it is not just Democrats who will look to undermine her if she widely perceived as a leading presidential contender, political analysts say. It is also Republicans, particularly those in New York, who are certainly going to argue during her re-election campaign in 2006 that she is simply using the state as a launching pad for her national ambitions.

"If she runs for re-election in New York, that will bring the inevitable question of whether she will serve out her full term in the Senate," said one person who is close to the Clintons.

 

This is only after Bill CLinton and Tony broke it off...

 

Man, there is some UNBELIEVABLE stuff being posted over at the DemocraticUnderground forums. They are all focused on fraud and Diebold. One poster even thinks that Kerry conceded because of a Skull & Bones pledge. Hilarious. The DeanforAmerica forums are a great place to read outrage and fury as well. Amidst the madness, I did find this little nugget. Batman Jones, I'm not taunting you at all, but I would like to hear your opinion about this:

Everytime you HATE on Bush you hate on the 60 million americans who voted for him.

its time to grow up and change this party so that next election we will have more to show for ourselves than t-shirts, bumperstickers, and countless hours of internet hate speech.

We need to outsmart the GOP by reaching for the pocket books of those 60 million americans. we aren't going to win anything by mocking their religiousness.

if you think you're so much better than a hard working mill worker in alabama, maybe its YOU THAT BELONGS IN THE GOP!

 

Believe it or not Dems it's a really good thing that Bush won the election --- he needs to deal with the situations his administration has created at home and around the world. If they turn out for the best then more power to him ---personally I don't feel they will and Kerry could have been in for a nightmare.

What I really wanted to post though is I really just want a president EVERYONE can get behind (ie) McCain, Powell, Biden, Obama, Cohen (we really need to get back together).

 

No wonder Kerry had so many problems. His campaign was a shipwreck. I wonder if Carville is still crying:

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041104/nyth186_1.html

EWSWEEK ELECTION ISSUE: 'How He Did It'
Thursday November 4, 2:37 pm ET

Kerry Laments: 'I Can't Believe I'm Losing to This Idiot'

Carville Leads Clintonistas' Coups, Implores Cahill to Step Aside or He'll 'Tell The Truth' About Campaign Woes On NBC's 'Meet The Press'

Daughter Alexandra Pleads to Kerry After Locking in Nomination: 'Will You Please Appreciate This Moment for 10 Seconds?'

NEW YORK, Nov. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- When President Bush's poll numbers surged in April after a press conference where his performance was derided by the press and the chattering classes, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry was baffled, writes Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas in an exclusive report in Newsweek's special election issue. "He said with a sigh to one top staffer, 'I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot.'"
(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20041104/NYTH186 )

The November 15 issue "How He Did It" (on newsstands Thursday, November 4) includes an exclusive behind-the-scenes account of the entire presidential campaign reported by a separate Newsweek Special Project team that worked for more than a year on the extraordinary campaign. Highlights from the report:

The Clintonista "Coups." At several critical junctures Kerry's campaign (and the candidate himself), struggled to find sure footing. Following the missteps of August, Clinton veteran James Carville confronted Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill, telling her she had to step aside and let newly arrived Joe Lockhart run the campaign. So worked up, Carville began to cry, imploring Cahill: "You've got to let him do it." Carville continued, "Nobody can gain power without someone losing power." Carville threatened to go on "Meet the Press" the next day "and tell the truth about how bad it is" if Cahill didn't give effective control to Lockhart.

The "Outlandish" McCain Offer. Kerry's courtship of Senator John McCain to be his running mate was longer-standing and more intense than previously reported. As far back as August 2003, Kerry had taken McCain to breakfast to sound him out to run on a unity ticket. McCain batted away the idea as not serious, but Kerry, after he wrapped up the nomination in March, went back after McCain a half-dozen more times. "To show just how sincere he was, he made an outlandish offer," Newsweek's Thomas reports. "If McCain said yes he would expand the role of vice president to include secretary of Defense and the overall control of foreign policy. McCain exclaimed, 'You're out of your mind. I don't even know if it's constitutional, and it certainly wouldn't sell.'" Kerry was thwarted and furious. "Why the f--- didn't he take it? After what the Bush people did to him...'"

"A Marathon Man." Kerry's intensity on the trail rarely, if ever, faded. Moments after delivering his victory speech after wrapping up his party's nomination on March 2, Kerry was back in his motorcade and on his cell phone. "Dad," asked his daughter Alexandra. "Will you please appreciate this moment for 10 seconds?" Newsweek reports, "He mumbled yes, yes, he was happy, it was good, and then went back to working the cell phone." It occurred to his daughter Vanessa that her father did not match the media's clichi of him being a fourth-quarter player, he was a marathon man. Writes Thomas, "Kerry liked to say that 'every day is extra' after Vietnam, but actually every day was like the day before, a relentless march toward his goal."

Kerry's drive to self-perfection was boundless-sometimes to a fault. In early spring he sought counsel from Washington speech coach Michael Sheehan. With aides he would sometimes say, "Tell me everything you think I'm doing wrong." When John Sasso arrived on the campaign in September he found a candidate who had turned himself into a pincushion. "Kerry had been inviting personal criticism from pretty much anyone who had an opinion...Kerry was drowning in negative energy from all around," Thomas writes. Sasso wanted it to stop. There was to be no more direct criticism of the candidate, period. And Teresa and the daughters were not exempt, Newsweek reports.

Additional exclusive news reported in Newsweek's Special Election Issue:

Clinton Advice Spurned. Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the Red States, former President Bill Clinton, in a phone call with Kerry, urged the Senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides, "I'm not going to ever do that."

Kerry Anger Over Swift Boat Ads. By August, the attack of the Swift Boat veterans was getting to Kerry. He called adviser Tad Devine, who was prepping to appear on "Meet The Press" the next day: "It's a pack of f---ing lies, what they're saying about me," he fairly shouted over the phone. Kerry blamed his advisers for his predicament. (Cahill and Shrum argued responding to the ads would only dignify them.) He had wanted to fight back; they had counseled caution. Even Kerry's ex-wife, Julia Thorne, was very upset about the ads, she told daughter Vanessa. She could remember how Kerry had suffered in Vietnam; she had seen the scars on his body, heard him cry out at night in his nightmares. She was so agitated about the unfairness of the Swift Boat assault that she told Vanessa she was ready to break her silence, to speak out and personally answer the Swift Boat charges. She changed her mind only when she was reassured that the campaign was about to start fighting back hard.

Managing Teresa. Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, presented a host of behind-the-scenes drama for Kerry. Early on, the campaign staff regarded Teresa as something of a hypochondriac, and she canceled three trips in October at the last minute, usually for what was described to aides as a "nonspecific malady." Kerry's first campaign manager, James Jordan, had little patience for her strong opinions, sending emails trashing the candidate's wife...which inevitably reached his rivals within the campaign, including Bob Shrum (an old Teresa friend) and helped seal Jordan's eventual dismissal.

Later came Kerry campaign's post-convention "Sea to Shining Sea" tour: a 3,500-mile bus and train trek that was not a happy trip for Teresa. With each passing day she made less effort to hide her displeasure. Audiences were mystified when Teresa turned her back to them at daylight rallies and wore dark sunglasses and a hat at night (backstage, the candidate's wife complained of migraines and sore eyes). As they reached the climax of the tour, an hourlong "family vacation" hike in the Grand Canyon, the planned happy-family- vacation was disintegrating in plain view. Daughter Vanessa didn't enjoy being a prop, Teresa was complaining of migraines and telling her husband she couldn't walk anymore. The candidate tried to bravely soldier on, pulling his sullen wife and children to show them the magnificent condors flying overhead.

Edwards Campaigns for Veep. Hours after bowing out of the presidential nomination race on March 3, the senator from North Carolina convened a small circle of his closest advisers at his house on P Street in Georgetown. He wanted the veep nomination, Edwards told his aides, he wanted it badly, and from that moment was going to wage "a full-fledged campaign" to ensure that he got it.

Shades of Dukakis. In early August, when the Swift Boat story started to pick up steam on the talk shows, Susan Estrich, a California law professor, well-known liberal talking head and onetime campaign manager for Michael Dukakis, had called the Kerry campaign for marching orders. She had been booked on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" to talk about the Swift Boat ads. What are the talking points? Estrich asked the Kerry campaign. There are none, she was told. Estrich was startled. She had seen this bad movie before.

Newsweek's 2004 Special Election Issue marks the magazine's sixth consecutive installment of providing a behind-the-scenes account of the entire presidential campaign. The 50,000-word inside story was written by Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas and edited by Special Projects Director Alexis Gelber. The project's correspondents are: Jonathan Darman (with Kerry), Kevin Peraino (with Bush) and Contributing Editors Eleanor Clift and Peter Goldman.

 

Really interesting read, Faos. Thanks for sharing.

Teresa sounds like a complete biotch.

Kerry sounds even more indecisive that he appears on tv.

America made the right choice.

 

I can't wait until Dubya tries to blame something on the "previous administration"...

 

Their "family vacation" sounds like something from National Lampoons Vacation.