2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumAm I the only one....
...who thinks this election is looking too easy? It's almost feeling like a setup.
I've never seen a candidate be this clueless and with so much money behind him.
What's going on?
jpbollma
(552 posts)Don't get too excited. We have a lot of ad gold and a great president for the debates, but people are hurting. I still don't think it will be a landslide. People want to blame someone.
elleng
(130,126 posts)but they've got t-buggers AND strong propaganda machine AND many approaches to steal elections. If things were 'normal,' it would be 'easy,' but this ain't normal.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)I don't think anything would be easy for them. The only things that would be harder would be any of the others!
Remember when the biggest joke of the campaign was that McCain saw RMoney's tax returns and picked Sarah Palin? Incredibly, it seems he was right.
things will get really ugly imo
Doctor Jack
(3,072 posts)We have a saying in medicine "if you hear hoof beats, think horse and not zebra". The point is not to over think things, not to manipulate evidence to find a complicated explanation, when a much more likely answer is staring you in the face. In this case, I think it is as simple as Romney is a total fuck up, he can't do anything right, and his campaign has entered its "death throes" stage, to borrow a phrase from our favorite Republican vice president.
TroyD
(4,551 posts)I have to totally disagree.
I am very much a believer in darker forces being at work in many events (eg. JFK assassination). In events like that, nothing will convince me otherwise after what I have read, researched & seen.
However, in a case like this, it's possible that there may not be anything sinister going on.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)Stakes are high.
I thought Kerry had it right up till Bin Laden tape spooked folks days before election.
Felt better about chances this week, though.
Response to lexw (Original post)
littlemissmartypants This message was self-deleted by its author.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)but the downballot races are looming large: we have to retain control of the Senate and if possible regain the House.
longship
(40,416 posts)We are still weeks from the election.
No!!!! The apparent ease is not a grand conspiracy, a rope-a-dope, by the Republics.
No!!! Rove and Cheney are not at an undisclosed location tweaking the dials of their wonderful politics machine.
Sometimes a political party is in a decidedly inferior position. Sometimes you cannot fool all the people. These situations inevitably come up due to the vagaries of politics.
But it seems that this is true this year. The Republic Party is going to lose at the top of the ticket. What we Democrats have to do is to make sure that this victory includes Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.
We've got a lot of fucking work to do. We can leverage this Republic meltdown by keeping not only the White House, but the Senate, and putting a Democrat as Speaker of the House.
I have no money to donate. But I have time to phone bank, which I will be doing as often as I can before November 6.
We will probably win this thing. But, we can really win big if we all work hard. We have 150,000 members here (maybe more). What can't we do with that number of activists?
lexw
(804 posts)I donated in 2008, and this one as well.
I'm just paranoid that we're being setup for something. But why the hell worry, I'm seeing. Just press forward.
Thanks for the phone work! I think that's more important: there are less folks doing that!
mykpart
(3,879 posts)Her opponent Clayton Williams couldn't seem to keep his foot out of his mouth. One of his most infamous sayings was, "It's like rape; if you know it's inevitable, you might as well just relax and enjoy it."
Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)I'm surprised so many Democrats are surprised that a presidential campaign can be so poorly run. I say I'm surprised because you'd think, after years of being Democrats, they'd know what bad campaigns are all about.
In 1984, I bet some Republicans couldn't believe the Democrats were actually going to nominate the vice president of a president who, four years prior, lost in a landslide and was seen by most Americans as a failure. But they did. It wasn't a conspiracy, it was just dumb politics. It happens all the time. It was dumb politics that made Mondale admit to raising taxes in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention ... it was dumb politics that made Dukakis get into a tank and drive around like a fool ... it was dumb politics that made McCain pick Palin and then suspend his campaign during a crisis.
Politicians are human and run by humans and sometimes humans aren't smart and they do stupid things.
To quote Kathy Bates in the movie Primary Colors:
"...this one, he takes me out. We go to an outdoor Cuban joint. My head's in my hands. I mean, life has end. I say, 'They did it! The CIA.' I can't believe that Tom Eagleton would really be a nutcase. They had to have taken him and made him crazy. It couldn't be that McGovern was a complete amateur!"
It's so true. Not everything is a conspiracy. McGovern was an amateur ... an awful presidential candidate who left his running mate out to dry and lost in one of the biggest landslides in American history. It happens all the time. We're so conditioned on believing politicians and campaigns can't fuck it up royally ... but they can. Romney is a complete amateur and it's why he's losing and why he keeps stumbling over his own two feet. Nothing more. Nothing less.