Barbara Boxer for Prez '08

I love her, but her age is a problem.

but Reagan wasn't a liberal jewish woman, either.

We do live longer, yanno.

However, as much as I adore Barbara Boxer, I don't particularly want to see her on the ticket in the top slot. I think 2008 will be a make or break election for this country, and we need to WIN, not with a DLC Dem candidate but with a centrist who errs on the side of progressivism, and I'm afraid it will have to be another male.

In the meantime, we need to keep the pressure on the party to recognize the disaster of GOP owned and compromised voting machines and to address it with real world solutions, even if it means filing lawsuits in all 50 states simultaneously.

and come out as the winner. hey, i'm just sayin' ;)

Dang I though early 50s

-Hoot

She's from a whole different world than the people we need to reach. Besides, who was the last blue-state Senator who obtained the presidency? Kennedy? Do we want our first female candidate to be running from such a weak place?

explain.

by being extremely liberal, being a senator, and being from a blue state. All of which play very well among Democrats, but don't have the independant and republican appeal we'd need to win.

Quite frankly, I would rather run an unknown than a senator. With unknowns, they can imply that they might not know what's best to do. With a senator with a voting record, you can cherry-pick and warp votes and 'prove' that they don't know what's best to do--'prove' that they don't have the same identification values the electorate has. Since she's a blue-state liberal, the same charges that would make Kucinich an electoral disaster stick to her just as well. And, finally, because she's a woman, she immediately doesn't fit the alpha-male, father-figure role that Republicans have been creating for the president. Each are individual problems that shouldn't exist and should be fought. But trying to inflict a total paradigm shift on the American electorate in 12 months when you have a just-as-well-funded, just-as-intelligent group of people trying to keep that paradigm alive--well, let's just say I don't think we have that great a chance. People don't like cognitive dissonance, and quite a few voters happy to vote for Clinton in '92 would have trouble voting for Boxer.

I don't get your post.
Are you giving up on having a candidate actually elected to office?

Clinton, that is. I'm not giving up on a candidate getting elected. Sounds like you are, as far as Boxer goes.

Personally, I don't think we can win unless we get a good number of the red states on our side. Certainly we need OH and FL, for one. IA and MO shouldn't be that hard. And for God's sakes, why can't we win WV? Democratic governor, two Democratic senators, and we can't get Democratic electors? Somehow I don't think that winning them is beyond the pale. For God's sakes, if we could convince just 12% of the voters in Texas we'd pick up a blue state.

I think Clinton was seriously one of the best Presidents the Democrats ever had. Even IF Boxer got elected she'd find herself faced with a hostile Republican congress. She'd be less effective than Carter was. Seriously, a moderate willing to make quid-pro-quo concessions would do more for us than a hardliner dedicated to deadlock.

33 Million People, the Eighth largest economy in the World...

"Weak", my ass.

Any Democrat will win California. What we need is someone who can win, say, Missouri. And for that purpose, Boxer has a weak background.

when we run someone who isn't afraid to say things that piss people off, like "You know what? 'Under God' was tacked on to the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy era, and it doesn't belong there." or "If people are really interested in preventing abortions, maybe what they should worry about is making sure kids know about birth control, women and kids have universal health coverage, and poor people can make a liveable minimum wage so that trying to raise children on a single low-wage salary isn't such a cruel joke"

Lets see. 2000, we ran a candidate who tried to be all things to all people, and was slammed for not "standing for anything" and "taking polls to see which color shirts he should wear". In 2004, we ran a candidate who tried to be all things to all people, and he was slammed as a "flip flopper".

I think Bush, if the beady-eyed f*ck has proven anything, has shown that the Merkin people overall apparently respect someone who clearly stands for things- even if they vehemently disagree with what those things are. I know, it doesn't make sense to me either.

But we've played it the DLC's way for quite a while now (and I liked Clinton, too, but a big part of the reason Red State Merkins think "Sinning fornicator" when they see the (D) after some person's name is Clinton's wandering Johnson.) and it's not working. I say we take the chance of running someone polarizing. I don't think the situation could possibly be any worse than it is now.

Not interested in meeting them in the middle. No how, no way.

Time to take a stand for people.

You can be a hard core liberal in the midwest, or sometimes even the South if you know how to appeal to those voters. Someone who has spent her entire career representing California, which as a very unique political culture, probably does not know how to do that.

I like her views but we need someone who knows how to win over swing state voters to progressive ideas. There are people who have done that like Russ Feingold, Dick Durbin, and John Edwards. They have spent their careers winning over rural and working class voters that would roll their eyes and laugh at a typical California liberal.

I like Boxer a lot but I question her ability to move beyond California. That doesn't mean we need to nominate a moderate, corporate Democrat sell-out. It just means we need someone with the kind of progressive message that will appeal to people who don't live in New England or the West Coast.

no way, no how....

but the election is a LONG way away.

Hillary, Kerry, Edwards, Bayh, and the rest of the rollover specialists.

the one about getting people to vote for her.

Last I checked, I'm a people.

to vote for her. I'm saying that moderates and value-identification voters won't, and conservatives would more than likely actively mobilize against her, even without prompting from Republican campaign workers.

The Fred Phelps crowd? The people who think Tim LaHaye writes non-fiction? The gang that thinks T Rex was chasing Abraham around the desert 6,000 years ago?

Sorry, chief, but those people aren't going to vote for ANY democrat. And all the contortions in the world to see which core principle or constituency we can jettison in effort to woo them- reproductive choice, the gays, whatever- all that is going to do is further transmogrify our party into an unrecognizeable husk that doesn't stand for anything, at all.. and for which no one- red state OR blue- will feel terribly inspired to vote for.

I would vote for that ticket:)

One of the few possible tickets mentioned that I could really get behind.

We would probably have held Georgia if he had been chosen

He would be a great pic for VP or President. He's a national treasure. An Edwards-Lewis ticket would have beat Bush by at least 5 points.

She speaks the truth.

She's my first pick absolutely positively without a moment's hesitation I'd send her thousands of bucks, walk the pavement for hours, make a gazillion phone calls... whatever it took.