What is your attitude towards carpet-bagging?

Does it irritate you when someone goes from one congressional district to another to run or from one state to another to run?

I got the treat of both Senate contenders in 2002 being carpetbaggers. I honestly wondered why someone who actually lived in my state couldn't get the support for the nomination.

But then he stayed, and that sucks. So I am of two minds.

Bad elected officials can be home grown or imported and good ones can be your neighbor or a guy youve never met.

That one bothered me immensely.

Cheney was a US Senator from Wyoming before he moved to Texas to be an oil quadrillionaire.

It still doesn't change the fact that what he did sucks. "Oops! We can't get Texas' electoral votes if we're both from there, so I'll rush up and get a Wyoming driver's license."

Hence, the move back to Wyoming.

Well, that - and the fact that Cheney picked himself for VP.

What it says is that the electors shall vote for a President and a Vice President, at least one of whom shall be from a state different from themselves.

Let's say Howard Dean got the presidential nomination in 2008. Dean lives in a three-vote state. He could choose Bernard Sanders as his running mate, kick ass, and receive the electoral votes of as many as 49 states plus DC. He could never take Vermont because the Constitution specifically says an elector can't vote for two candidates who are from the same state as himself.

Would Dean choose Sanders? No, for three reasons--key among them being that Sanders isn't a Democrat. Dean would also be required to forfeit his home state--something that no one would ever expect him to do. And in an era when every single vote counts, no one would voluntarily forgo even one vote.

Now look at Texas. It has 34 electoral votes, and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Texas. Oh, Bush could have run with Cheney as a Texan, it's perfectly legal. If he would have, though, Al Gore would have won 2000 by 33 ev and Bush would be able to clear brush and run companies into the ground without having to listen to boring old briefings every morning.

If Dean ran with Sanders, the Vermont electors could indeed vote for Dean, but they couldn't vote for Sanders too. The "at least one of whom" would likely be the VP candidate, not the presidential one - wouldn't you think?

So, If Bush ran with Cheney from Texas, then Bush would have still gotten the same electoral votes he did get, so he'd still be prez. On the other hand, the Texas electors couldn't vote for Cheney so they'd vote for Condi Rice for VP. Then since no VP candidate had a majority of the vote, the Senate would pick the VP from the top two votegetters which would have been Lieberman and Cheney. That would get more interesting because wasn't the senate a 50-50 tie for that brief period until Bush was sworn in. I don't know what would happen if the vote went 50-50.

Okay, I got it now.

If this happened, Bush would tell the Texas electors not to vote for him for President, but for his dad. Then the electors would be free to vote for Cheney for VP, and he would be safely in.

Now for president, no one would have a majority, and the House of Representatives would pick a president from the top three electoral vote getters which in this case would be Gore, Bush and Bush Sr. Since the House was safely Republican, especially since they would vote one vote per state, Bush would win handily, and therefore,

Bush and Cheney would legally be elected Vp and Prez both from Texas. It's as smple as that.

IIRC, in the immediate post-Colonial era, the concept of running mates hadn't come about yet. The electors had to choose A President and A Vice President--and they could come from different parties. John Adams, the second President, was a Federalist, while Thomas Jefferson, his Vice-President, was a Democratic-Republican.

Today they come as a package, and the presumption is that the vote for Vice President (or Actual President in this case) will be a mere formality.

Why the hell are we arguing this anymore? The Supreme Court elected our leader in 2000 and some computer programmers who work for Diebold elected him in 2004.

better reread your constitution.

is correct either.

thats where i first heard and understood what that term meant. Ted kicked his ass in the debates and sent him back to Utah for a few years.

Yes,it irritates me.

so just what the HELL are you talking about?

Middlesex County to run for Congress.

Common knowledge.

Especially when that BIG MOVE was just across a river.

And he didn't even have to cross the river.

a good carpetbagger is way better than a lifelong resident a-hole..

I would prefer someone who is "homegrown" so to speak. But when you don't have good people willing to run for office if a good person comes from outside with policies and proposals I can support then that's just fine with me.

Carpet baggers in politics we already know about, higher ups in either party structure who are brought into a state so they can use the people to attain higher office and forget all about the state they supposedly represent.

Carpet baggers in sports are those overpriced players that whore themselves from team to team, and have no allegiance to either the team or the people who support the team. Now whole teams are doing the same thing, forcing cities to build more and more elaborate sports palaces to attract them every few years.

Carpet baggers in business are the B-school grads who have a head full of theory and an education in contempt for labor with little loyalty to the company and no loyalty to its workers.

They all suck. They all need to go.

Sometimes elected officials get gerrymandered out of their own district and into someone else's from their party. They basically have to move to stay in their district, or run against someone from their own party.

Then again, Britain doesn't bother with this shit at all. You vote by party and the party that wins your district assigns someone to represent it. I think Tony Blair's district is in Northern England when he, obviously, lives in London.