2015 American Politics Thread: The 114th Congress Is in the House!

he's on Chris Hayes.

He was outsmarted by hanging chads.

still get pissed at 'lol al gore invented the internet' jokes. wasn't crazy about him (i remember him from the 80s)(not talking about pmrc) and though i do think it's an outrage he 'lost' i can't pretend that alot of the catastrophes of the bush era (9/11, afghanistan, the financial collapse) wouldn't have happened anyway if gore had won. some awful policy isn't enacted and some good policies are and the supreme court might look different (though maybe not, and it might look worse). it's not like if carter had won in 80 or even humphrey in 68.

pretty sure Rehnquist would still have died of cancer

Hmm feel like a couple things are missing from balls' list of dubyasasters what could they be

o yeah there are plenty of dubyasasters that wouldn't have occurred - the new orleans levees specifically were an issue that clinton paid attention to that bush went 'lol whut' and slashed funding for and a gore administration would have mounted a competent response. i can also believe that while we almost definitely wouldn't have occupied iraq that more ops similar to desert fox might have happened. 9/11 probably still happens (maybe al qaeda was a point of emphasis for the clinton administration grasped that bush's new national security team didn't but considering how much of it occurring was the result of missed signals at lower levels i can imagine it still happens), we still go in afghanistan, and even if gore doesn't continue deregulation or emphasise a 'home ownership society' like bush the damage was done on that front, collapse was inevitable w/o changes the democratic party at the time had no interest in broaching nevermind pursuing. at the same time i can imagine that nobody resigns from scotus during his first term (always thought nobody resigning during bush's first term was maybe a result of some understanding following bush v gore), he loses reelection after republicans attack him for allowing 9/11 to happen, for not winning afghanistan/killing bin laden, and for the recession (and god knows what else). the next guy then gets o'connor's retirement and rehnquist's death then maybe get's reelected and at a minimum probably get's souter's seat (jps might have stayed on the court).

I think it's pretty possible Gore would have prevented it. Not above entertaining the notion that an arrogant stance towards foreign affairs could totally lead to Bush seeing a possibly life changing memo and not taking it seriously, thinking "I'd like to see them try then I could do [exactly what his swiftly and effeciently did]". Gore didn't have this baggage did he? Middle Eastern terrorism is what papa Bush cut his teeth on -- he was head of the CIA. It's kind of in the family. So maybe Gore doesn't have that blind spot.

re: balls's scenario - - I dunno, I mean it's not like Kerry or anybody saw any percentage in running on "Bush let 9/11 happen and failed to win Afghanistan and get Bin Laden" ticket in 2004. no reason to assume gore wouldn't still be enjoying some kind of post-9/11 leadership afterglow. incumbency effects are strong, and he'd really have had to just tank his whole first term to lose IMO. obviously these are all hypotheticals and counterfactuals but i don't think it's that easy to just say gore wouldn't have gotten to nominate anybody to the court.

but yeah the big one here is the Iraq war - even if there were "ops similar to desert fox" that doesn't mean a half a million dead (at least), al qaeda in iraq, total fucking chaos from there, abu ghraib etc. etc. i mean we are talking about an absolute disaster of a foreign policy at every level, that was a pet project of this particular administration from before they walked in the door.

will leave someone else to address the economic collapse - i'm just not versed enough in it. always felt to me very much like black monday 87, where the preceding years of deregulation and gutting the SEC enabled this to happen. dunno how much that applies here though or how different it would have been under gore. definitely would not have gotten the bush tax cut, no child left behind, and various other damaging things. but i bet gore would have seized the initiative to finally do something about those terrifying human-animal hybrids. bush was all talk on that one.

it's not like Kerry or anybody saw any percentage in running on "Bush let 9/11 happen and failed to win Afghanistan and get Bin Laden" ticket in 2004. no reason to assume gore wouldn't still be enjoying some kind of post-9/11 leadership afterglow.

yeah i think you're misunderstanding what republicans would be willing and able to do in a campaign vs what dems would (i mean the gop used 9/11 against the dems to take back the senate in 02). also i think the public cut bush some slack as he'd been on the job less than eight months, gore would've owned it completely and aspects of how the clinton administration (or really the cia) managed to let bin laden 'get away' after clinton put in place a 'can we plz have some degree of certainty of what we're bombing before we bomb it' rule after pathetic cia intel led to us bombing the chinese embassy in sarajevo (plus a pharmeceutical factory in sudan, though that really wasn't a major motivation in the decision). they've dug for some plausible impeachment case (w/ obama and hillary if need be) w/ benghazi and then acted like just because they didn't find anything doesn't mean they can't as outraged as if they did. they repeat the 'bush kept us safe' line despite, yknow, the bloodiest day in america since antietam, and then get hysterical that obama can't claim the same because of ft hood. i have no doubt the party that superimposed bin laden's face over max cleland's would have blasted gore hard and often for letting 9/11 to occur.

no child left behind had considerable democratic support, ted kennedy was a big fan. education policy in general doesn't really line up neatly along party lines - diane ravitch served in the bush I admin, arne duncan might as well work for the gates foundation.

another thing is that it is very very hard for the veep who gets elected to the white house to get reelected. only two men have managed it and jefferson belonged to a different party than the president and won the white house by beating him while nixon had an 8 year hiatus between his vice presidency and presidency.

i admit it's plausible gore could've prevented 9/11, i mean it's plausible james woods could have prevented it and he couldn't prevent sean young from gluing his dick to his thigh. i just don't think it was likely. failures like that are systemic. not that the bush national security team wasn't especially set up for failure on that front (i can still remember reading the 9/11 commission report and damn near losing my shit after reading that condi rice basically didn't know what al qaeda were on 9/11. they'd only bombed a couple of embassies, a us navy ship, and some barracks (and that's just the plans that succeeded) and we'd only already bombed afghanistan and sudan once in response but i guess that escaped the damn head of the nsa's notice cuz she'd decided this century was going to be about keeping an eye on the russkies), but it's not like there'd been a huge turnover at the fbi and cia after 8 months. they bear responsibility but it's comparable to how a commanding officer bears responsibility when a sentry falls asleep at a post.

xpost very few vice presidents have actually gotten elected president in the first place! adams, jefferson, van buren, coolidge, and poppy bush are the only ones that really fit the bill; truman, coolidge, and johnson ran as incumbents after the death of the president and as you say nixon was running after a gap. so basically in modern times the only reference point is GHWB. not a super robust sample size in terms of making predictions about what could have happened in 2004.

re: no child left behind: sure. but it's one thing to say "a thing bush proposed got some democratic votes" and another to say "gore would have also proposed that thing." sorta like the iraq war. similarly i guess if gore had sat down and tried to sell a random war in iraq he probably could have gotten the votes, but he wouldn't have done that. not saying they were just radically different on education or anything, just different priorities, different attitudes, different constituencies. i dunno, maybe it would have amounted to the same thing or something like it. at the time, "we need to have tough standards to make sure our schools are performing" sounded really good to a lot of people.

that's also obama's policy fwiw

I'll try a facile conclusion: had Gore been president, we would've had no Iraq, slightly milder neoliberalism, would've lost the presidency in 2004, and many of the Obama administration victories would've been delayed another 5 to 10 years b/c Obama wouldn't have ever been president.

would've lost the presidency in 2004

This is really debatable though, and requires transplanting the cynicism that came out of GWB's handling of it (and his re-election!) into a timeline without it.

I'm going by history and our not being kind to veeps wanting a second term of their own.

I'm with Doctor Casino on that one - threadbare sabermetrics over a few data points is likely to be less use than the specific circumstances.

Tonight on Counterfactual Theatre

^^^

education policy in general doesn't really line up neatly along party lines

Yeah. Probably needs its own thread, though there might not be enough education-policy geeks on here to sustain one. I've reported/written a lot about education over the past couple decades, and I think it's the most complicated and frustrating of yr major national/social/cultural issues. Even more than healthcare, which at least has some clear ideological faultlines -- single-payer vs. "private market." In education, you have liberal "reformers" and conservative "reformers," who sometimes seem to agree on some things but sometimes are very far apart. And then you have a bunch of more-or-less defenders of the status quo, who aren't ideological so much as institutional, and you have a massive amount of plain old inertia just making it very hard to ever change anything. There are the profiteers -- the people who make and market textbooks, technology, etc -- who aren't necessarily wedded to any one model, they just want to be first in the door. And there's also this very decentralized power structure, where the feds control some things, the states control others, and local school boards still have a huge amount of authority (because the biggest chunk of most school systems' funding is local). Anyway, it's a mess.

Weird all this talk of a spec Gore presidency and zero mention of kyoto protocol, climate change, energy policy etc

Can we talk for a second about an acquaintance of mine who is running against Sean Duffy in Wisconsin?

http://www.kirkbangstad.com/

guh i regret the conjecture now. i was more just (internally i guess) heading off 'didn't we almost have it all?' fantasies that spring up over hypothetical gore presidency so I could defend him against that dumb 'lol he invent internet - NOT' meme.

never allude to that Whitney song again, bro

don't be so emotional

where do broken hearts gore.

guess not

i wholeheartedly endorse anyone who wants to take down sean duffy and any means they choose to do so

I haven't actually talked to him in years but a common friend (who works in politics) alerted me to this, which I think is pretty awesome; he's a really great dude.

(Here's hoping there isn't some nightmarish surprise in his policy positions)

Does he have a chance? Any other Dems?

I'll be his baby tonight!

As far as I know, he is the Dem; I don't think anyone else is in the race.

I wanna dance wausau body.

didn't wisconsin have it all?

it's not right (but it's eau claire)

^ winner

beautiful

just gonna be watchin' football in my Mankato

just wanted to throw Minn in

ok i can't tell any of those states apart

also beautiful

grrr: https://wilderness.org/blog/few-members-congress-are-about-erase-50-year-old-promise

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) - Aerial bombardments blew apart a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the battleground Afghan city of Kunduz about the time of a U.S. airstrike early Saturday, killing at least 19 people, officials said.

@billmon1
London 1940: Civilians throughout the city were killed at about the same time as a German air strike, @CNN reports...

Further investigation is needed to determine whether the Taliban has acquired a modern air force.

http://s22.postimg.org/cn78ql8hd/kochswarm.png
I know it's pronounced Koke but that's not how I read it

the ignorance of history recent enough to be journalism is getting a little hard to take. suffice it to drop these in re the "counterfactual" gore admin (he won btw)?

https://www.questia.com/newspaper/1G1-63954947/gore-criticizes-bush-foreign-policy-approach-gop-candidate
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/05/time.history/
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/juicy_bits/2004/03/could_we_have_prevented_911.single.html
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/15/how-bin-laden-escaped-in-2001-the-lessons-of-tora-bora.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/nov/12/opinion/op-kagan12
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/05/15/flashback_gore_calls_bush_policies_un-american_in_2002_speech.html
http://articles.latimes.com/2003/nov/10/nation/na-gore10
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,574809,00.html
http://money.cnn.com/2002/11/06/news/pitt/
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2002/12/snow_job.single.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aoM0mju1ARQo
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/19/AR2007121902177.html
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0502a/gorebushwarming.html

Greenwald re the bombedy-bomb media tiptoeing

"The U.S. and its allies — in both the Afghan government and its own media — have now switched course from the 'it was a collateral damage mistake' cliché to the proud 'yes we did it and it was justified' boast (indeed, a large bulk of today’s NYT article, ostensibly about the effects of the hospital’s destruction, is actually devoted to giving voice to those who are justifying why the hospital was attacked, even as the framing of the article is designed to suppress the identity of the perpetrator). But from the start, not even the U.S. military had the audacity to try to obscure that they did this. They left that dirty work to their leading media outlets, which, as usual, are more than eager and happy to comply."

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/cnn-and-the-nyt-are-deliberately-obscuring-who-perpetrated-the-afghan-hospital-attack/

the latest news is that the Afghan forces requested the airstrike. see, they asked for it!

MSF/DWB:

“MSF is disgusted by the recent statements coming from some Afghanistan government authorities justifying the attack on its hospital in Kunduz. These statements imply that Afghan and US forces working together decided to raze to the ground a fully functioning hospital with more than 180 staff and patients inside because they claim that members of the Taliban were present.

“This amounts to an admission of a war crime. This utterly contradicts the initial attempts of the US government to minimize the attack as ‘collateral damage.’

“There can be no justification for this abhorrent attack on our hospital that resulted in the deaths of MSF staff as they worked and patients as they lay in their beds. MSF reiterates its demand for a full transparent and independent international investigation.”

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/the-radically-changing-story-of-the-u-s-airstrike-on-afghan-hospital-from-mistake-to-justification/