American Midterm elections

If only I were joking...

Haven't seen Minnesota results but I'm *way* annoyed about Florida.

It's not just two years, it's decades of damage if you look at the right wingers they'll appoint as judges. And possibly centuries of damage if you look at how the arrogant and divisive policies they will now launch will alienate not just America's traditional enemies, but people all over Europe etc. And it will certainly mean death for many innocent Iraqi citizens, and even some British soldiers who will no doubt perish, like last time, by 'friendly fire'. And after Iraq, Sudan? North Korea? Space?

WE ARE FUCKED. AND MOST AMERICANS LOVE IT.

P.S. we are having an election party. there is wine, and there is much yelling at the television. um, and we took a break to watch SHIPMATES- the BikInI episode. briefly, we could breathe. ahhh breasts....

p.p.s. i'm actually really afraid. and why did he have to die?

I voted Mondale because although he is a more centrist candidate than Wellstone, he's still not THEM and Wellstone's kids asked him to stand in for their dad. I loved Wellstone, and thought the best way to honour him was to not let the bastards win, because it'll be like 'Gee Bubba, they got out their least offensive former Veep and we still sprayed 'em with a can of whup-ass!' Yucch.

American society reminds me of British society in the '80s, when nobody you knew would ever have voted for Thatcher's Tories, her policies made everyone you knew physically ill, yet somehow there were enough votes for Tories to keep them in office.

And I was not perving on JT, I merely think his single is grebt. He still looks like Screech.

"It was a great win for the president of the United States." - Chairman of the Republican Congressional Committee

Er, what is wrong with that statement? He seems have forgotten that Congress isn't there to cater to the President, though I'm afraid that may be the case.

Look, I can remember when Reagan took everything in 1980 inc. senate seats for IR candidates in MN and...it didn't last long.

But this is weird in that for the first time the US has a REGIME instead of a government.

I don't know if I personally know anyone who's happy with these results, although I'm sure the publicly traded company that I work for -- which put a mugging GWB on its online service's front screen for the five days leading up to the election ("What, us try and nudge the agenda?") -- is thrilled.

But still: Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

1) Are the candidates the Democrats offering up all that good? And if not, why is there surprise if they're losing?

2) Why is everybody assuming that the only Republican voters out there are 'cracker morons' or idiots? Because this *just might* -- in some circles at least -- explain why there might be a sense of alienation from the left if one's target audience is being told that about themselves.

Especially in Massachussetts, where 47% of residents voted to abolish the state income tax yesterday.

1. No, and no, I'm not surprised, and have been hollering at my weeping leftie parents all morning for being surprised.

2. I think that your supposition is true, although this says nothing about the smartness or good of those being alienated by being called dumb and evil.

Instead of all expatriating, lets rally all the hardcore leftists in the country together. We will all move to one small state, and we will take it over completely, and expand from there. Its a war!

How is this the case? The turnout for midterm elections, and this one is no different, is lower than the turnout for presidential elections. Populous states largely controlled by Democrats didn't have Senate elections, and the Senate by design distorts the popular vote even more than the Electoral College. And the key races the Democrats lost were quite close.

I don't think there were large numbers, compared to 2000, voting for Republicans. But the Democrats, typically, ran scared, and failed to offer any sort of comprehensive alternative program in a set of races that Bush managed to nationalize.

I'm a bit relieved that with Missouri, the control of the Senate didn't boil down to the antagonistic tone of the Wellstone memorial service. That would have shown the Democratic Party at its stupidest in stark isolation: a bunch of party hacks jeering at everyone else.

They also wonder what you mean when you say America is on Corporate Welfare thanks to the GOPiggies.

And that nobody wants a war, but those nasty nasty people who could fly into a building and kill all those innocent people are going to know exactly how it feels when we go and do it to them.

"I'm not entirely sure Americans are seemingly so much happier to to back their leaders into war"

So which is it?

You probably need to know that the war in Iraq wasn't an election issue (except possibly in the Georgia Senate election, where a Republican somehow managed to impugn the patriotism of a TRIPLE COMBAT AMPUTEE who actually voted for the Iraq resolution), and that only about 45% of the eligible population voted anyhow.

The conditions-- a poor economy, corporate scandals, and a heavy-handed foreign policy-- were there for the Democrats to offer an alternative national program. They didn't.

As for the point about "war on their soil in recent memory," I'd agree with you that the physical distance from Europe, or really any other countries of high international stature (sorry, Mexico and Canada), tends to create an isolationist mindset in the US-- as it has for the entire history of the US as a world power. But WW2 was 57 years ago-- barely in the memory of my own parents-- and moreover, the violence of Sept. 11 probably tended to galvanize American popular opinion towards war in a way that the Cole bombing/Tanzania and Kenya bombings/anything else "over there" would never have. The almost immediate memory of "war" on American soil, counter to your point, seems to increase the likelihood of war in Iraq (note that I don't think Iraq has anything to do with Sept. 11, and that I find the desperate attempts by Bush to link them to be nauseating).

I seem to remember that after Sept. 11, many (pundits on TV) were thinking that the events would cause America to be more aware of what was going on in the rest of the world. Implicit in that idea is that our increased awareness would allow us to make the distinctions between different countries in any given region, the type of government in those countries, and the leadership styles of those who were in power, etc. The opposite has happened. We have become more general in our accusations. I am feeling sick, too.

I don't deny that the war on Iraq wasn't an election issue, but the fact that Bush is making gains despite his incresingly isolationist attitude to world politics, will be seen by the rest of the world as support. That's the way I saw it anyway, not knowing a huge amount about internal US politics.

And although the US was involved in WW2, it wasn't to anywhere near the extent that europe was involved.

While there are other, domestic, issues that the Congress has more direct control over, Sept. 11 and its aftereffects-- Iraq, Israel, homeland security, etc.-- is Topic One, and if the Democrats entirely defer to Bush on that, they look ineffectual as national leaders.

Well, yeah, but there were, by the end of the war, 13 million Americans in uniform. At the time, the US population was 140 million. And there were over 300.000 combat deaths of US soldiers.

So while the US wasn't as involved as Europe, it had a substantial involvement in the war.

What is really fucked up in America is that we have, at the same time, in the same people, is the fervent belief in god, christianity, etc., and the nihilism and selfishness that results from the death of god. what gives? instead of either loving thy neighbor or shooting him, we shoot him for the love of god.

No reason that the left needs to write creationists off as ignorant rubes who will necessarily support regressive taxation and oil companies.

44 per cent agree with the statement 'God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so' = 44 per cent are monkeys.

Can we eat them before they eat us?

just a few quick question for everyone...

should presidents be allowed to campaign for others? (I don't think I would want Gore or Nader to be telling me who to vote for, either.)

is political strategizing killing off democracy? (strategizing will always be part of the game, but to what extent should it play a part?)

I don't begrudge people their feelings; yesterday was maddening. But if there's anything we've learned from this election - and the last year and a half - isn't it that Dems and liberals in general need a focused, positive, constructive set of ideas? Call me a scold, I don't care, but I'm not going to join in calling my neighbors and friends (see, I don't live in an ivory tower either) names just because they've got their shit together.

I really hate to say it, and even taking into account ineptitude by certain key Democrats, but the rot goes much deeper than this. And that some folks of good will here are taking offense at my calling humbug humbug, and bullshit bullshit, only underscores that.

I'm gonna have to step away from here, I'm going on rhetorical overdrive and I don't like it much myself.

doesn't this question belong on ILM?

the second is a symptom of the first. the republicans, at least, have conviction regarding their (misguided) ideology. it seems to me like the democratic candidates are saying what they think others want them to say. the republicans presented a unfied front, and talked about the same core issues.

And speaking of GOP slime tactics: Let's not forget that the amount of money spent during the course of a campaign is key to the umpteenth degree. The Republican candidates in this election were very well-capitalized (did anyone else get the e-mail asking for money for the Mondale campaign last week?). Some numbers from Altercation:
"...I'm guessing that not too many pundits on those endless gabfests focused on the fact that, as reported by AP, the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had outraised their Democratic counterparts by $184 million through mid-October. This does not include, of course, the billions Bush gave them through the federal government. This is the kind of thing that makes all the difference in close races and that's just what happened last night.

"As Eric Boehlert noted in Salon yesterday, to take just one tiny example
about how aggressive the White House has been about this--and how easy the so-called liberal media has been on them--the administration billed the Office of Family Assistance $210,000 to help pay for five trips in which Bush promoted welfare reform at official events, then made fundraising stops for Republican office seekers, according to the Washington Post. In all likelihood, the White House scheduled Bush to make brief speeches about welfare reform in cities where he already had fundraisers scheduled. That way the Republican Party, which has to pay for fundraising activity, would not have to pick up all of Bush's travel costs.

"According to available records, Clinton also billed government agencies to share the cost of domestic trips that had a political agenda, but at nowhere near the rate Bush does. During his final four years in office, Clinton billed Health and Human Services $243,862 for 45 presidential events. By contrast, Bush has already billed HHS $210,000 for just five trips in six months. Siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars appropriated to assist needy families in order to pay for Republican fat-cat fundraisers? There's no better symbol of the Bush White House priorities."

I've decided that politics are not the convincing-people debate that we like to think of them as -- they're not a matter of demonstrating to people that one's policies are right. Please don't read this as Republican-bashing, but if it were a matter of arguing policy, this would be a nation of Democrats: campaigns for many years now have been a matter of unsuccessfully complex policy gestures by Democrats and successfully vague rhetoric about "values" and "character" by Republicans.

What it is about is casting a wide net over people who are already inclined to agree with you and then energizing them. I think that energy, that sense of vigor and righteousness and momentum, is what brings people into the fold, not careful logic -- because in the end, most people can't make heads or tails of the Nation or the Weekly Standard, because they don't follow points of logical principle and don't care to, because in plenty of cases they're probably not even clear on what roles the positions they're voting for even play.

Third parties understand this, actually. I think Nader understood that it wasn't the specifics of his politics that brought a lot of previously-uninterested people to him: it was the pure sense of momentum he had around him. This should serve as a test case for people with any political views -- the guy had a certain type of young person flocking to him not necessarily because they understood the first thing about his politics, but because he seemed to ... well, to have something going on.

Republicans have run very well on this idea, reducing their rhetoric to certain archetypes and certain key issues people respond to, and they've seized control of the agenda itself. The problem for Democrats right now is to figure out the right way to combat that. Will it help to get technical, to try and articulate exactly what's wrong with Republican ideas? Or is it more important to ignore that and articulate some competing framework?

Funnily, I don't think the two are as incompatible as they seem: it's possible to do the former in practice and the latter in spirit. Go further left: yes. Call Republican ideas idiotic: by all means. I think the worst thing about this election is that it will likely lead to Democrats caring more about their elections, which is a terrible thing -- the best they could do right now is stop caring, to come out with the sort of fight that would please both a guy like Tad who follows the issues and a guy who doesn't follow the details but can recognize conviction when he sees it. It's not about appeasement and careful argument and trying to please, it's about momentum; it's not about professionalism, it's about looking like you're there because you want to be. A lot of Democrats right now look like they're scared people are going to notice they have no purpose, and it's exactly that fear that makes them look so purposeless.

As for us on a social level: well yeah, writing off conservatives and calling them stupid is often a bad idea. Too many people have gotten used to the idea of sitting around a Thanksgiving dinner with their Freeper uncles and racist grandmothers and keeping their mouths shut, saving the argument for when they're "home" among their own type and don't have to articulate anything other than "they're horrible." What the entire left needs right now is just a better, more confident way to say "I'm sorry, but that's idiotic and I reject it." If this is a nation of cracker morons, nothing looks worse than hiding under a rock and cursing them to yourself: it makes you look weak and scared. You're better off striding casually out to the morons and cursing them to their faces -- plenty of them will believe you!

Especially in Michigan, everything was re-districted to the Republicans' advantage.

Also, I think the party divide becomes less and less significant as you come down to more and more local races: at some point the positions become about competence and trustworthiness more than ideology. (In Illinois, for instance, the problem with state and city government has always been not ideology but corruption and cronyism from both parties -- when it comes to a position like Secretary of State or State Treasurer I'd take a Republican I trusted over a suspect Democrat any day.)

Agree with them or not, at least Republicans had a message. Republicans were saying, "When you vote for me you are voting for this, this and this." Democrats were saying only, "Vote for me."

I'm learning every day, comrade.

just kidding.

America is a nation conceived in fear. One of the finest founding tenets of the USA is written on the Statue of Liberty, it says, 'bring me your tired, poor and huddled masses'.

The large part of these had something to fear, from the pilgrim fathers and east european jews fleeing fear of persecution, to those fleeing the fear of financial hardship and serfdom. This current of fear runs right through to the present day, as the cartoon above so eloquently puts it.

The upshot of this is that when the US got to global big school, sometime between the genocide of 600,000 Philippinos in the Spanish American war in 1901 and FDR's semi-orchestrated attack on pearl harbour in 1941, The USA became a global Bully. Not that there haven't been others.

G W and his cabal, who incidentally are descended, in the main, from the less fearful; the second sons of Anglo-Saxon Gentlemen off to the new world to seek their fortunes, have played to these fears for their own ends (GW Bush's ends TM Carlyle group, Exxon et al.)

someone said that part of the reason that democrats are losing their popularity is that immigrants are more conservative than they used to be. many now want to assimilate, make money, and vote republican. they may believe in the mythology of america more than many americans (who have lived in this country for a longer period of time), and are therefore captivated by the rhetoric of the republican party.

this is obviously a huge generalization...

for chissakes don't start this stuff. Though I will agree with your general point.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mpearlharbor.html

too lazy to make a link so cut and paste...

http://www.electionri.com/Results/TopTicket.htm

If Laffey wins the Republican primary, the common thought is that their goose is cooked.

My current pet theory is that the prevalence of redistricting / gerrymandering has resulted in people using primaries as a new forum to throw the bums out - Connecticut having gone through a similar episode on the Democratic side.