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SedanChair posted:Healthcare was her signature issue and a previous failure. There's no reason she couldn't have pursued it out of continuing ambition. Quick question, and a real one as well despite the tone. How do normal people like Joe Biden slip into politics among the broken, the crazy, the greedy and the sociopaths? I thought that normal people were weeded out of politics as a matter of course.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:40
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Joe Biden is normal?
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Jun 13, 2014 02:44
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Half-serious answer: the tragic death of Biden's family at exactly the right moment gave him empathy superpowers and kept him from becoming a nazgul.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:47
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Joe Biden is just as cutthroat and ambitious as Obama, Hillary, or anyone else. He's just cultivated a better public image.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:52
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You guys know Biden's public image is unfortunately one of a buffoon, right?
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Jun 13, 2014 03:10
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Beamed posted:You guys know Biden's public image is unfortunately one of a buffoon, right? probably because he's not particularly smart compared to most politicians of similar stature (and certainly not compared to obama and hillary).
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Jun 13, 2014 03:22
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Haha, christ was Armando Iannucci feeding Clinton her lines?
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Jun 13, 2014 03:28
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comes along bort posted:Haha, christ was Armando Iannucci feeding Clinton her lines? Yeah, I mean I just don't get the response or the overall tone. People like candor and empathy; at least fake it. A compassionate conservative who doesn't go too far right in the primaries will crush her.
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Jun 13, 2014 03:34
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Dystram posted:Yeah, I mean I just don't get the response or the overall tone. Therein lies the rub. A compassionate conservative who doesn't go too far right in the primaries will never leave them.
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Jun 13, 2014 03:42
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Dystram posted:Yeah, I mean I just don't get the response or the overall tone. Nobody like that exists in the current Republican field period. sullat posted:Therein lies the rub. A compassionate conservative who doesn't go too far right in the primaries will never leave them.
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Jun 13, 2014 03:43
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Dystram posted:Yeah, I mean I just don't get the response or the overall tone. Shows candor and empathy: she's faking it, what a fraud and phony. Doesn't show it: wow, what it loser, not even bothering to fake it.
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Jun 13, 2014 03:44
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There's no competition for The Great and Terrible Madame Secretary in either party; she's already running for good poll numbers in her first hundred days. So act human for fucks sake. She already has some of the best nonverbals and tone of voice in the game, just let your words mean something Hill 
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Jun 13, 2014 03:55
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You see, the issue with your evaluation of Hillary's mental state is that it's totally subjective and based on oujia-esque prognostication. Perhaps, you should focus on the real issues that she has: She's a Neoliberal, triangulating, power broker. That said, I eagerly await her electoral sweep.
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Jun 13, 2014 04:00
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SedanChair hasn't been set off like this since Sandy Hook.
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Jun 13, 2014 04:04
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MODS CURE JOKES posted:You see, the issue with your evaluation of Hillary's mental state is that it's totally subjective and based on oujia-esque prognostication. Perhaps, you should focus on the real issues that she has: She's a Neoliberal, triangulating, power broker. That said, I eagerly await her electoral sweep. You mean Jeb's electoral sweep. 
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Jun 13, 2014 04:06
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Dystram posted:Yeah, I mean I just don't get the response or the overall tone. It's not even that. There's a standard dodge to that question and there's what she said. Good on her for steering into the skid later on calling the question out, but she should've gone a step further and discussed the political process of expanding civil rights and the disparity between public opinion and politicians' perception of public opinion.
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Jun 13, 2014 04:06
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The 90s was not "do you support gay marriage?" It was "do you support jailing homosexuals."
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Jun 13, 2014 13:01
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:The 90s was not "do you support gay marriage?" It was "do you support jailing homosexuals." It was different in different places. There were some small pushes toward marriage equality in the early 90's, but they were squashed pretty fast. The whole reason we got DOMA was because they were trying to squash those pushes.
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Jun 13, 2014 13:26
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:The 90s was not "do you support gay marriage?" It was "do you support Fixed for my hometown. And now my old high school has an LGBTQ/Ally club.
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Jun 13, 2014 13:37
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Well Hillary had already gotten some notoriety (aka the right was looking for things to attack and to frame as radical feminism) for her position on the rights of abused children to petition for emancipation (I think? I'm probably fuzzy on the details). It's not like she hasn't been capable of being out ahead on issues, since law school really. But I actually agree with Clinton that most people simply weren't thinking in those terms--to be honest I don't think the LGBT community was either. In the early 1990s gays had yet not decided to frame themselves as family-oriented monogamists. They didn't really have the power to frame themselves as anything. I think if people wanted to get married back then, they kept that wish to themselves because they would have been vilified for it.
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Jun 13, 2014 14:16
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SedanChair posted:Terry Gross is a perfect human being Terry Gross is without question the best interviewer on the airwaves. She somehow manages to get great guests on her show, asks them deep, probing questions, doesn't let them wriggle off the hook with non-answers, and all the while she comes off as an amazingly gracious and friendly person. And she spends 30 minutes to an hour on a topic with an expert or Significant Person Of Interest, no call-ins or Panel Of Centrist Experts. In an era of soundbyte media Fresh Air is, well, a breath of Fresh Air. Her interview with Bill O'Reilly is another great one because he gets super combative and basically self-destructs for no reason, followed by him storming off and decrying Liberal Media and it's totally incongrous with Terry and her behavior in every respect  I really don't know how in the world she's still on the air or gets guests, a Terry Gross interview is just about as dangerous as a Daily Show interview and Terry is not going to spend half her time kissing your rear end or making fart jokes. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Jun 13, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 14:26
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DynamicSloth posted:Given that he did win the nomination, it wasn't that terrible. Being the frontrunner obviously puts a target on you but on balance if you have a choice it's much much better to be in that position. The primary was undeniably a Pyrrhic victory for Romney, though. Having to deal with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who won a US House seat in a R+10 district drained his funds, sure, but much more importantly it twisted his platform into a pretzel. The etch-a-sketch quote was a dumb mistake, sure, but it absolutely spoke to a real problem Romney had, a total lack of any sort of underlying principles or morality, in Romney's case even within a timeframe of a few weeks. There's a similar argument to be made that Hillary is a political windvane, etch-a-sketch, whatever. She just isn't an abrasive rear end in a top hat like Rahm, and doesn't have the complete lack of empathy Romney displayed, the Clintons actually have some serious charm they can deploy. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Jun 13, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 14:57
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Paul MaudDib posted:The primary was undeniably a Pyrrhic victory for Romney, though. Having to deal with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who won a US House seat in a R+10 district drained his funds, sure, but much more importantly it twisted his platform into a pretzel. The etch-a-sketch quote was a dumb mistake, sure, but it absolutely spoke to a real problem Romney had, a total lack of any sort of underlying principles or morality, in Romney's case even within a timeframe of a few weeks. Hell, even Terry Gross had to go back two decades to question Hillary's changing stance on gay rights/marriage.
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Jun 13, 2014 15:08
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Axolotl posted:However, Hillary's timeline for flip-flops, Etch-A-Sketching, etc on issues is measured in years, not months or weeks. If someone's position evolves over a long period of time, that's more an indication that they are open to new ideas and information, not necessarily that they swing to match the political winds. Right but everyone thinks that Hillary (and Obama) were never really against full equality for gay people and just took that position for political reasons which is pretty cowardly.
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Jun 13, 2014 15:28
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Raskolnikov38 posted:http://youtu.be/wLoqti0lzAw Hmm for some reason I get only audio on this. The video of her sad little apartment and chips and dip dinner really helped make the atmosphere of this thing.
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Jun 13, 2014 15:48
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Zwabu posted:Hmm for some reason I get only audio on this. The video of her sad little apartment and chips and dip dinner really helped make the atmosphere of this thing. I watched it, too, and I think it's mostly black screen on purpose, like she turned on the camera to rant into the mic or something. I had to take a break after five minutes, I never realized that freeper tears could be this potent.
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Jun 13, 2014 15:57
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Nth Doctor posted:I watched it, too, and I think it's mostly black screen on purpose, like she turned on the camera to rant into the mic or something. I had to take a break after five minutes, I never realized that freeper tears could be this potent. I just looked it over again, it looks like she edited out the parts that actually show her place, either she became ashamed of showing the sad way she lives (but not of the ridiculous rant itself) or things got a little to stalker-y for her after achieving internet fame.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:04
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Paul MaudDib posted:The primary was undeniably a Pyrrhic victory for Romney, though. Having to deal with every Tom, Dick, and Harry who won a US House seat in a R+10 district drained his funds, sure, but much more importantly it twisted his platform into a pretzel. The etch-a-sketch quote was a dumb mistake, sure, but it absolutely spoke to a real problem Romney had, a total lack of any sort of underlying principles or morality, in Romney's case even within a timeframe of a few weeks.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:20
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mcmagic posted:Right but everyone thinks that Hillary (and Obama) were never really against full equality for gay people and just took that position for political reasons which is pretty cowardly. Right, but it's something that every Presidential-level political figure of their generation was also doing. It's also, honestly, about average on the level of moral cowardice people expect from their politicians, which makes it a hard to pin down as a weakness. Romney took flack because he was feckless even by political standards; going from being palatable to Massachusetts to palatable at CPAC left him with no consistent core values whatsoever. Hillary's never made that kind of flip.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:25
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mcmagic posted:Right but everyone thinks that Hillary (and Obama) were never really against full equality for gay people and just took that position for political reasons which is pretty cowardly. Well, they might argue (in private) that if you're an ally, it's better to be cautious and get elected than it is to speak your mind and lose your potential future influence in office.
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Jun 13, 2014 16:56
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SedanChair posted:Well, they might argue (in private) that if you're an ally, it's better to be cautious and get elected than it is to speak your mind and lose your potential future influence in office. Um, this? Once again, gay rights is the only issue that supporters in the Democratic Party seem to have played perfectly since 1992, despite the concerted efforts by conservatives to stop it. Part of the reason for this is the immensely effective multifaceted activism of the gay community. But keep in mind that the Democratic party in general and the Neoliberal contingent in particular and most especially the Clintonite inner circle never sold out the movement despite enormous short term political benefits for doing so. The only (infamous) exception to this was the passing of DOMA which put too many Conservative Democrats (there were still tons of them in 1996) on the hook to avoid sending it to Clinton's desk with a veto proof majority. His signing it was seen as a betrayal, a betrayal of his history-making overt support for gay rights which he campaigned on and enacted swiftly in his first term. Even the signing of DOMA without a further fight was an effort to head off Bob Barr getting a constitutional amendment passed, as it correctly presaged the future declaration of DOMA as unconstitutional in a future era where an anti-Gay Marriage amendment was now politically off the table. All of these moves were explicitly made to protect and further the cause of gay rights and LBGT issues generally. Many in the community have questioned various tactics that the Clintons and others in power made along the way, but it's pretty clear in hindsight that their support for the cause was always genuine, and almost all of their tactical decisions have borne um, fruit all these years later.
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Jun 13, 2014 17:43
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Axolotl posted:If someone's position evolves over a long period of time, that's more an indication that they are open to new ideas and information, not necessarily that they swing to match the political winds. Well, then Clinton had genuine, heartfelt opposition to gay marriage until the year 2013, which is pretty loving awful for a Democrat and really suggests that she's an inappropriate candidate to lead a big-tent party focused on inclusiveness and tolerance. And it's really not an unprecedented idea regarding Clinton, she stirred up a lot of bigotry in 2008 as well. Clinton supposedly had heartfelt opposition to gay marriage when she ran in 2008 and campaigned on that opposition. That's a lot more significant than (say) Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich who was forced out over campaign contributions he made in that same year. quote:In a primary, Clinton could be forced to explain a longtime position that a significant part of that Democratic political coalition now views as suspect or even bigoted. Most famously, the Silicon Valley left forced the ouster of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for a 2008 donation he made to an anti-gay-marriage ballot initiative. That same year, Clinton ran for president while openly opposing gay marriage. If she is to be believed, she also opposed gay marriage as recently as 2013, long after a majority of Americans already held a more gay-friendly position. Would the subset of Democrats who thought 2008 opposition to gay marriage should prevent a man from becoming CEO in 2013 really support the 2015 presidential campaign of a woman who openly opposed gay marriage until last year? That article also quotes Andrew Sullivan who does a good job of summarizing the "political windvane" argument as well as some of the other noxious stuff the Clintons presided over. quote:She was the second most powerful person in an administration in a critical era for gay rights. And in that era, her husband signed the HIV travel ban into law (it remained on the books for 22 years thereafter), making it the only medical condition ever legislated as a bar to even a tourist entering the US. Clinton also left gay service-members in the lurch, doubling the rate of their discharges from the military, and signed DOMA, the high watermark of anti-gay legislation in American history. Where and when it counted, the Clintons gave critical credibility to the religious right’s jihad against us. And on the day we testified against DOMA in 1996, their Justice Department argued that there were no constitutional problems with DOMA at all (the Supreme Court eventually disagreed). At the end of the day, what we're seeing is an issue that has swung 180* in 15 years, and that leaves a lot of politicians with awkward statements in their past that have had the cushioning rhetoric stripped away revealing the bigotry very plainly. Everyone has evolved a lot over that time period, but one of the things that really stuck out to me in that interview was Clinton's total inability to admit that she was wrong and closed-minded and held/advocated a lovely position. She's just a quintessential politician and can't bring herself to admit failure. Her political positioning for her next campaign trumps absolutely everything. And by the way your "Terry Gross had to reach two decades into the past!" thing is just wrong there. Clinton "evolved" in 2013 and that's not two years ago let alone two decades. Terry was being gracious and giving Clinton a chance to save face, and even handed her a couple prefabricated reasons that she could have riffed off of, and she still couldn't bring herself to reach out and take the olive branch. At the end of the day we're still talking about someone who campaigned on keeping gay marriage illegal in the last big Democratic presidential primary, at the same time she was playing racial tension against Obama. That whole segment was still really softball on Terry's part, with the sole exception that she wanted an actual answer, not just a bunch of Palinesque rambling about the American People. And then Clinton started to get mad over it. e: A lot of this also applies to Obama, but his slow "evolution" and his flip-flops from pro (1996) to anti (2004) to strongly anti ("never favored", 2010) to pro (2012) are actually a much-noted and rather derided political windvane. And he's not running for President this cycle. Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jun 13, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 17:58
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Paul MaudDib posted:Well, then Clinton had genuine, heartfelt opposition to gay marriage until the year 2013, which is pretty loving awful for a Democrat and really suggests that she's an inappropriate candidate to lead a big-tent party focused on inclusiveness and tolerance. No, but you see, Hillary is inevitable. We can't be critical of her.
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Jun 13, 2014 18:28
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Brendan Eich wasn't forced out because of his donation; he was forced out because he still holds those views. Or--if he doesn't--wouldn't actually come out and say he doesn't, and wouldn't apologize for previously holding them. All he actually needed to do to keep his job was give a mea culpa in the form of an "I was wrong" and an equivalent donation to a pro-gay group. He wouldn't do it based on some sort of "CEOs shouldn't be held responsible for the things they do" stand, and was forced to face the consequences of that.
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Jun 13, 2014 19:24
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It's pretty relaxing that Clinton is inevitable because we can really criticize the poo poo out of her. But uh, let's go ahead and track down somebody who was overtly pro-marriage in, say, 2012. Somebody qualified, I mean.
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Jun 13, 2014 19:36
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SedanChair posted:It's pretty relaxing that Clinton is inevitable because we can really criticize the poo poo out of her. But uh, let's go ahead and track down somebody who was overtly pro-marriage in, say, 2012. Somebody qualified, I mean. Barack Obama, I guess.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:11
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Do you guys think enough Democrats will be able to ride Hilary's coattails into office to get back the House of Representatives, or are we pretty much stuck in legislative limbo until 2024?
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Jun 13, 2014 20:21
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Pfirti86 posted:Do you guys think enough Democrats will be able to ride Hilary's coattails into office to get back the House of Representatives, or are we pretty much stuck in legislative limbo until 2024? I'd say the GOP will have the house until at least 2022 and till then only if the democrats can reverse some of the gerrymandering that took place in 2010 in 2020.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:22
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Well having listened to the Fresh Air interview, it sounded like Hillary claimed that she did not want to take a stand on what she saw as a domestic political issue while she was SecState (another copout but one that I doubt anyone will really press her on). That deflects blame for not being pro equality until back in 09. It sounded to me like what Gross was trying to get Hillary to do was to recount an anecdote to explain what precipitated her evolution. Clinton refused to speak about that issue in personal terms, instead opting for emphasizing how "we all have evolved". That, of course, set off Gross's bullshit detector. The way to answer that question (whether it is a lie or not) is to tell the interviewer that you grew up in the church hearing only one thing about that, maybe you didn't believe all of it but you were uneasy with making marriage a less explicitly religious institution. Say that years went by and you rarely revisted the position. Then when you were SecState, you had a lot of involved conversations with your millineal-aged daughter who over time made you realize your mistake. Makes you look like a good mother and sounds good for millenial voters because it's a story of you listening to one of them and then changing your mind on an issue. That satisfies Gross's line of questioning, which was "if you weren't cynically refusing to stand up for civil rights due to it's unpopularity, what did make you change your mind?" But instead she only wanted to speak in broad terms and basically just said "I changed my mind roughly when everyone else did" which is the most transparent copout imaginable. oldswitcheroo fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Jun 13, 2014 |
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Jun 13, 2014 20:24
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mcmagic posted:I'd say the GOP will have the house until at least 2022 and till then only if the democrats can reverse some of the gerrymandering that took place in 2010 in 2020. Not necessarily. As populations shift around over a decade, gerrymandering can become less and less effective. Who's to say that lines drawn in 2010 will be a "good" gerrymander by 2018? The more careful and byzantine the gerrymander the more prone it is to losing its effectiveness over time.
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Jun 13, 2014 20:27
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