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Senator Aqua Buddha vs. Senator Thinks He's Actually The Buddha.quote:Ted Cruz refused to say whether or not he would support Mitch McConnell for Senate majority leader even after his party secured control of both chambers on Tuesday night.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:36
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Wouldn't Rand Paul make far more money (books, speeches, etc) after even a failed Presidential run than he would as a sitting US Senator? Paul could just run again in 2020 if McConnell retires; he'll be 78 years old then. Why wouldn't he run for President then chill out as Honorary Chair at the Cato Institute or something?
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Nov 7, 2014 16:39
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skaboomizzy posted:Wouldn't Rand Paul make far more money (books, speeches, etc) after even a failed Presidential run than he would as a sitting US Senator? Paul could just run again in 2020 if McConnell retires; he'll be 78 years old then. Why wouldn't he run for President then chill out as Honorary Chair at the Cato Institute or something? The only way to make more money as a sitting politician than in the post office money game is to just graft the poo poo out of it to a degree that you're openly daring law enforcement to do something about it.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:50
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skaboomizzy posted:Wouldn't Rand Paul make far more money (books, speeches, etc) after even a failed Presidential run than he would as a sitting US Senator? Paul could just run again in 2020 if McConnell retires; he'll be 78 years old then. Why wouldn't he run for President then chill out as Honorary Chair at the Cato Institute or something? I think we have our chance to cut off any speculation about why people run for President early, here: People run for President because they want to be The President of the United States of America. Let's not have a repeat of the Romney run where people were wondering why he wanted to run for President; people do these things because they want to win.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:52
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Chantilly Say posted:I think we have our chance to cut off any speculation about why people run for President early, here: People run for President because they want to be The President of the United States of America. Let's not have a repeat of the Romney run where people were wondering why he wanted to run for President; people do these things because they want to win. This is very true, but Rand is something of a special case. The Paul family political machine can bring in tons of money by drumming up their supporters with quixotic Presidential campaigns. If Rand Paul wins the nomination, he would certainly love a shot at the big chair, but I think he'd be nearly as happy to run every four years, going on speaking tours of college campuses and raking in the cash from moneybombs.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:55
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Chantilly Say posted:Senator Aqua Buddha vs. Senator Thinks He's Actually The Buddha. I unironically admire and respect Ted Cruz.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:59
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The Warszawa posted:I unironically admire and respect Ted Cruz. May I unironically ask why? Is it for his political gamesmanship and daring ability to do the unthinkable(even to his own party)?
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Nov 7, 2014 17:00
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Chantilly Say posted:I think we have our chance to cut off any speculation about why people run for President early, here: People run for President because they want to be The President of the United States of America. Let's not have a repeat of the Romney run where people were wondering why he wanted to run for President; people do these things because they want to win. But Ben Carson is a special kind of deluded freak for thinking he can be President, isn't he. I can see a business person running and even winning, like a Bloomberg, but a doctor? Yes, I know there are plenty of them in the legislature but every one that I can name sucks at being a politician. The man is a messianic dictator in waiting.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:03
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joeburz posted:May I unironically ask why? Is it for his political gamesmanship and daring ability to do the unthinkable(even to his own party)? 1) He's legitimately incredibly smart; 2) He entered a body that basically functions exclusively off collegiality and decided "gently caress this noise" and blew it the gently caress up, achieving massive success (within defined parameters) while alienating literally everyone. So, yes, basically.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:05
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I think it's worth noting that Rand won't necesarilly retain his Senate seat in 2016 even if he's allowed to try. There's some rumor that our well-liked Democratic governor, Steve Beshear, will run for it. If he does, he might stand a decent shot. Particularly coupled with the buzz that would be generated by a Hillary presidential run (we like Hillary here). The only problem with that scenario is that Beshear is already pretty drat old. He would be 72 in 2016. Barring Beshear, prominent Kentucky Democrats who could challenge Rand for the seat include AG Jack Conway (who Rand already trounced in 2010, and who will probably be our new governor by that point anyway), SecState Alison Grimes (we just saw how a senatorial campaign went for her, and we currently like McConnell a lot less than we like Rand) and former louisville mayor/lieutenant governor Jerry Abramson (who is only 2 years younger than Beshear and seems like he is emotionally done with elected offices at this point). So that's kind of bleak. Maybe John Calipari will run or something weird like that. skaboomizzy posted:Wouldn't Rand Paul make far more money (books, speeches, etc) after even a failed Presidential run than he would as a sitting US Senator? Paul could just run again in 2020 if McConnell retires; he'll be 78 years old then. Why wouldn't he run for President then chill out as Honorary Chair at the Cato Institute or something? I like to think we will be sufficiently tired of him by then that we would not elect him in 2020. Now that Byrd is dead, McConnell is arguably the most skilled Constituency Senator around. He presents himself as ideologically opposed to federal spending, then locks down the Kentucky electorate by funnelling tons of federal infrastructure funds and other pork to us. Rand doesn't do this, partially because he is pretty genuine in his libertarianism and partially because he is an rear end in a top hat who just uses the Senate seat to gain prominence for a presidential run. But yeah, that would probably work. His popularity here hasn't really tanked here yet, and a doomed presidential run would gain him a lot of sympathy if he played it right.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:07
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The Warszawa posted:1) He's legitimately incredibly smart; To me, Ted is the scariest potential 2016 candidate. In a shortened GOP primary, where turning out the crazies is the key to winning, he could do it.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:14
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The Warszawa posted:1) He's legitimately incredibly smart; At the end of the day, high functioning sociopathy is still sociopathy.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:17
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Berke Negri posted:At the end of the day, high functioning sociopathy is still sociopathy. I think people are way too quick to pathologize ideological divergence. I swear, the loving Sopranos has done more for armchair psychiatric diagnostics than Mad Men did for pocket squares and middling-functioning alcoholism. He's not a sociopath, he's just a true believer who got dunked on by Austan Goolsbee and refused to study with non-HYP undergrad classmates in law school, and every night he goes to bed with a voice whispering in his ear: "You settled for the second-best law school." Calling Ted Cruz a sociopath is like calling Richard Nixon a sociopath - it elides the deep insecurities that drive them and make them historically and personally interesting.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:20
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radical meme posted:To me, Ted is the scariest potential 2016 candidate. In a shortened GOP primary, where turning out the crazies is the key to winning, he could do it. Scary for sane republicans, maybe. For democrats the only person they'd love to have as an opponent more is Sarah Palin.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:20
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The Warszawa posted:I think people are way too quick to pathologize ideological divergence. I swear, the loving Sopranos has done more for armchair psychiatric diagnostics than Mad Men did for pocket squares and middling-functioning alcoholism. Ask ten people on the street what the definition of sociopathy is and you'll get ten different answers.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:22
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surely Ted has to be the opponent the Democrats are hoping for? Against a berserk extremist of that order, Hillary could go as Centrist as she likes without worrying about turnout among the liberal base, who would be aware that Ted Cruz has no problem with shoveling them into a locomotive engine.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:23
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radical meme posted:To me, Ted is the scariest potential 2016 candidate. In a shortened GOP primary, where turning out the crazies is the key to winning, he could do it. Who the hell cares if Ted Cruz wins the primary. The only strategies open for crazy Republicans to win the primaries are ones that kill them in the general.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:23
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I think Cruz is smart, he is just creepy in a tough-to-hide way and his slash-and-burn politicking isn't likely to work in the long run.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:30
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The political science literature is pretty consistent on the important of forming strong intra-party coalitions to win the Presidential nomination, so I wouldn't  too hard over Cruz. The Democrats should definitely want him to run because he has a very low chance of winning the nomination and a very high chance of causing headaches for all the other Republicans, pushing the eventual nominee's platform to the right.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:33
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I'm not really getting Cruz's political success yet. If his machinations result in a long Senate career or even President maybe but at this point he seems like he's just pissing off a bunch of people. Even my Tea Party relatives don't really know how to feel about him since while he talks the talk they know there's something off about him in a way they can't really describe. Also I don't really give a poo poo about how smart someone is if they just use it to be colossal assholes. I'm not sure why that's an inherently admirable quality.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:34
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Radish posted:Even my Tea Party relatives don't really know how to feel about him since while he talks the talk they know there's something off about him in a way they can't really describe. It's because he's Canadian.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:41
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Republicans posted:It's because he's Canadian. They can sense the syrup in him.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:42
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The Warszawa posted:I think people are way too quick to pathologize ideological divergence. I swear, the loving Sopranos has done more for armchair psychiatric diagnostics than Mad Men did for pocket squares and middling-functioning alcoholism. See, I think that is an unfair comparison. Richard Nixon was bipolar.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:46
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Joementum posted:The political science literature is pretty consistent on the important of forming strong intra-party coalitions to win the Presidential nomination, so I wouldn't I'm not at all worried about Cruz winning the nomination, but I'm interested in him possibly acting as another pole within the GOP legislative organism. Radish posted:I'm not really getting Cruz's political success yet. If his machinations result in a long Senate career or even President maybe but at this point he seems like he's just pissing off a bunch of people. Even my Tea Party relatives don't really know how to feel about him since while he talks the talk they know there's something off about him in a way they can't really describe. The success is in his prominence as a freshman senator and by positioning himself as an intracaucus alternative to the establishment at the quasi-leadership level. Intelligence is not inherently admirable, but to not respect it is dangerous. The admiration comes from basically rejecting established power norms in the Senate.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:51
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Radish posted:I'm not really getting Cruz's political success yet. If his machinations result in a long Senate career or even President maybe but at this point he seems like he's just pissing off a bunch of people. Even my Tea Party relatives don't really know how to feel about him since while he talks the talk they know there's something off about him in a way they can't really describe. remember that Tea Party true believers believe they speak for a secret Moral Majority that has been marginalized by Radical Marxist democrats and weak-kneed republicans unwilling to stand up to them. It's a resilient worldview because, no matter how conclusively the data shows that they are alienating every demographic in the country, they remain convinced that there are millions of ultraconservative voters who will suddenly appear if only they have a sufficiently conservative candidate. I wouldn't call Cruz smart, if only because 'smart' is a broad-enough term that it doesn't mean anything. Cruz reminds me of many Debate hotshots I've met (I did 4 years of forensics in college). The secret of formalized collegiate Debate is that it is a hyper-specialized sport that doesn't translate to being a gifted speaker, rhetorician or scholar in any other context. You're taught to navigate the intricacies of scoring rubrics that have little in common with the way a normal human being would guage a conversation, and you learn that neither content nor intent (nor any normal person's approximation of style) matter. It's decent preparation for either Law or Politics and has some things in common with both coutroom jurisprudence and parliamentary wrangling, but the rules of the courtroom are more sensible and juries/voters are more Regular Folks than the debate judges who fill out those rubrics. I'm sure Cruz would eat Obama alive in the context of a college debate, for instance, just because Obama was not a nationally-successful debate hotshot in college. But Obama would easily win a televised presidential debate. Sure there are some people (like Goolsbee) who are both good at Debate and good at other things, but you meet other people who zealously master Debate and seem either totally dull or manically abrasive in any other context. When this latter category of people become convinced that their debate success makes them charismatic Hot poo poo in general, you get a Ted Cruz type. tl;dr you can be good at that procedural poo poo and still be a dumbass. PupsOfWar fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 18:00
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I wouldn't use dumbass it is a broad-enough term that it doesn't mean anything.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:16
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Here's a question about the 2014 post-mortem and how it's going to affect 2016. Everybody seems to agree that the youth vote is important but, voter ID laws, like the one approved by SCOTUS in Texas, is a direct impediment to the youth vote, out of state college students especially. So is there any way to measure how much it affected voting this cycle; any way to predict how much it's gonna affect the vote in 2016. I don't see any way of changing it.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:16
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PupsOfWar posted:remember that Tea Party true believers believe they speak for a secret Moral Majority that has been marginalized by Radical Marxist democrats and weak-kneed republicans unwilling to stand up to them. It's a resilient worldview because, no matter how conclusively the data shows that they are alienating every demographic in the country, they remain convinced that there are millions of ultraconservative voters who will suddenly appear if only they have a sufficiently conservative candidate. Cruz was APDA, which is radically different than forensics for what it's worth.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:33
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skaboomizzy posted:Wouldn't Rand Paul make far more money (books, speeches, etc) after even a failed Presidential run than he would as a sitting US Senator? Paul could just run again in 2020 if McConnell retires; he'll be 78 years old then. Why wouldn't he run for President then chill out as Honorary Chair at the Cato Institute or something? If Rand Paul loses out a term, that sets back his seniority in the Senate. That can be a pretty major thing to lose out on if he plans to build influence there.
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Nov 7, 2014 19:36
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Ted Cruz makes me quiver with excitement for the 2016 debates. But which female candidate will pour all the men water at the table?!?!
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Nov 7, 2014 19:42
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dorkasaurus_rex posted:Ted Cruz makes me quiver with excitement for the 2016 debates. But which female candidate will pour all the men water at the table?!?! Lindsey Graham?
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Nov 7, 2014 19:44
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PupsOfWar posted:I'm sure Cruz would eat Obama alive in the context of a college debate, for instance, just because Obama was not a nationally-successful debate hotshot in college. But Obama would easily win a televised presidential debate. What about a series of Lincoln-Douglas style debates with a timekeeper but no moderator?
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Nov 7, 2014 20:16
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Chamale posted:What about a series of Lincoln-Douglas style debates with a timekeeper but no moderator? Will never, ever happen. Though Obama tanked his first debate with Romney, badly, so who knows.
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Nov 7, 2014 20:35
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Chamale posted:What about a series of Lincoln-Douglas style debates with a timekeeper but no moderator? Are you Newt Gingrich?
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Nov 7, 2014 20:37
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Unzip and Attack posted:This isn't about "America's respect for enlisted" it's about how the Republican Party could exploit a military celebrity like this. We haven't had a military member do something this unique in all of American history. The dude killed the most hated man on the planet. I'm not saying he's the next Eisenhower, I'm saying he's the type of person that fulfills all of the conservative fantasies about a savior candidate. White, male, outspokenly xenophobic, conservative (by all accounts) and the ultimate military caricature. If plans aren't being made to get this guy a candidacy somewhere then the RNC should have their loving heads examined. Richard M. Johnson, the man who killed Tecumseh in the War of 1812 (a figure as hated then by Americans as bin Laden was in the 2000s), rode the fame from that straight to the Vice Presidency (under Martin van Buren). He was also a terrible human being, as you'd expect from someone who boasted of killing Tecumseh, and proved such a disaster of a human being that van Buren dropped him from the ticket in 1840.
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Nov 7, 2014 20:52
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radical meme posted:Here's a question about the 2014 post-mortem and how it's going to affect 2016. Everybody seems to agree that the youth vote is important but, voter ID laws, like the one approved by SCOTUS in Texas, is a direct impediment to the youth vote, out of state college students especially. So is there any way to measure how much it affected voting this cycle; any way to predict how much it's gonna affect the vote in 2016. I don't see any way of changing it. How many college students are changing their voter registration but not driver's license to their campus state?
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Nov 7, 2014 21:09
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I wish Newt would run a 3rd party futurist campaign. You can tell he wants so badly to just do this, but he knows the grifter money is too sweet to give up, so he says plenty enough to sound like a hardliner even though you know he'd rather be talking moon colonies and polar bears than tax rates, so he just shits out some regressive stuff to keep the $ coming in and dreams about the rest. You can really see that he is happiest talking this stuff in Caucus.
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Nov 7, 2014 21:19
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Kiwi Ghost Chips posted:How many college students are changing their voter registration but not driver's license to their campus state? Lots. At UT we register tons of kids in Texas from out of state.
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Nov 7, 2014 21:21
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De Nomolos posted:I wish Newt would run a 3rd party futurist campaign. You can tell he wants so badly to just do this, but he knows the grifter money is too sweet to give up, so he says plenty enough to sound like a hardliner even though you know he'd rather be talking moon colonies and polar bears than tax rates, so he just shits out some regressive stuff to keep the $ coming in and dreams about the rest. You can really see that he is happiest talking this stuff in Caucus. This and his animal stuff is why I can't muster up any real bile for Newt. Like yeah, I'd never vote for him, but I also can't hate the guy the way I can someone with the same policies but no endearing hobbies. I really hope there's an alternate universe where he's a kooky zookeeper who maybe testifies about space stuff. Like a less respected hybrid between Steve Irwin and Bill Nye.
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Nov 7, 2014 22:14
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Pharmaskittle posted:This and his animal stuff is why I can't muster up any real bile for Newt. Like yeah, I'd never vote for him, but I also can't hate the guy the way I can someone with the same policies but no endearing hobbies. I really hope there's an alternate universe where he's a kooky zookeeper who maybe testifies about space stuff. Like a less respected hybrid between Steve Irwin and Bill Nye. The world lost a great zookeeper the day Newt went into politics.
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Nov 7, 2014 22:19
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