SA Decides, 1788-2000: If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > SA Decides, 1788-2000: If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.

«‹›53 »

Ibogaine: Aug 11, 2015

I am voting for John Adams, because America needs an experienced leader now more than ever before. He has reigned for twelve years now, and America still has a proper republican process. To those naysayers among you who claim that he is ambitious, I answer you this: Thrice he was offered a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?

He needs a Vice President who has proven to work well under Adams, which means either Burr or Jay. I am voting for Aaron Burr because Jay's position towards Britain is rather questionable, I think.

The inhabitants of perfidious Albion are like rabid dogs, and there can be no reasoning with them. The only language they understand is that of powder and shrapnel. We need to stand with our French brothers in the battle against the vile cancer called the "United Kingdom", since we have now reached a point in time at which there are only two choices: Freedom, represented by France and the USA and tyranny as represented by Britain and its lackeys. Burr will keep Adams on the straight and narrow regarding the English question.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:11

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 7, 2024 04:59

cinci zoo sniper: Mar 15, 2013

Voted for President Aaron Burr and Vice President John Adams.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:17

Joementum: May 23, 2004; jesus christ

Pretty sure if Adams gets a fourth term he's going to crown himself.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:21

Ibogaine: Aug 11, 2015

Joementum posted:

Pretty sure if Adams gets a fourth term he's going to crown himself.

Et tu, Joementum?

# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:26

GlyphGryph: Jun 23, 2013; Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

John Adams is clearly fixing these SA elections, no doubt about that, and I won't stand by and let it happen again, especially after the better Adams lost last time around.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:30

Ibogaine: Aug 11, 2015

GlyphGryph posted:

John Adams is clearly fixing these SA elections, no doubt about that, and I won't stand by and let it happen again, especially after the better Adams lost last time around.

John Adams would never steep so low as to fix an election. The only reason he keeps winning these elections is that his boundless love for the people of this great country is reciprocated by the people in equal measure.

If he wins again, we should change the name of the title "President" to "Adams" for simplicity's sake, IMHO. Failing that, I would accept naming the capitol after him.

Ibogaine has issued a correction as of 16:42 on Dec 6, 2015

# ? Dec 6, 2015 16:40

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

Someday John Jay will President.

Someday :smith:

# ? Dec 6, 2015 17:51

oystertoadfish: Jun 17, 2003

voting for jay and adams to keep the federalist party in power - i hope jay gets the most votes. i'd love to give hamilton power by voting for his puppet but i don't want open war with france. we might want to buy something from them in a few years...

# ? Dec 6, 2015 18:11

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

oystertoadfish posted:

voting for jay and adams to keep the federalist party in power - i hope jay gets the most votes. i'd love to give hamilton power by voting for his puppet but i don't want open war with france. we might want to buy something from them in a few years...

Why not seize it outright for free? War with France, expand the frontier!

# ? Dec 6, 2015 18:29

karmicknight: Aug 21, 2011

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Someday John Jay will President.

Someday

And that day is in 1801. John Jay/CC Pinckney.

The Vice President has earned his time to take over for His Highness, the President, who has broken with his party, the party of rulers and leaders, the Federalists.
Mr. Hamilton's Southern proxy would be an excellent choice for President of the Senate to coalesce coalitions aligning with both Vice President Jay's interests and Mr. Hamilton's policies, giving us the closest to a true Hamilton government our nation is capable of. (drat Adams and that letter Mr. Hamilton wrote about him)

# ? Dec 6, 2015 19:00

Sax Mortar: Aug 24, 2004

John Adams will continue to dominate these elections until he no longer runs...which will be fairly soon. We're going to need to take a break from the Adams clan for a couple of a elections too, which is pretty sad.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 19:17

Alfred P. Pseudonym: May 29, 2006; And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss goes 8-8

I have concerns about letting Adams rule too long especially after the somewhat tyrannical Alien and Sedition Acts. Jay for President, ~~Hamilton~~Pinckney for VP.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 20:22

Alfred P. Pseudonym: May 29, 2006; And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss goes 8-8

Federalist til I die

# ? Dec 6, 2015 20:24

Ibogaine: Aug 11, 2015

Aliquid posted:

Why not seize it outright for free? War with France, expand the frontier!

Because the French will eventually defeat Britain and rule the waves! We should bet on the winning horse and side with France, which will allow us to conquer the British posessions at our borders.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 20:54

The Lord of Hats: Aug 22, 2010; Hello, yes! Is being very good day for posting, no?

This is a terrible suite of candidates. John Adams is probably the best of the bunch, but he passed the awful, awful Alien and Sedition Act, Thomas Jefferson opposes that act which is nice, but the rest of his views are garbage and he's a garbage human being, Aaron Burr is made of nothing but raw ambition, Pinckney is a puppet that champions slavery, and John Jay is on the decline health-wise. John Adams/John Jay is still a reasonable ticket but urgh. Maybe that should read John Jay/John Adams, because while they're pretty clearly the best option I am holding my nose here.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 20:55

Glenn Zimmerman: Apr 9, 2009

The fruits of radical federalism finally come to roost.

God I would vote for Thomas Jefferson so hard if he wasn't slaver scum.

What is Burr's position on the annexation of Canada? Or, everyone's really. It's really important that monarchy is banished from the north american continent.

Sort of disappointed I didn't see this thread earlier as I was tempted to make a lovely pamphlet about how tyrannical the constitution is for banning the printing of paper money by states. Also, like, not having for direct voting for most offices. That was also bad.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 21:23

foobardog: Apr 19, 2007; There, now I can tell when you're posting.

-- A friend

Why must this damned system always blow up in my face? Where is Paine with his Common Sense? We shall be returned to tribal society by the end of all this, the great Enlightenment of humanity as a sudden flash in the pan before we return to darkness.

Adams must be stopped. The republic was going to break anyway. I'd rather us be feuding states to be picked off by France and Britain than live to see us make the same mistakes of absolute power and nobility that Adams and Burr threatens.

Jay is the obvious choice, though even the support of the Alien and Sedition Acts is bad.

Pickney is too strong on slavery, so that leaves me hesitantly voting for Jefferson. His Agarian Republic pipe dream will be built on the backs of slaves, and destroyed by the capitalists, but at least there is a chance that with public participation reason can prevail.

Jay - Jefferson '00 for a Euphoric America.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 22:12

Lycus: Aug 5, 2008; Half the posters in this forum have been made up. This website is a goddamn ghost town.

He's going too far. Three terms is going to his head. The Adams presidency needs to end.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 22:19

GlyphGryph: Jun 23, 2013; Down came the glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead.

Ugh, much as I don't want to, I think I'm going with Jefferson/Jay this time around. I am not a huge fan of Jefferson's, but it seems the only way too stop us descending into tyranny and war with our once ally France.

# ? Dec 6, 2015 23:24

Empress Theonora: Feb 19, 2001; She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Adams/Pinckney in a well thought-out scheme.

# ? Dec 7, 2015 00:44

QuoProQuid: Jan 12, 2012; Tr*ckin' and F*ckin' all the way to tha
T O P

For those interested in knowing how voting took place in 1800, The New Yorker's Party Time provides some delicious background. I would highly recommend the book that sparked this article, A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America�s First Presidential Campaign by Edward Larson, for those that want to get knee-deep in the bizarre Election of 1800.

Fortunately, I will not be trying to simulate the attempts by the Federalist Party to repeal the popular vote or the (likely innumerable) attempts at ballot-stuffing that occurred across the country. Fortunately, Google Drive is probably a little more secure than whatever mechanisms were used by the Founding Fathers to protect and tally the vote.

quote:

�As you love your country, fly to your polls,� the Gazette of the United States urged. But there was no �Election Day� in 1800. Voting stretched from March to December, and the President wasn�t chosen until February, 1801, just weeks before he took office. To get to the polls, you may have trudged through snow; you may have sweltered in the sun.

Whatever the weather, chances are you couldn�t vote. There were sixteen states in the Union in 1800. In Maryland, black men born free could vote (until 1802, when the state�s constitution was amended to exclude them); in New Jersey, white women could vote (until 1807, when the legislature closed this loophole). All but three states�Kentucky, Vermont, and Delaware�limited the franchise to property holders or taxpayers, which works out to about sixty to seventy per cent of the adult white male population. Out of a total U.S. population of 5.3 million, roughly five hundred and fifty thousand were enfranchised.

Even if you could vote, at no polling place, anywhere, should you have expected a ballot with choices marked �ADAMS� and �JEFFERSON.� Nor should you have expected your government to have supplied a ballot of any kind; many states still voted viva voce, and, in those which didn�t, you supplied your own ballot unless you brought to the polls a �party ticket,� torn from the edge of your local newspaper, with your choices already printed: the slate of your party�s candidates.

If you voted by ballot, your ballot would be destroyed. Your government would not keep any record of the results, unless you lived in Massachusetts, the only state where election returns were routinely collected and preserved. Not until 1824 would records be better kept. The scandalous election of 1824, much like the Bush-Gore battle in 2000, riveted the nation�s attention on the casting and counting of votes. That year, Andrew Jackson trounced John Quincy Adams in the Electoral College, ninety-nine to eighty-four, but, because this represented a plurality, and not a majority, the election was thrown into the lame-duck House, which, perversely, chose Adams.

But election returns before 1824 do survive: in newspapers, where partisan editors printed them after every election, like so many box scores. Since Americans voted so often�most legislators and many governors served for one-year terms, and in some towns voters went to the polls every other month�thousands of returns can be found in early American newspapers. Until recently, though, the records were too numerous, and too scattered, to be useful to historians. Then, in one of the strangest and most heroic tales in the annals of American historical research, a man named Phil Lampi decided to devote his life to compiling those returns. He began this work in 1960, when he was still in high school. Living in a home for boys, he wanted, most of all, to be left alone, so he settled on a hobby that nobody else would be interested in. He went to the library and, using old newspapers, started making tally sheets of every election in American history. His system was flawless. It occupied endless hours. Completeness became his obsession. For decades, at times supporting himself by working as a night watchman, Lampi made lists of election returns on notepads. He drove all over the country, scouring the archives by day, sleeping in his car by night. He eventually transcribed the returns of some sixty thousand elections. Since 2004, the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been digitizing Lampi�s collection; soon �A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns, 1787-1825� will be available online.

It�s still impossible to give anything like an exact figure for the 1800 national popular vote, but Lampi calculates that, in elections held that year, somewhere around a hundred and fifty-one thousand Americans cast votes for Republicans, compared with a hundred and thirty-nine thousand for Federalists. To the extent that this serves as a proxy for a popular vote, we now know that Jefferson won.

The election of 1800 was possibly the least democratic election in American history. In later elections, more citizens voted: by 1828, most states allowed white men to vote, whether or not they owned property or paid taxes. In earlier elections, more states allowed for the election of Electoral College delegates by popular vote. In 1796, seven out of sixteen states relied on the popular vote. But in 1800, after Republicans made a strong showing in local elections in New England, the Federalist-dominated legislatures of Massachusetts and New Hampshire repealed the popular vote, and put the selection of Electoral College delegates in their own hands. Before the year was out, seven of the sixteen states had changed their procedures for electing delegates to the Electoral College.

Citizens of Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia could vote directly for their state�s delegates to the Electoral College. In Tennessee, sheriffs cast votes for Electoral College delegates. But, in the other ten states, you could vote only for your state legislators, who would, in turn, choose delegates to the Electoral College, who would, in turn, elect the President. Your choices would be represented, on your behalf, by your betters. The people, Larson writes, were the election�s �wild card,� which is why �lawmakers in most states did not authorize them to vote for electors.�

In some places, efforts to manipulate the voting were thwarted. When, in an election brilliantly engineered by Jefferson�s running mate, Aaron Burr, New Yorkers elected a Republican Assembly, Hamilton tried to persuade Governor John Jay to convene the lame-duck (Federalist) legislature to institute the popular vote, so that the Republican legislature would not be able to choose Jeffersonian electoral delegates. �It will not do to be overscrupulous,� Hamilton claimed, if the result would be �to prevent an atheist in Religion, and a fanatic in politics from getting possession of the helm of State.� Jay refused.

# ? Dec 7, 2015 01:27

Proposition Joe: Oct 8, 2010; He was a good man

I think I'm going to have to vote for John Adams as President and John Jay as Vice President. I am disappointed that Samuel Adams was not elected as Vice President in the previous election, I only hope that the next election we will have more candidates from Massachusetts in the running.

# ? Dec 7, 2015 03:35

fantastic in plastic: Jun 15, 2007; The Socialist Workers Party's newspaper proved to be a tough sell to downtown businessmen.

ugh I'm just going to write in William Pitt for president as a protest vote, adams is literally caesar

# ? Dec 7, 2015 03:41

carticket: Jun 28, 2005; white and gold.

I voted to defund congress just like the NH house/senate.

# ? Dec 7, 2015 04:39

Sheng-Ji Yang: Mar 5, 2014

if adams wins again Jefferson needs to launch another revolution of a confederacy of southern states imo

# ? Dec 7, 2015 07:50

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

Sheng-ji Yang posted:

if adams wins again Jefferson needs to launch another revolution of a confederacy of southern states imo

hanging the wretched traitor would give me the greatest of joys

# ? Dec 7, 2015 08:06

Soup du Jour: Sep 8, 2011; I always knew I'd die with a headache.

Christ, this might be one of the worst slates of presidential candidates ever. Jay/Jefferson for me, much as it pains me to put a slaver rapist on my ballot.

# ? Dec 7, 2015 18:56

Lord of Pie: Mar 2, 2007

I think Bernie's old enough to be president by this time so I'm writing in Bernie

# ? Dec 7, 2015 19:51

the paradigm shift: Jan 18, 2006

John Jay for President and since he won't survive his first term why not have the loose cannon Burr as his VP to act as incentive

plus then maybe we could get that first presidential assassination attempt out of the way

# ? Dec 8, 2015 05:01

Fruit-by-the-Foot Fetish: Aug 3, 2012

In my mind there's no contest. John Adams is the only person standing between stability and complete chaos. Jefferson is an atheist lunatic and in alignment with Burr, who we all know is a nice guy, but still exploitative. Anyone who has picked up a newspaper knows Pinckney is a puppet, large, and a slaveowner.

Adams/Jay '00 is the only way to go.

# ? Dec 9, 2015 04:23

Fritz Coldcockin: Nov 7, 2005

Jefferson plays billiards and breaks the Sabbath, Jay/Adams in 1800

# ? Dec 9, 2015 04:25

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

Jefferson plays billiards and breaks the Sabbath, Jefferson in 1800

# ? Dec 9, 2015 05:49

Vavrek: Mar 2, 2013; I like your style hombre, but this is no laughing matter. Assault on a police officer. Theft of police property. Illegal possession of a firearm. FIVE counts of attempted murder. That comes to... 29 dollars and 40 cents. Cash, cheque, or credit card?

Aliquid posted:

Jefferson plays billiards and breaks the Sabbath, Jefferson in 1800

I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've heard for him so far.

As an aside, this round of voting introduced me to the musical Hamilton, for which I cannot thank QuoProQuid enough. I mean, wow.

# ? Dec 9, 2015 11:34

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

[HAMILTON]
Thomas. That was a real nice declaration
Welcome to the present, we�re running a real nation
Would you like to join us, or stay mellow
Doin� whatever the hell it is you do in Monticello?
If we assume the debts, the union gets
A new line of credit, a financial diuretic
How do you not get it? If we�re aggressive and competitive
The union gets a boost. You�d rather give it a sedative?
A civics lesson from a slaver. Hey neighbor
Your debts are paid cuz you don�t pay for labor
�We plant seeds in the South. We create.�
Yeah, keep ranting
We know who�s really doing the planting
And another thing, Mr. Age of Enlightenment
Don�t lecture me about the war, you didn�t fight in it
You think I�m frightened of you, man?
We almost died in a trench
While you were off getting high with the French
Thomas Jefferson, always hesitant with the President
Reticent�there isn�t a plan he doesn�t jettison
Madison, you�re mad as a hatter, son, take your medicine
drat, you�re in worse shape than the national debt is in
Sittin� there useless as two shits
Hey, turn around, bend over, I�ll show you
Where my shoe fits

# ? Dec 9, 2015 19:39

karmicknight: Aug 21, 2011

SA Decides, 1788-2000: "Hamilton Appreciation Station."

# ? Dec 10, 2015 02:17

Lord Cyrahzax: Oct 11, 2012

We can't vote Adams out now can we? It's probably sedition!

Adams/Pickney, please!

# ? Dec 10, 2015 02:18

QuoProQuid: Jan 12, 2012; Tr*ckin' and F*ckin' all the way to tha
T O P

karmicknight posted:

SA Decides, 1788-2000: "Hamilton Appreciation Station."

The real reason I started this thread was to get a bunch of goons really into musical theatre.

Now someone just needs to make a musical about Henry Clay or Daniel Webster.

QuoProQuid has issued a correction as of 02:41 on Dec 10, 2015

# ? Dec 10, 2015 02:32

oystertoadfish: Jun 17, 2003

hamilton once argued that black people had "natural faculties as good as ours". he also said �women and children are rendered more useful, and the latter more early useful, by manufacturing establishments, than they otherwise would be.� he was also perhaps the first great american figure to admit to having an affair. i would like to vote for alexander hamilton

# ? Dec 10, 2015 02:57

Yoshifan823: Feb 19, 2007; by FactsAreUseless

I hope Hamilton (the musical) will get enough support that we don't take Hamilton (the man) off the :10bux:

. I'd much rather see Andrew Jackson get booted in favor of a woman, even though the irony of him being on fiat money is fun.

Also, voted for Jay/Pinkeny.

Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:

Federalist til I die

# ? Dec 10, 2015 03:41

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 7, 2024 04:59

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

And if you don't know, now you know, Mr. President

# ? Dec 10, 2015 08:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > SA Decides, 1788-2000: If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.

«‹›53 »