YOU'RE FIRED!Follow

On the off chance it happens, I'm putting money on "I haven't posted about it because I was busy / on vacation the whole time."

Oh. As to the whole Clinton doing well despite all the dirt, I'm not sure about that. She's the only serious candidate in the race at all. She's the presumptive nominee and has been for years, so much so that no-one has bothered to run against her until her numbers were so alarming that someone completely unelectable (like Sanders) basically said "why not?", jumped in, and is getting 30% support. Her numbers are a disaster for her. If Warren were to get in tomorrow, we'd see Clinton drop below Sanders in less than a week. She's really doing that poorly.

Edited, Aug 31st 2015 4:17pm by gbaji

What stories? You really want me to link to dozens of news articles (certainly not all partisan GOP shills), talking about how troubling her numbers are? She could barely garner 50% of potential primary voters even when no one else had declared. Sanders only got in because she was polling so badly (and he's just ornery enough to do it anyway). Biden has 10%, and he isn't even in the race (at least last I heard). Are you kidding me?

You can't just look at the raw numbers here because there basically isn't another serious contender in the race. Her numbers would be outstanding if there were 2-3 other serious contenders and a half dozen issues folks (like there are on most "open" primaries). But that's not the case here, is it?

Oh. And just "being in the lead to be the nominee" isn't really the point here. That's easy to do when your party chooses not to field any other serious candidate. The kid with the broken leg will win the foot race if he's the only person in it, right? Doesn't mean he's a good runner. Just that for some bizarre reason, no one else decided to get into the race. Now maybe this is all some brilliant plan by the Democrats, but it's looking to me like some kind of backroom deal may just bite them in the rear.

Edited, Aug 31st 2015 6:20pm by gbaji

Uh... It's not that they're writing the stories, but the content of those stories. The tone is completely different from say the tone of stories back in 1999 when Al Gore was the presumed nominee (but ironically *less* presumed than Clinton has been). Yet, despite an actual serious contender in Bradley (surely more serious than Sanders), he still managed to consistently poll in the high 50s to low 60s, and I don't recall any news articles talking about his troubling numbers, or questioning whether he was a good candidate, etc, etc. Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but it does seem as though there's a lot more questioning of Clinton's ability to win than I ever saw about Gore.

It may amount to nothing in the long run, but I don't know if I'd dismiss this as just journalists feeling like they have to find something to write about. It's not like there isn't a ton of stuff they could be writing about with regard to the GOP nominee pool. If past experience is any indicator, I would normally expect more left leaning news sources to just gleefully report on all the chaos going on with the GOP side, and just kinda ignore or under report (or just outright dismiss) anything about Clinton. That's the pattern I tend to expect of the media, but it's not what we're seeing. There is some of that, to be sure, but it almost seems like the liberal journalists are realizing that these problems for Clinton aren't going away, and maybe they should actually raise the alarm about them while there's still the possibility of getting someone else in there, rather than ignoring it today and hoping they can sufficiently ignore it during the general election enough to get her a win.

Again, maybe I'm reading too much into this, but it does seem like odd behavior to me. Of course, I'm a conservative, so I'm used to seeing what I view as overly favorable treatment of Democrats by the media, so any negative leaning stuff does stand out to me. Like I said earlier though, I would normally expect the media to just dismiss any problems with Clinton and double down on negative stories about the GOP. And in Trump, they've got a ton of material to work with. So yeah, it's a bit shocking to see so much downbeat messaging coming from them about Clinton.


And again, the poll numbers just aren't where they should be given the absence of any other serious candidate in the race. I don't think you can dismiss that with a hand wave about bored journalists. The numbers have been below where they should be since well before I noticed many negative stories about her from what I would normally see as "liberal" news sources. I think the news is the result of the bad numbers, not the other way around.

That clickbait really is effective.

I don't think the argument is you were wrong last time, so you're wrong this time. It's more you've been wrong every time in the exact same way, so we're not really going to lend much weight to what say in this regard. Are you saying that Clinton will lose to sanders?

Uh... So Joph uses the same schtick, and I use the same schtick in response to him? Ok. Doesn't have any determinant effect on the outcome though. Pretty sure if we went back far enough, we'd find the same kind of exchange re: Bush v Kerry, and even Bush v Gore. I don't think it's shocking to have the Democrat saying that the Democrat will win and the Republican saying the Republican will win. Kinda expected, right?

I fully admit that I massively underestimated the degree to which voters would support a black candidate who got far enough in the process to be seen as actually having a chance to win. So much so that I still assumed that after the disastrous first term showing, voters would not continue to support him for re-election (and in my defense 5 million of them didn't). I actually had a friend/co-worker shock the heck out of my by saying that he's a conservative, and he normally votes Republican, but he was proud to have voted for Obama (twice!) because in his mind, by voting for the first black president, he was voting for someone based on his abilities and not the color of his skin. Yes, the logic made my head spin, but there you have it.

But I just don't think that the same will apply for Clinton as the "woman candidate". Obama had all the advantages of being a good solid politician. Engaging, warm, friendly, great linguistic skills, etc. And being black gave him an extra advantage that made it harder for opponents to attack him and easier for supporters to overlook his flaws. Obama had the additional advantage of being a relatively unknown candidate with little past to come back and bite him. He could basically write his history as he went, so to speak. Clinton has a ridiculous amount of baggage. Very very bad baggage. And she's not handling that baggage well. Obama could get away with the whole 'deflect for a few months, then declare the issue "old news"' bit, but that's not working as well for Clinton (and she's not handling the press well either). And aside from genitalia (well, presumably), she doesn't have a lot of weight in terms of rallying women voters.

Could I be wrong about all of this? Absolutely. But that's my opinion any way. Clinton just has a boat load of negatives. Denying that, or trying to equate her to Obama isn't going to work IMO.

The schtick where I point out your previous ignorance about polling and, really, election politics and reporting in general?

Yeah, guess so. Like I said, the more things change...

I'm going with him being a victim of a social assumption that black success is automatically restricted due to institutional and even sub-conscious racism, thus *not* voting for a black candidate is the equivalent of voting against him because of his skin color. Therefore voting *for* him is the opposite (meaning, your not voting for him based on his skin color, but for his other qualifications). I, and most conservatives, find this line of reasoning absolutely moronic.




Yes, because, as I stated above, this is a trait common among liberals, but rare among conservatives. So him stating this thought process was shocking to me. If any of my liberal friends had said the same thing, I'd have just accepted it as the normal liberal dementia with regard to issues of race and moved on.

But he read about a guy who knows a guy who saw a guy who read a book! Research!

The next time you think "that conservative just doesn't understand the issue", you might want to consider that maybe he actually understands it better than you do, has taken more factors into consideration than you have, and is actually making a better assessment of the issue than you are.

On one hand, she did poll better after her last "also runner's" debate and is in the top ten so she might as well be allowed to join the front half of the pack. On the other hand, the only person that managed to really stand out during Fox's debate was Trump, and not for any political reason so it might be better to just avoid the actual debates and instead figure out another way to stay just relevant enough to remain in the running until the field shrinks to four to six people. On yet another hand, her most notable achievement was to run HP into the ground and is starting at a minimum of 30,000 vote deficit.

You could also hear a pin drop during the conference when he said it, until the audience was prompted to cheer. Pretty clear that Trumps primary support comes from people who just want to stick it to the establishment (just in case the crowds boos upon mention of the RNC chairman didn't already clue you in). Interesting that this seems to be a common theme at this stage in the process. Carson is in second place. Really?

I'm still holding out the assumption that as the actual primaries come nearer, this "buck the establishment" trend will fade away. We'll see though.