Trump

Leo

Leo

Well-known member
if you insist on denying the fact that clintons have been the most scrutinized politicians of the past 25 years and there is no indication that things will change in the future, then yes i agree, we have very different views.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Ross Douthat has a good article in the NYT today that touches on a lot of this:

VOTE for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign has suggested... isn’t just a vote for a Democrat over a Republican: It’s a vote for safety over risk, steady competence over boastful recklessness, psychological stability in the White House over ungovernable passions.

This theme has been a winning one for Hillary... and for good reason. The perils of a Trump presidency are as distinctive as the candidate himself...

Indeed, Trump and his supporters almost admit as much. “We’ve tried sane, now let’s try crazy,” is basically his campaign’s working motto... Some of his more eloquent supporters have analogized a vote for Trump to storming the cockpit of a hijacked plane, with the likelihood of a plane crash entirely factored in.

But passing on the plane crash candidate doesn’t mean ignoring the dangers of his rival.

The dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency are more familiar than Trump’s authoritarian unknowns, because we live with them in our politics already. They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn't recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

Almost every crisis that has come upon the West in the last 15 years has its roots in this establishmentarian type of folly. The Iraq War, which liberals prefer to remember as a conflict conjured by a neoconservative cabal, was actually the work of a bipartisan interventionist consensus, pushed hard by George W. Bush but embraced as well by a large slice of center left opinion that included Tony Blair and more than half of Senate Democrats.

Likewise the financial crisis: Whether you blame financial services deregulation or happy go lucky housing policy (or both), the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment. Likewise with the euro, the European common currency,*a terrible idea that only cranks and Little Englanders dared oppose until the Great Recession exposed it as a potentially economy sinking folly. Likewise with Angela Merkel’s grand and reckless open borders gesture just last year: She was the heroine of a thousand profiles even as she delivered her continent to polarization and violence.

This record of elite folly — which doesn’t even include lesser case studies like our splendid little war in Libya — is a big part of why the United States has a “let’s try crazy” candidate in this election, and why there are so many Trumpian parties thriving on European soil.
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
despite some spin here and there, much of that is probably true. but it's a moot point when the real-world alternative is the plane crash.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
vimothy said:
Another phrase whose meaning I take a different view of.
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my understanding is it's a point that's open to discussion/debate but of little or no practical value, purely academic. what's the alternative meaning?
 
droid

droid

Well-known member
Given the aggregated polls at the moment, it would be the worst polling disaster in history if Trump wins. Its also beginning to look like he may do serious damage to GOP votes.
 
Leo

Leo

Well-known member
craner, believe me i understand how you feel but wonder if the "too confident" story line is more a catchy media interpretation of a candidate who's opened up a lead as opposed to what's really happening in hillary's camp. looking at her schedule, she's not slacking off, been non-stop since the last debate in ohio, penn., north carolina and florida, trying to rev up the base and help down ballot democratic candidates. and i know someone who knows people on team clinton in brooklyn and apparently they've been even more focused on winning as she's pulled away.

as we saw with the debates, she's notorious for over preparing. i can't imagine someone with that mindset would come this far and then take her foot off the gas with less than two weeks left.

the other factor i've mentioned upthread is clinton has a pretty strong, targeted get-out-the-vote ground game compared to almost nothing on the ground for trump. in florida alone, she has 32 offices and he has zero. actually having people on the ground to help get people out to vote on election day was key to obama's two wins, and hillary has much the same network in place.

hope that calms your nerves a bit. ;)
 
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
Mr. Tea said:
Aaargh, now you're doing it!
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ha...my bad, anxiety is the best medicine.

a friend just posted this on FB, probably how a lot of us feel:

Just mailed my absentee ballot. I voted for Hillary. It felt a lot like sex with a condom. No pleasure at all, but at least i'm taking prudent precautions against a screaming baby in my life.
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Leo

Leo

Well-known member
droid said:
Given the aggregated polls at the moment, it would be the worst polling disaster in history if Trump wins. Its also beginning to look like he may do serious damage to GOP votes.
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the polls continue to have hillary up but two things make it unsettling. one is some battleground races have actually tightened in the last week within the margin of error. seems incredible considering the shit time trump's had the past few weeks but he has gained a few points here and there.

the other thing is some state polls vary wildly: she's up 12 points in one nevada poll and ahead by just two points in another one, so it's hard to feel confident that you really know where things stand. and then there's the dreaded "silent trump voter", those who are supposedly too embarrassed to tell a pollster they are voting for trump but will do so in the privacy of the voting booth. no way to know if that's a myth or not, there are plenty of online polls that are anonymous but still.

but even with all of that, trump needs to run the table on all romney states and all the big swing states (florida, ohio, north carolina, pennsylvania) in order to get to 266, THEN he still needs to win somewhere else that's not even currently a toss up state to reach 270. very uphill climb, but not impossible.
 
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