juppiter

Romney's loss kind of reminds me of the failure of "Life with Lucy." The audience laughed at everything she did just because she was Lucille Ball and Lucille Ball was a goddess. But when the show actually went on air audiences didn't find it funny at all. The Romney campaign was so insulated by pundits saying that the polls were wrong and biased toward Obama that he never saw the inevitable coming. I almost, ALMOST, feel bad for him. In the slightest. Like in Precious when Mary beat her daughter for years and years and allowed her boyfriend to rape Precious repeatedly, but when Monique gives that amazing performance and says, "Who was gonna love me?" and you ALMOST kinda feel for her... that is how I feel.

Right but look at Kirsten Gillibrand winning with 70+% of the vote in New York. She has gotten more popular in the past couple years because she fought for the bill to give health coverage to 9/11 rescue workers, but she went from nobody to Senator in 2009. There was talk of her getting a primary challenge in 2010. Now she gets 70% of the vote? It's because of the D next to her name. My thought (and likely, Rick Berg's thought as well) was that Rick Berg did not have to be remarkable because he had an R next to his name. Heidi Heitkamp's feat is remarkable.

There were few surprises for me because I was following Nate Silver and he went 50 for 50 this time. The biggest shocker for me-- the one that NOBODY predicted-- was Heidi Heitkamp winning in North Dakota. I knew she was running an amazing campaign there and she was making it closer than anybody else could have, but I thought the narrative would be that as well as she was doing it was just too far a reach for any Democrat to win that seat. She is proof that even in today's hyper-polarized electorate, "all politics is local" can still be true when you've got the right candidate. She related to the voters and made them like her in a year that everyone said a Democrat could not be elected in North Dakota. Wow.

Are you serious? That's my favorite thing of the whole night. Payback for Bush. I love that FoxNews has suddenly decided it does not like the electoral vote. I have been watching Fox all night and it is great.

The meltdowns on FoxNews have been even sweeter than I ever pictured them being. Someone just complained about the popular vote not mattering. No, really. LOL.

Y'all forget that in the age of twitter and facebook the media cannot unilaterally draw this out. Sure they did in the past month or so but on Tuesday they cannot. What I see, as a Democrat, is cautious Democrats who have been put through the ringer and have learned to expect the Democratic Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I condemn Maher's remarks, Brian, as I'm sure you condemn birtherism. Both are equally ugly. As for your question, I don't foresee an Obama loss. If he does lose, it's because he failed to articulate his message in the past four years. He failed to walk the American people through what he was doing. The fact that some Republicans are now calling the pending sequester the "Obama sequester" shows how this administration from day 1 has failed to frame the message correctly. If and when Obama wins he owes a big thank you to Bill Clinton for framing his message in Charlotte better than he ever did.

Agreed, and it is the reason I don't think we should ever go to war again without a draft. No way Iraq would've lasted 8 years and Afghanistan 11+ years if we had a draft.

It IS true though. Why are these laws coming out in an election year after the Repugs were swept into power into various state houses in 2010? Why are states limiting early voting days? You never heard about widespread voter fraud and suddenly this is a huge issue in a number of states? Does not compute unless you reach the reasonable conclusion that it is being done to keep likely Democratic voters from the polls. They stole Florida in 2000 with the purge and aborted recount there and they are trying to steal even more states this time. It's interesting how you will read novels and encylopedias into Barack Obama's motivations, Brian, but not for one second question alterior motives about the Voter ID Law trend.

That is why I post here and at my other website. I get the liberal circle jerk here and the fight against the conservative circle jerk there. If there is a moderate msg board I haven't found it.

To me the election is down to three states -- WI, NH, and VA. I'm confident that IA, NV, and OH are for Obama and that NC, CO, and FL are for Romney. And I never thought there were other swing states besides those 9.

I think you misunderstand Max. It's not that Obama hasn't governed from the center, since he has (if he is sooo socialist where is the minimum wage increase and protectionism and collective farms and vast expansion of social security and nationalization of healthcare and oil and etc.) That article is simply stating that Romney positioned himself as a centrist in the DEBATE better than Obama did. I think Romney is to the left of the mainstream Republican party and I would not consider his presidency such a potential disaster if it weren't for the far-right Republicans in the House whose voices I fear would win out in a Romney presidency. Also reading the past page or so I love the liberal circle jerk that is SON. My other politics msg board is city-data.com and it's mostly conservative... it is fun being the minority but only to a point.

Pure hypocrisy. We criticize Putin for rigging the vote in Russia but try to avoid the same level of scrutiny to avoid having that happen here.

I actually agree with your list Max, maybe switch WI and NH.

Obama was so ~on~ tonight it makes me wonder if he threw the first debate on purpose.

It almost makes me wonder why Republicans do not endorse gay marriage as that is the only demographic that is increasingly getting married lmao.

The whole marriage rant by Romney was a severe blunder. There was a time a conservative could say that and come off well -- and that time was not so long ago. But now we have reached the point where it is not just minority babies born out of wedlock... it has become increasingly common among white babies as well. In this day and age, that was a far-right rant for a candidate who has been trying to re-position himself as a moderate. Otherwise good performance by both but I gotta say Obama did better as he had no serious gaffes like Romney's marriage rant.

Agreed Max, I don't think any of the debates matter as far as election day goes, but Obama IS killing it tonight.

Joe Arpaio keeps saying the birth certificate is a forgery. And obviously it is not overt racism; it is a vast right-wing conspiracy to make Barack Obama "different" from all previous presidents. Which he is different, but it's riding the line so as not to overtly imply that it's because he's black. Instead elected Republican officials and the Republican part of the mainstream media have created the Islam thing and the birther thing as ways to say black without saying black. Dunno, if you watch South Park, but there is an episode where Oprah, Will Smith, etc. move to town. The townspeople say they want the "richers" out, and succeed in getting them out without talking about race the entire episode; at the end Mr. Garrison proclaims, "At least we got rid of those nig--" and it cuts out. It's exactly like that. Of course you're allowed to say his middle name but I don't see people saying "George Walker Bush" or "William Jefferson Clinton" because it sounds weird. Why else would people constantly say Barack Hussein Obama if not to remind people of what his middle name is? I think it's selective memory on your part to say the health care law was rammed through. It was extremely difficult to get it passed and they ended up having to do a budget maneuver in order to even get the House and Senate to pass the same bills. It's not like they passed Obamacare on day 1 and then ignored the economy for two years. In fact at the time conservatives were even saying the maneuver used to pass Obamacare was illegal -- it was that hard to get ANYTHING passed thru congress at that time. Between the Repugs voting no on everything and filibustering routine bills, it was not an easy time to get bills passed at that time so the "2 years of complete control" is just not true. It had also been 20 years since health care reform was even attempted and it went down in shambles the first time. It was now or never to get any kind of health care legislation enacted and Barack Obama had learned (some of) his lesson from the Hillarycare debacle. When you say "find a way to control spending rather than figure out additional ways to blow the wad" you're failing to be objective. You have to realize, liberals see increased government spending as a way out of recession. You think the government needs to contain itself even during recession. So there's a fundamental disconnect there. The stimulus was our fiscal policy to contain the recession and achieve recovery. So really, it's not that you don't think Obama did enough for the economy, it's that you think what he did was not the correct solution and made our problems worse. I'm not making racism a moving target at all. Black people wanting to be represented by one of their own is as valid a reason as any, and causes no harm to the prospects of any white man becoming president. The first black president being railroaded by elected, mainstream Republicans because he "must be a muslim foreigner" is thinly-veiled racism that actively seeks to unite white voters against a foreign entity holding power over them, actively preventing blacks from pursuing further glass ceiling shatterings.

From day one the mainstream right has made his race an issue -- John McCain, to his credit, did not. But you had the Kansas Secretary of State, an elected Republican thus very much in the mainstream, trying to keep Obama off the ballot in Kansas. You have Joe Arpaio on his racist crusade in Arizona against not only anyone who looks Mexican but against Obama as well. You had the infamous "Obama invites Hip Hop stars to chill at the White House" article on Fox Nation. And also this lol : http://mediamatters.org/video/2010/04/14/fox-amp-friends-sees-muslim-image-in-logo-for-n/163159 . Michele Bachmann stated that the first black president was running a "Gangster Government." Choice words from her. Not to mention the way the mainstream right constantly refers to him as "Barack Hussein Obama." Why is his middle name important if you are not bringing race into the conversation? And I'm tired of hearing about the "two full years" of government control, when really you cannot do anything in the Senate without 60 votes these days and the Republican minority filibustered him every chance they got. I also object to this argument that just because we were in a Recession, he should have abstained from any legislation not relating to the economy. Then they would just be campaigning against him from "breaking his promise" on health care reform. Also, if you are going to state that he spent two years not doing enough for the economy, it is intellectually inconsistent to then state that the "gigantic, wasteful" trillion dollar stimulus was some awful thing. If that was not a massive-scale solution, whether you consider it good/successful or not, then it was just a drop of spit in the ocean. You can't have it both ways where you say he didn't do enough and then consider the stimulus a gigantic behemoth monster. It is racist to not vote for Obama because of his skin color. It means you don't believe a black man can lead the country -- that there is something un-American about being black. On the other hand, it is not racist to vote for Obama BECAUSE he is black. That is not discriminating against whites or saying you will never vote for a white president. We have had 43 white presidents already. Of course once a black option was available the vast majority of black people would vote for him to see one of their own in the Oval Office. There is nothing discriminatory or racist about that in the least.

The problem is that instead of condemning or ignoring the racism that the psychos fling at Obama, the mainstream right embraces it. For example Mitt Romney stating that he's never been asked for his birth certificate. And then elected Republicans trying to bar Obama from the ballot if he does not produce it. Never before we had a black president were birth certificates such an issue. The mainstream Republican Party flipping on ideas it once embraced and ignoring its own recent deficit spending is politicking. It has nothing to do with his race and they would've done the same [!@#$%^&*] if Hillary had been chosen. But all too often the mainstream right, which could ignore the whole birther thing, promotes and encourages it and does make things racial.

Although she was a "conservative", and I hate to use that term for a Supreme Court judge, I have the deepest respect for Sandra Day O'Connor. She fought to the death, in vain, to make the American public understand that the SCOTUS was not a political body. Her decisions were always based on her understanding of the Constitution and not the politics of the day. Judges like Scalia and Thomas constantly bring politics into the court and it just disgusts me and degrades what should be the most impartial apolitical institution we have.

I gotta say, history has written Quayle as a buffoon during the 1988 debate, but he is coming across as hopeful and proud of his country. I see none of the hatred that is the key ideal of today's Republican party.

Watching the 1988 Vice Presidential debate on C-SPAN. Dan Quayle just said he and Bush wanted to get rid of PACs... WOW. lol.

The one positive thing I can say about G. W. Bush is that when it was clear what a liability he was to the Republican Party he receded into obscurity. Kerry and Gore just. won't. die.