The Politics Thread

[SFK]

My great uncle was a delegate in Prince George's County. While a democrat, he and many of his friends in P.G. and up in Annapolis were essentially Dixiecrats... old, white, and more than a little bit racist. With his bad octogenarian knees, he hopped into his S-class Mercedes and quipped that he had to make it to the polls to cancel out his daughter's Obama vote. I know we're historically blue, but being a MoCo resident living in a D.C. burb surrounded by open minded liberals, I think it's easy to be out of touch with the true mindset of the collective state. I bet there are a lot of people who think like my uncle, and who are unfortunately a fraction of his age.

[Max]

It's really sad that despite being president for six years, there is no admission by anyone here that Obama has any responsibility for the county's current malaise.

First, note that while the "deficit" may have been cut in half, the debt has gone up 99.8% during Obama's presidency:

http://www.factcheck.org/2014/04/obamas-numbers-april-2014-update/

For those who like to brag about the unemployment numbers, you also might want to keep in mind the fact that participation in the labor market is at it's lowest level since the Carter Administration. And many of those who have found new jobs have had to settle for less pay than what they had in their old ones.

Not everything about ObamaCare is bad, but the public hated being lied to by the president when he promised that people could keep their plans if they wanted to. They also despised the fact that a leader as cold as Nancy Pelosi made a statement to the effect that health care reform legislation had to be passed as soon as possible, so there was no time to read the bill or debate it until after ObamaCare became law.

While I am glad that some new people are getting health insurance, a lot of people--myself included--are now paying a lot more for health care than before. And some of those who enrolled in ObamaCare exchanges have only done so because their companies (such as Wal-Mart or Home Depot) dropped coverage for certain employees.

Yes, we are not in a depression, but this has been such a painfully slow recovery in terms of the things that really matter (despite the fact that the Obama machine and their media allies have been breathless spinning the "Recovery Summer" bullshit ever since 2010). In terms of the idiotic pie-in-the-sky hype that tens of millions of Americans (and billions worldwide) were duped into believing back in 2008, Mr. Obama falls far short of his own standards for presidential greatness.

(Just to clarify, I don't think that everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 was duped into drinking the Kool-Aid, as obviously a lot of his support was the result of loyal Democrats--including Hillary supporters--voting the party line or the result of swing voters wanting to repudiate Bush and the Republicans or the result of swing voters not wanting to put McCain and particularly Palin in power. But I don't think that I exaggerated when I stated that tens of millions of Americans--and billions of people all around the world--bought into the incredibly absurd hype that Obama would be some sort of savior. While I understand the pride and historical importance involved in electing the first African-American president, I will personally never understand how anyone could think that the election of any one person, particularly somebody as inexperienced as Obama, was going to be the answer to our problems.)

Edited November 6, 2014 by Max

[Max]

Jane, the United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates of any country in the industrialized world (so they are still paying a lot in taxes even with those tax breaks to which alluded). Unlike with individuals, you really can't penalize a corporation with a high tax bill, since they are better equipped to save money elsewhere. Given the selfishness of corporations (which is a liberal belief I actually concur with), it should be no surprise that they will try to regain the money they lose through taxation by outsourcing, by raising prices on consumers, or perhaps by doing something as extreme as what Burger King did, which was to acquire Tim Hortons and relocate its corporate headquarters to Canada.

I personally don't believe that supply-side economics is a panacea, and we recently have seen some Republicans (such as Jeb Bush) who have been willing to fight this Grover Norquist type of mentality. On the other hand, President Obama--in a lame attempt to appear bi-partisan--appointed the well-respected Simpson-Bowles Commission, which recommended revenue increases along with cuts in entitlements as the necessary solution to balance the budget. Yet either because he wanted to appease the far-left or because that advice went against his own rigid ideological beliefs, the president refused to go along with the commission's recommendations regarding entitlement reforms.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Max

[DRW50]

The state legislature isn't likely to pass that type of legislation. It was a huge fight, a very ugly one, to get the legislation for gay marriage on the ballot. I don't think they'll want to revisit it.

[Eric83]

I was shocked to see Brown only had the majority vote in one county in the entire state. Some ladywas on MSNBC saying he had all the DC suburbs on lock.

[DRW50]

Media darling Mia Love, who will likely be pushed as a "face" of the party, struggles with the spotlight.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/11/05/cnn-hosts-have-baffling-conversation-with-utah-congresswoman-elect-mia-love-on-race-and-gender/?tid=pm_opinions_pop

In a great year, she only barely won in spite of a district drawn for Republicans and a heavy push. Considering it's Utah, I'm not surprised. I have a feeling she's going to end up being transferring to FOX News soon unless 2016 is better for her.

National Review tells McConnell not to do anything, just make sure Obama fails. Considering he's been doing this for 6 years, I'm sure that won't be difficult.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/national-review-gop-should-not-govern

Edited November 6, 2014 by DRW50

[DRW50]

More about Maryland.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/campaign-2014/bs-md-how-hogan-won-20141105-story.html

[Max]

That's a great article. At least Martha Coakley can take comfort in knowing that she wasn't the worst politician of the year.

I am still surprised that Dan Malloy won in CT. Although it's one of the country's most Democratic states, I have no idea why Tom Foley couldn't pull out a win in this climate.

[DRW50]

I guess the state just didn't feel that wave. There are two seriously competitive Congressional districts in CT, and Democrats narrowly held them (they used to belong to Chris Shays and Nancy Johnson, moderate Republicans, until the late 00s).

I doubt this helped.

http://ctmirror.org/a-tom-foley-press-conference-goes-awry-in-sprague/

Sometimes a candidate is just too messy. That's why I thought Bruce Rauner would lose, but he pulled through.

Did Republicans do better than you expected or about what you expected?

[Max]

They did about as well in the Senate as I thought they would. However, after initially thinking that Nunn would defeat Purdue, my final prediction was that the race wouldn't be decided until a runoff. Although Tillis' small margin of victory was expected, he should have won by a much larger margin given the fact that NC was the only purple state Romney won. (Given the lackluster campaign he ran, I am guessing that he will be a one-term Senator.) And while I never once doubted that McConnell and Cotton would win, I have no idea why the polls failed so miserably when it came to predicting their landslide margins of victory. But the biggest shock of any Senate race was the extremely poor showing on the part of Mark Warner. No serious political analyst of which I am aware seemed to think he would be in any danger against a GOP hack such as Ed Gillespie.

I think that the House and gubernatorial results took everybody, myself included, by surprise. It appears that the GOP will have its biggest House majority since the first two years of the Hoover presidency. After "fangate," I thought that Rick Scott would lose for sure (but I give you a lot of credit for correctly predicting that he would win). While the Maine gubernatorial race was always competitive, Paul LePage was seldom, if ever, ahead in the polls. Scott Walker seemed to be in serious trouble for the past six months, but I thought he would squeak by in the end. Given the fact that Wisconsin is a lot more blue than purple, I have no idea how he managed to win so handily. As I mentioned earlier, I got my prediction for CT wrong. I was almost wrong about MA as well, and was surprised that Martha Coakley did better than most though she would. I felt Illinois was my riskiest prediction; I thought that Bruce Rauner would win despite being behind in most polls simply because Pat Quinn was so unpopular. Finally, I was shocked that Wendy Davis tanked so badly in Texas. Although that race's outcome was never in doubt, she received such glowing national media attention back in 2013, and Texas is also a state (I believe) in which non-Hispanic whites are in the minority. Thus, there really is no excuse for her horrendous performance.

I would be most interested to know which results surprised you the most.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Max

[quartermainefan]

Wait Max, you--a republican--are complaining about deficit spending? The whole Reagan religion is built on deficit spending, creating deficits out of whole cloth all so tax breaks could be given to the rich. George Bush Sr. called it Voodoo Economics, and for the past 35 years this has been the very foundation of conservative economic thought.

The debt is up but that isn't going to come down til surpluses start coming--something we had under Bill Clinton but republicans decided what was needed was yet another round of tax cuts, turning the surplus into deficits presto chango,

[JaneAusten]

^^

I live in Illinois. I am not sure what polls were being looked at, but for the majority of the campaign Rauner was ahead of Quinn in the polls and it didn't really become a dead heat until the past week or so. Yet had the turnout in Cook County been as it was last go around, Quinn would have won again. I had no dog in the race, Quinn is a generally decent and ethical man(unusual for a democrat in Illinois) but the Leader of the house in Illinois has been in place for 40 years and if you can't work with him, you get nothing done. Quinn's biggest negative was that he fought to keep the tax increases in place because the state is basically broke as is the state retirement fund, to try and help get these things back on their feet. The tax increase is scheduled to roll back to the original rate next year. But he didn't really have any other measures to implement to help fix the state debt.

Rauner doesn't impress me. The last good governor this state had was Jim Edgar, a republican (more a Nixon-like republican than Reagan, and I don't mean paranoid and delusional, but very moderate, pragmatic, and a hard worker. He was able to work with the legislature and get things done. No one since him has done a darn thing. But Edgar was not a billionaire and was very much a compromiser. Rauner has no political experience and I can't see him getting anything done with the current legislature.

As for Scott Walker frankly I get it but I don't. He did increase the state's bond status, no easy feat, but the fact that Wisconsin is dead last in job creation should have cost him more. His opponent is a respected democrat who has a very good reputation, yet she ran a weak campaign which lose momentum in the last 2 weeks before the election.

Edited November 6, 2014 by JaneAusten

[JaneAusten]

I am not bragging about the umemployment numbers but this idea that the country is in worse shape economically like the republicans want us to believe is total bullshit. And you must have missed when I said that even the programs Franklin Roosevelt implemented to help the country during the depression didn't substantially change things economically. What it did was built our country's current infrastructure, something you by the way enjoy today, and gave people a paycheck but mostly gave people hope, something the republicans seem to not give a damn about. They operate on fear not hope. And it's this current generation. I may not have liked Reagan, but he never promoted his agenda by capitalizing on fear and using scare tactics.

And if you don't understand why Obama's election instilled and energized many and led to lofty expectations, they you really don't understand people or our social climate. It's called having hope. Of course Obama never was going to be able to meet those expectations and I actually do hold him responsible for a lot of the problems. Had he had the same ability to relate to the populus as Bill Clinton had, perhaps he could have made his case to the public and had the same public support that Clinton had.

I am not even going to get into the discussion about the big "taxes" corporations pay in the United States or how the poor billionaires who live here have to pay through the nose. Some of these corporations, like the pharmacy corporations for example, also charge the United States consumer ungodly rates compared to elsewhere in the world, so you'll have to forgive me for not feeling a lot of pity for big corporations.

it's sad. I consider myself a moderate, not a liberal. But nothing this current republican party stands for anymore has any appeal. They can't even claim to be the party of fiscal conservatism anymore, something I did support at one time.

And the last thing is why do the republicans never want to discuss the fact that trickle down doesn't and hasn't been shown to work. The past four years, big corporations have increased their cash substantially but where has this investment translated into new jobs? Isn't that the premise behind trickle down. Yet statistics still indicate that the majority of new jobs added are added through small businesses.

Edited November 6, 2014 by JaneAusten

[DramatistDreamer]

Have you ever heard Tom Foley speak? That would be one indication perhaps of why he lost.

Interesting that some of the candidates who didn't run away from Obama like he had Ebola managed to keep their positions.

[marceline]

What I find more interesting, shocking actually, is how well gun control candidates and measures did. The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence has been doing handsprings.

Edited November 6, 2014 by marceline