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As a progressive, I hate it, but I have to disagree.
Bluntly, Obama's record is that of a centrist with some leftward tilting ideas. As it happens, he's in tune enough with the public 'vibe' of the country that the leftist ideas he has happen to be one's the country is finally ready for, but it took eight years of paleo-conservatism to drive the country to this point.
The problem is the nature of Conservatism and Liberalism. Conservatism is, in most circumstances, a deeper base than liberalism - because it is after all, by definition, about being invested in the status quo (In extreme cases, in the *old* status quo), where liberalism is about looking for something better than the status quo. So it's not until the status quo becomes obviously unhealthy for a *lot* of people that start going "This isn't working for me, and it needs to be better" that liberalism gets really rolling.
The 'pendulum' effect of "Conservative to centrist to Liberal to centrist to Conservative ..." isn't really true - look at your history, and the great liberal reforms don't tend to follow a centrist era that followed a conservative era - they follow deeply conservative era's when those that were invested in 'the way things are' had enough power to ignore and push aside those that disagree . . . for awhile. But like a spring being held down while the clock is still running, tension tends to build up, and then you have a sudden release of energy all at once.
Then, after a time, the new arrangement becomes the new 'status quo', weight shifts slowly back to the right, until sufficient energy builds up enough to dismount the *new* conservatives that will be holding back progress. Yes, some day you and I will be old corrupt men that don't want to see these young punks that have no idea what the heck they're talking about ruin everything good and pure that we helped to build because they *think* they have some better idea. Heck - I hate those arrogant 'lil shitheads already . .
Gimme a minute - I gotta go beat up a third grader. Egotistical knowitall punk, probably thinks he's gonna go to harvard someday.
So yeah, I don't think we're suddenly a center left nation - I think we just had conservatives in charge of everything for twenty of the last twenty-eight years, with predictable results - {G}.
Which doesn't mean I don't hope to make hay while I can - {G}.
Jonnan
You do know it was those damned neanderthal republicans that ended slavery, segregation, and let everyone vote, right?
Not that I mind laughing my ass off at idiot democrats that are so proud of their racist, segregationist party, but you really should get a clue on which side of the spectrum has been backwards. The democratic party shit themselves big time when Wilson backed the suffrage amendment, not that they weren't shitting themselves before he backed it too. The bill was going to fail, with overwhelming republican support and few democrats, everyone wave to the democratic party! The joys of states leading the way. Revisionist history can be quite entertaining.
Wrong. Not that I blame you, the media is truly horrible. First, you missed the obvious, something the news actually did report. Niether were top issues, the economy dominated all others.
On education, the voters want vouchers, big time. This has been polled numerous times by agencies from all spectrums. The politicians want to protect the NEA from their inevitable destruction following a nationwide voucher system. Do explain how that free market, union crushing blow to the government monopoly on schools is at all liberal? It would end public school dominance, permanently.
On healthcare, the voters want the fictitious horror scenarios to be avoided. The politicians make up the fictitious horror stories. There are no poor people being thrown out on the street to die because they don't have health insurance. The hospital eats the bill and the government cuts them a check on a regular basis to make up the costs and keep them operating in the black. They go to jail for refusing treatment of a life threatening problem, and public hospitals aren't allowed to turn away anyone.
Habitual lying makes a population liberal not, just stupid and gullible. Like the farce about people eating canned pet food because they were poor. If you've half a wit, it's an obvious lie, dog food is too expensive to eat because you're poor. You'd eat cheaper buying steak than some of the canned cat food. Fortunately for Clinton, most people haven't. Naturally, the crazy old people that eat dog and cat food because they're fucking bonkers didn't get talked about once he took office.
How nice of you to bring them up. Did you know we pay the costs of their pharmaceuticals? The assholes in Australia and France that shaft the companies by forcing them to charge less than their market value only get to do it because not everyone does it.
Once everyone does, there wont be any pharmaceutical companies. Now they could use a patent overhaul, but good luck getting that through congress, they donate nearly as much as the copyright holders do. For the US and the rest of them to pay the same costs as Australia and France do, we'd put every last one of the research companies in the red. No more new drugs every couple years. I'm sure you can do the math, 35% profit margins and 80% lower prices.
Australia and France don't have that great healthcare either. When the liberal idiots are talking about how great Australia is, they conveniently forget to mention that 400k+ natives have almost no health care at all, and that the rural areas have to be airvaced out for anything beyond a general practitioner. They're also in more of a bind for doctor and nurse shortages. When they're talking about France, they conveniently forget that France is on the verge of collapse despite having lousy care. In this country, 15,000 people don't die during a heat wave. When they get sick and go to the hospital, 20% of the doctors aren't out on vacation either.
Yeah, the news is worthless. Yeah, the waste needs cut out of the military, not that we're spending too much, it's just getting pissed away on crap when we have a grunt shortage and 30 year old jets in service. I'd love to stop playing world police, but then you hippy liberals want to go muck around every time some third world putz starts killing people, so what's the point? Never mind that we're feeding nearly a billion people that wont feed themselves and causing the mass poverty that leads to the genocide in the first place. If we're going to have our ass on the line every time a place goes to hell, I don't see why we should wait until things have gone to hell and your consciences start bothering you for entirely invalid reasons.
You might even be right about the bases, although I trust Russia farther than I can throw a polar bear by just a little. Putin isn't a Stalin, but he's not a Yeltsin either. His people wont have to support the end results to go along with the stated goals till they have no choice in the matter. This isn't a peaceful world we're in, it's one real capable of being in WW3 inside a decade without even trying hard. Europe flat can't defend themselves, even against the new and improved, sucks monkey nuts Russian military. If it happens, our bases will be the only immediate response. The dude really wants his empire back, and he can take it back without even trying if we get out of the way.
Idiots decide the last war they went through is the last one they'll ever be in on a regular basis. The only constant so far is that the next big one makes the last one look small, and doesn't take very long to happen.
What I find hilarious is that anyone thinks these issues decide an election. Simple statistical models of the economy, taking into account things like which party is in power and how long they've been there, can predict the outcome of an election with startling accuracy. I took a stats class in 2000 or so that addressed this very issue. I can't think of the name of the model we used, but I remember the model had missed a prediction only twice since 1900; those would be Roosevelt's thrid and fourth terms. Not only does it predict who will win, but the percentages are very close as well. This election could have been called as soon as the stock market tanked.
Don't believe me? Read some of the exit poll returns from this year, see how often the war shows up as the most important issue.
How is winning by 6.7% popular vote a landslide?
There's a good listing of presidential vote margins --> here (Warning, for reasons I don't quite get, the site shows Democrats as red, GOP Blue - I'm sure If I delved into it there's a reason but I haven't bothered - just be aware he flips the usual colors.)
As you can see, although you can argue about things like how to count third party candidates et al, in general Obama has the best margins in raw numbers since since 1988 - nothing like the 1984 Reagan election of course, but I believe that was the largest ever. Moreover Obama had longer coattails than even Reagan did - the 1984/1988 elections won quite handily at the presidential level, but not so much downticket - Congress stayed more-or-less static till 1994.
I wouldn't call it a 'huge' landslide, but it is the largest margin in a generation, and one of the broadest shifts in terms of affecting downticket races so it's not unreasonable to call it 'a' landslide.
As far as statistical modeling goes - You also should remember that 'only twice' since 1900 is not a good statistical base - I could be wrong, but I suspect your model was produced in the 1950's to 1970's era (When Game Theory, where most of these models came out of, was producing the most papers - I could be wrong, but I'll bet dollars to donuts it was first published 'in' 1972 plus or minus six years) - so what your saying in principle is that it successfully 'predicted' past events, and not with 100% accuracy then. I'd be interested in seeing the actual model of course, but more to see how much tweaking of it there has been behind the scenes.
Above and beyond that - although I'm skeptical of numbers at 92% prediction, yeah, People are pretty predictable in large numbers. But your assumption that a statistical probablility indicates a disconnect between the issues and the results seem like an odd presumption - as if the economy tanking was completely unrelated to the policies of the government, education policy, healthcare plans, et al. Those polcies are highly related to the very things that moved people to vote the GOP out of power.
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November 13th 2008, at 12:24 AM2psychoak
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Some of the horror stories are true. I know from personal experience. I was working and had insurance when I went to a doctor for a problem I had. The doctor looked me over and told me I needed an oncologist (cancer specialist). After calling five doctors about an appointment and gettting turned down, I finally got a sympathetic nurse who clued me in.
The basic problem was my insurance. It didn't cover enough. I followed her advice and went to a public hospital. I checked in at 8 AM on a Friday morning. Someone finally checked on me at 11 PM that evening. Oops, someone else needed to see me. Finally, at 5 AM someone did. They checked me in to the hospital for a biopsy. No food since they might need to use an anesthetic. Then I ran into the problem that all of the surgery rooms kept getting filled with trauma victims. They finally performed the biopsy in my hospital room at 11 AM Wednesday.
Keep in mind that I had a small insurance policy. They charged for meals, meds, and the room the whole time. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how they could charge for meals, since they would not let me eat anything. Needless to say, before they let me out I hit the cap on the insurance.
Yep, I had cancer. When they told me that they said they would call me back with an appointment. It took three months, and the cancer kept geting larger the whole time. When I finally wound up getting in for the appointment, the doctor started me on chemo and said I needed radiation treatment too. After another three months, I finally got referred to another hospital. There the doctor told me that if I had come in earlier, the treatment would not have been nearly as dangerous.
I'm still alive, so I guess you are right about public hospitals being required to treat people. But I do beg to differ with you anyway. There is treatment and then there is treatment. I had an almost worthless insurance policy, but I did have one. I still think that they could have done the biopsy in my room a LOT sooner than they did. I've always wondered if they waited as long as they did to make sure that they could get everything that the policy would pay.
So, there are problems for low income people.
Well, this kind of ranting was fair enough up into the mid-'80s or so, but the racist segregationists who are still living have pretty much all switched to the GOP (or gone to wacko militia-land) or sincerely recanted their past positions and done political work to back up their words (e.g. Robert Byrd). And while we're slinging sloppy historical talk, Lincoln was a bone-deep racist. His Emancipation Proclamation was not done out of any belief that black folks were "just people" like white folks. It was a wartime tactic that helped them win and fit with northern industrialist ideology--wage slaves are more efficient than chattel slaves. Lincoln himself hoped that free blacks would somehow all end up back in Africa.
The women's vote thing, though, I'll pretty much give you. But really, the big chunk of credit there goes to the folks out West, where women were understood as fully capable beings because life during our expansion out there didn't leave much time for building pedestals and wearing hoop skirts. IIRC, the first female in Congress was from out there (Wyoming?), and she took her seat before national women's suffrage.
I'm still alive, so I guess you are right about public hospitals being required to treat people. But I do beg to differ with you anyway. There is treatment and then there is treatment. I had an almost worthless insurance policy, but I did have one. I still think that they could have done the biopsy in my room a LOT sooner than they did. I've always wondered if they waited as long as they did to make sure that they could get everything that the policy would pay. So, there are problems for low income people.
How's it feel to be a legend in your own time!
Sorry, but I sympathize. I know, if it wasn't for the VA hospital system, I had a few episodes where basic healthcare costs would have killed me financially - I was working full time, at jobs that were considered (moderately) decent wages, but had no coverage at all.
Lord knows the VA is not the perfect system, but the doctors do care (They're harried, overworked, and looking for a better job because they have to pay off their school loans too, but they do care.), and having access meant medical expenses didn't take me under either.
I have very good insurance now, and I'm glad to have it, but I haven't the foggiest how people with no insurance make it. Well, yeaf I do - they let it go until they have to show up at a public hospital and the public has to pay $50,000 for something that could have been treated for $1,000 six months before.Or they die.
That's what I don't get about the screams of 'omg . . . IT'S *SOCIALISM*' - Hey, sometimes it's less expensive to just say "Hey, we're going to deal with this up front when we can do it cheaply, rather than hold off dealing with it till it's expensive." I mean, hey, if we accidently help 51 people for $1,000 each by fixing stuff before it becomes a problem, I can live with that, but most studies show you actually save money doing it up front.
For those that are actually interested in the facts and nitty gritty of different healthcare systems, there's a very good Frontline that goes over the healthcare systems of the U.K., Taiwan, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, advantages and disadvantages of each, warts and all.
There's a lot to be learned from how other people handle the same problems.
It is actually kinda interesting because, when you look at history both parties have done almost a reversal in there party lines
i think that where he was going anyways
I think the election wuz kinda reminiscent of Kennedy/Nixon WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYY back when.
For Nixon, you had experience, and reliability.
For Kennedy, you had looks and promises...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Kennedy win?
Koda0
Mmmmm....and what happened to Kennedy?
personally I didnt think either president candidates was actually going to make through the full term
This is a dumb place to discuss politics, by the way. Games like this are supposed to be an escape from reality....or as close as you can get to reality when discussing politics, which isn't very close at all.
Come to think of it maybe this IS the perfect place to discuss politics, as games and politics both seem to be based on attention grabbing fictions.
Carry on.
Sounds like someone did watch Sicko?
Well, to clear up some myths this documentary put into place about Europe:
Now, about the situation. Some socialism has always been part of European political landscape since the second world war. It has served us well to get some services, like healthcare, up to high quality standards and it did not turn us into communist states. Basically every country in the civilized world is struggling to get healthcare costs under control, Europe is not different from the U.S. in that way. The main issue is that the U.S. system is a lot less cost efficient than the European systems, Americans pay way more for less care, and therefore the best healthcare is unaffordable for many. A state-run system is not necessarily more efficient. As I view it, the U.S. indeed needs a new system and may look at the most successfull healthcare systems in Europe (France, Germany), but moving to a more social system is not the main improvement to make, getting the costs of healthcare under control is.
I strongly disagree with your labeling the left as 'progressive' (one look at human history will reveal that ideas on the 'right' are far more progressive). 'Right' ideas (read: NOT Republican ideas) are ideas supporting more individual freedom and less government control. This is where America comes from. Over the last 225 years, the experiment that is America has proven without a doubt that these ideas, which were once labeled radical themselves, and still largely are, work, and that leftist, statist ideas do not. This is further proven by the pattern of the last century. The more statist, big government solutions are implemented, the further we are from the prosperous nation we once were.
Before this century in America, and in most of the world even now, 'conservative' and 'libertarian' small government ideas are called 'liberal' ideas. The fact is that the statists have, over the last century, branded themselves as 'liberal progressives' when that is exactly the opposite of what they are.
Additionally, and more importantly, I stronlgy disagree with your overall conjecture that Americans are left of center. I think they're still right of center, and that Americans did not vote pro democrat this election cycle, but anti-republican. Republicans have betrayed the American trust, doing the opposite of what they said they would when Bush ran the first time, and abandoning their old small government ideals. I certainly don't think that this election proved that Americans are pro government social programs, less individual liberty, et al. Americans continue to value their freedom to choose rather than government solutions.
Democrats did not deserve to win, Republicans deserved to lose.