The Otherworldly Circus - The America Thread

[BrisDog]

Joe Biden's legacy going the way of RBG's?

Far worse

 

[Foxman98]

View attachment 2159937

Labor need to learn from the Democrats because Albo is Biden 2.0
(As in needs to step aside early)

 

[Pugz89]

Pretty decent article about some of the things that went wrong for the Democrats. And makes some good points. Like how Americans are tone deaf to some issues, and back feelings over facts. Which is why despite good results economically, border and job wise. It meant nothing to the voter.

I mean when yanks think inflation is caused by Biden and is an American only issue, I have no hope for any of them to understand how the real world works.

It covers the working class shift. The Democrats image problems. The double standards Trump could get away with, somehow he could lie and insult his way, and no one cared. The shift in the mentality of the way the general voter votes these days compared to past decades. Etc

And some of my own points.

Biden stepped aside way too late. Two months was always going to be a long climb for Harris. She flew out of the blocks, but stagnated after that, clawed back some lost momentum in the final days, but it was way too late.

Republicans were smart to avoid a second debate, as one more poor performance could have undone Trump. But they let the Democrats momentum fizz, kept everything at arms length, and kept hammering home their message.

The Democrats misread the youth, black, latin and women votes, as it was not heavily swayed towards the Democrats as was predicted.

Harris should have gone through the primaries. She dropped out before a single primary last time she was up for it. I seriously have my doubts she would have even finished inside the top two or three contenders if she ran this time around.

Democrats have NOT learned from their past mistakes. In regards to appealing to the working class, they struggled to shake the tag of the corporate Democrats, even though Trump did nothing for the working class last time. He made promises they like (like last time), and says things will get better. That is all they want to hear.

Harris was not the best candidate. But it was to late to nominate someone properly.

The Democrats need to reinvent themselves.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11...lenges-against-trump-in-us-election/104567702

The bolded are very interesting points.
Is she the first non incumbent candidate not to go through a full primary process and still get the nomination? Genuine question. She is certainly the first that I can recall in my short time of being interesting in US politics.

The corporate democrats will never shrug the corporate tag when they're getting Hollywood and the music industry to keep endorsing their candidates. I think the appeal of celebrity endorsements is well past its used by date.

 

[Royale]

Tackling the real issues of corporate greed in America. Trump team addressing the root causes.

 

[BEaston]

Tackling the real issues of corporate greed in America. Trump team addressing the root causes.

Hahhaha, yep spruiking people buy some useless goods within 10 seconds of the video.

MAGA/MAHA/USA - where people and their money are easily parted by grifters selling false hope to the masses.

 

[Royale]

Dem’s have been stuck in no man’s land for a long time and I can’t see them getting out of it anytime soon.

Becoming more and more difficult to get any traction in the party unless your ultra-liberal, yet won’t get near winning an election as an ultra-liberal.

They had an ultra liberal in Bernie but he lost the DNC nomination to Hillary in 2016. Was widely popular too but the stigma of the primaries being rigged for Hillary carries to this day.

Was the Democratic primary rigged?

Democrats made a big mistake in the 2016 primary.

www.vox.com

 

[Royale]

Hahhaha, yep spruiking people buy some useless goods within 10 seconds of the video.

MAGA/MAHA/USA - where people and their money are easily parted by grifters selling false hope to the masses.

That's all you take from it?

 

[BEaston]

That's all you take from it?

Correct. When your first line of a message is for people to buy your useless wares, what's the real message? I'd like to think I'm not a sucker for obvious grifts.

 

[Pugz89]

The bolded are very interesting points.
Is she the first non incumbent candidate not to go through a full primary process and still get the nomination? Genuine question. She is certainly the first that I can recall in my short time of being interesting in US politics.

The corporate democrats will never shrug the corporate tag when they're getting Hollywood and the music industry to keep endorsing their candidates. I think the appeal of celebrity endorsements is well past its used by date.

Tried to find info, and it seems pretty rare for someone to claim the nomination despite not actively campaigning through the full primary process.
According to Wikipedia, "Harris is the first Democratic nominee to be nominated despite not actively campaigning in the primaries since Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 United States presidential election."
That was before the current primary process was reformed, so it is pretty unprecedented.

 

[dogwatch]

Tried to find info, and it seems pretty rare for someone to claim the nomination despite not actively campaigning through the full primary process.
According to Wikipedia, "Harris is the first Democratic nominee to be nominated despite not actively campaigning in the primaries since Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 United States presidential election."
That was before the current primary process was reformed, so it is pretty unprecedented.

That didn’t end well for Humphrey either.

Nor for the USA for that matter. They elected Nixon.

 

[Werewolf]

Labor need to learn from the Democrats because Albo is Biden 2.0
(As in needs to step aside early)

Most election results these days boil down to a backlash against the incumbent. I couldn't see Dutton (for example) winning a federal election on merit.

 

[Royale]

Yep, Labor have done their level best to get themselves unelected in Victoria, and yet Libs still don't seem to be a great alternative even with all the financial mismanagement of the Andrews/Allan government.

 

[Norm De Guerre]

RFK's has lofty food and fitness goals that I can get behind in principle.

But to me his views always come across as those of a wealthy guy who has the advantage of being able to afford to shop exclusively at Whole foods for the highest quality individually packaged and wrapped produce. Without ever having to ever go to the likes of Walmart with its row upon row of cheap corn syrup reliant mass produced dreck. That the plebs have been steered towards since the end of WWII and the rise of cheap food and mass consumerism.

Anybody who has ever visited the U.S. could attest to how terrible the quality of that mass produced food and beverages with its heavy reliance of corn syrup is

Whether RFK ideals align with the reality of commercial farming needing enormous amounts of land and water to produce the food that requires fertiliser and pesticides to be viable enough to produce food at a scale high enough to feed 330 million people as well as producing a profitable surplus to export to the world. Let alone the equally destructive, enormous and intensive feedlots required to produce enough meat to meet those needs, remains to be seen.

I suspect that when the reality of governance, money, the corporate interests of Big Pharma and Ag, feeding the nation and Trumps policy of "Drill baby Drill!!!" come into sharp focus.

That Trump as is his transactional way will leave RFK and his lofty environmental ideals by the wayside.

He gave the campaign a plausible leftish greenwash of Kennedy name recognition that also tapped into a latent distrust of vaccines and will have served his purpose.

But sure. MAHA. Cool slogan.

 

[Pugz89]

That didn’t end well for Humphrey either.

Nor for the USA for that matter. They elected Nixon.

He got spanked, 301 votes to 191, which was also fascinating with an Independent (George Wallace) picking up 46 votes (13.5% of popular vote) in that election as well.

 

[Royale]

Brilliant analysis from Scott Jennings on CNN

 

[Next Waiting]

It's curious that Venezuela with the largest oil reserves in the world haven't really been a target of American interests. Seems a logical transactional trade with Russia given the geographical proximities of both.

You take Ukraine and the Baltic if you must coz you like history and grain and we'll take Venezuela coz we like oil and you have enough already.

 

[Sentinel]

A lot will go with option 1 and this is the issue the Democrats have at the moment,

The we are shit but he is shitter approach doesn't exactly make you want to go out and vote for them,

Trumpamaniacs as the Hulkster has named them grow the more you attack him impeachments/criminal trials/assassination attempts hence the best way to defeat him is to ignore him don't get into a left vs right he is Hitler war put up good policies and you'll win easy

 

[dogwatch]

A lot will go with option 1 and this is the issue the Democrats have at the moment,

The we are shit but he is shitter approach doesn't exactly make you want to go out and vote for them,

Trumpamaniacs as the Hulkster has named them grow the more you attack him impeachments/criminal trials/assassination attempts hence the best way to defeat him is to ignore him don't get into a left vs right he is Hitler war put up good policies and you'll win easy

Jury still out on the “put up good policies” approach. That’s how it SHOULD work but there’s a fair bit of evidence that many people voted on the image, the social media, the 3 second grabs and so on.

If you have lots of time to sell your policies and for them to percolate through maybe you’ll get some traction with that approach.

But as someone on TV pointed out yesterday would you rather have an endorsement from the NYT (5 million views) or Joe Rogan (66 Million)? When you take that sort of tactical approach to winning an election the policies can get relegated to a lower level. For instance how much critical independent analysis was done of the respective candidates policies? (Genuine question) And if there was, did anyone have the time or the concentration span to absorb it? Seems to me it was largely about image and vibe … and “something’s gotta change”.

 

[Foxman98]

He had 74 million votes in 2020 currently at 72 million Biden had 81 million in 2020 Kamala is currently only at 67 million massive drop off

 

[Pugz89]

Jury still out on the “put up good policies” approach. That’s how it SHOULD work but there’s a fair bit of evidence that many people voted on the image, the social media, the 3 second grabs and so on.

If you have lots of time to sell your policies and for them to percolate through maybe you’ll get some traction with that approach.

But as someone on TV pointed out yesterday would you rather have an endorsement from the NYT (5 million views) or Joe Rogan (66 Million)? When you take that sort of tactical approach to winning an election the policies can get relegated to a lower level. For instance how much critical independent analysis was done of the respective candidates policies? (Genuine question) And if there was, did anyone have the time or the concentration span to absorb it? Seems to me it was largely about image and vibe … and “something’s gotta change”.

To be fair, a three-hour conversation around policies on the biggest podcast in the world is the perfect platform imo. A long form chat where you can detail the different ideas and can be discussed in a relaxed environment seems pretty bloody great to me.