Talk Elections

I know it's meaningless now but since the election is exactly three years away I think it should be guaged.

Obama will win. The economic cycle by then will have improved such, even though his economic policies may or may not have any influence on that, he can still take credit for the better economy, justified or not.

Basically this.

Well said.

Obama will win. The country will be in dire straits that will make the last days of the Bush regime look rosy, but people are stupid.

Unless the GOP nominates someone who is actually different from Obama...

If the GOP nominates a fiscal conservative, they win.

A Republican.

A Democrat, as of now. I'm not quite sure, as it is really far away.

Huckabee or Obama

Incumbents have won 13 of the last 18 elections (which goes back to 1900). Losers:

1. William Howard Taft -- temperamentally unsuited to the Presidency.

2. Herbert Hoover -- messed-up economy.

3. Gerald Ford -- entered the Presidency through the back door and was barely defeated in his re-election bid.

4. Jimmy Carter --  Hard luck, bad economy and the Iranian hostage situation. Got caught in a political transition from the Sough voting Democratic as a block one last time to a norm in which the South usually voted Republican. An independent candidate drew away voters who would never have voted for Ronald Reagan.

5. George H. W. Bush -- he had no idea of what to do with the Presidency in a second term.

Heck, George W. Bush and Calvin Coolidge got re-elected despite two of the weakest Presidencies ever... Obama is a much stronger President than either of those.

Uh, Calvin Coolidge was an infinitely better president than Bush and Obama.

Calvin Coolidge is one of our best Presidents ever, and he did not serve a weak administration. His Presidency marked one of the most popular executives ever and a prosperous America.

Republican

Uhh, Calvin Coolidge had a weak presidency? If you mean non-active then you have a point, but he definitely wasn't anywhere as loathed as Bush was. Hell, he won 54% of the popular vote against two other candidates while doing almost no campaigning.
Nice attempt at hiding your bias by using pseudointellectual type btw. You almost had me going until you said that Jimmy Carter, the only Democrat out of those five, lost due to "hard luck" while everyone else sucked.
Again, nice try.

I predict a realignment election. Despite what some people may think 2008 was not a realignment at all, merely just a reaction against the Bush years. The real change will be in 2012, regarding the situation of the GOP. Does that mean the GOP will win in 2012? I don't know, but I predict that in 2012 the American political landscape will be different than it is now.

Are you stupid?

Obama is a very good campaigner, so if his approval is around 45%, he will win.

Obama will win: incumbency advantage, an upswinging economy, and his godly fundraising advantage over any Republican that would face him.

Coolidge may have been popular at the time, but I'm going on a historical assessment of the Presidents. Coolidge was a ticking time-bomb of a President who fostered calamities that would explode after the end of his Presidency. The speculative boom of the 1920s has obvious parallels to the one of recent years -- except that it was more in securities than in real estate. Coolidge did nothing to mute a stock market bubble that began when he was President. Hoover had been President for only six months at the time of the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

Add to that, Hoover rigidly enforced German reparations payments when the country was undergoing hyperinflation. German politicians can get some fault for deciding to inflate their way out of war debt, but Coolidge had his role. It's worth remembering that in 1932 both Germany and the United States were ready for major change in political life. We got the Second Lincoln; the Germans (barely) got the Antichrist. Some relaxation of the reparation regime might have made a huge difference in world history.  

The dangerous 1915 KKK reached its peak during the second term of Calvin Coolidge.  

Calvin Coolidge is remembered for practically no signature reforms of American life -- but for a boom that would eventually go bust. You can contrast him to two peacetime Republican Presidents -- TR and Eisenhower -- and those two (who were great or near-great) utterly dwarf him.  

tell that to John Corzine

If the Republicans nominate somebody fiscally conservative but socially moderate and with a reasonable foreign policy.

Oh yes, McCain was a damn socialist :P

Collidge laisser-fairism is responsible in a huge part for Depression

Coolidge declined to run for reelection. 1924 cannot count as reelection, duh

I'm not going to say who will win, in 2012. But I will say if things don't trunk around and Obama will not win.

I'm not going to say who will win, in 2012. But I will say if things don't trunk around and Obama will not win.

Your logic here fails so hard.
This is just as pathetic as what I've seen from many blowhard far right conservatives. I mean really pbrower, I didn't expect such a fail of an argument to be used by you.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about to put it into better perspective:

Nazi Germany reached its peak during the second and third terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Just because Group X grows the most while Leader A leads B country doesn't mean that Leader A is most responsible for the growth of Group X.

Here's another example (a bit more fun):

Progressive Rock reached its peak during Nixon's second term.
See, those two have little to do with each other, yet this is the kind of argument you are employing in the quote. The idea that Richard Nixon was responsible for the popularity of Progressive Rock is crazy, so is the idea that Calvin Coolidge is responsible for the rise of the KKK.

I tell you if James Cox or John W. Davis were presidents during this era the KKK would be just as strong, if not stronger (if Davis was president). I am not denying that the KKK was popular amongst Republicans in the Midwest, but their strength at the time was due to environment and not just because one guy sat in the Oval Office. The president is not f***ing god and can not dictate the direction of society, there are other factors present.

The way things are going right now, Obama will not only not win, but he will lose in a landslide. The problem is that he has no accomplishments because his party is disunited. The GOP, whether the Bush years or the Obama years, are like one arm, moving in unison. The Democrats are like 4-5 different parties squabbling on a wagon cart that is about to turn over. As I believe the pendulum has swung from weak government (1970s-2000s) towards strong government, as it was in the 1930s, then this favors the GOP, which is structurally best suited for strong government. The irony of the GOP's weak government rhetoric (when they are out of power) is that they are much more effective at actually passing legislation even with smaller majorities and therefore you end up with a stronger government (see Medicare Part D;Sarbanes-Oxley). Whereas the Democrats will talk for decades about grand plans like public health care, but they will never actually do it.

J.J. has been predicting a realignment for 2012 through much of the 2008 season, and he was laughed at at the time, but he may be right.

Of course I hope it does not happen and that things can turn around. If Obama can just get one major accomplishment (like health care) it will be a huge relief.

OK, OK, OK. There's a huge difference between the KKK and progressive rock; the KKK killed people, and progressive rock didn't. Coolidge didn't encourage people to join the Klan, but he didn't tell people to leave it. Heck, bootleggers killed more people than did the Klan.

Coolidge may not have been a corrupt, reckless, and dishonest man, but he was certainly unmemorable for any noteworthy achievements. Minority rights? He wasn't called Silent Cal without cause. Economic achievements? He presided over the most destructive bubble in American history.

Coolidge (like Dubya) demonstrates that a President with few achievements can be re-elected (or in his case he could be said to have been said elected to his then-current office) -- and the issue at hand is that 13 incumbent Presidents won election and 5 didn't.  That is no insignificant statistic. Whether it is continuing a term to which he was originally elected President or a term that resulted from succession of a President who died in office or resigned is not my consideration. 

I wasn't talking about Cox (how could he have been worse than Harding?) or Davis any more than I was talking about Thomas Dewey or Adlai Stevenson.

You MORON. Coolidge essentially killed the KKK. His refusal to incorporate them in his administration destroyed almost all influence they had. Minority rights? Coolidge was one of the best Presidents for minority rights we've had. I'd say he's second only to Abraham Lincoln.  Coolidge had many achievements. Was a return to normalcy not an achievement? A booming economy? Not to mention he only had ONE DAMN YEAR before re-election.

God, pbrower2a, you are easily one the most hackish, clouded, and straight up sinning posters on this forum. Your thought coherency is negative on a scale of 1-10.

This doesn't count for the first two. But with #s 3-5, each had an approval rating below 45 percent. Since pollings began around World War II, no party has been able to hold the White House if the incumbent party's figure (around election time) had a rating below that number 45. You can add George W. Bush to this; his numbers hovered between the mid-20s and -30s for his last two years in office.

The president is not in control of the business cycle. The Federal Reserve set the conditions up for a bust. It was the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations that then proceeded to turn an isolated crash into the Great Depression. Had Harding-Coolidge policy been adhered to, there would have been no Great Depression.

Wait, the Germans were the ones who got FDR?


TR and Eisenhower as "peacetime" presidents? Please, you clearly haven't gotten a clue.

(Coolidge was still better than either of them, by the way)

Independent: Michael Bloomberg.

No one, it turns out that all the "end of the world" stories were true afterall, except for the part where it ends on December.  Instead, the world ends one day before election night.  :P

</wussy-yet-somewhat-insane-non-committal-answer>

pbrower2a lives in a fantasyland where all Republicans suck and all Democrats are Gods.

Wake up call for pbrower:


If anything the KKK would consider Coolidge closer to the Anti-christ than a help.

Now let's contrast that to Almighty FDR:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

Enough said.

Way too early to tell, but if Obama doesnt get healthcare reform passed, I think many Democrats are going to abandon him.  Democrats are simply tired of being promised things by their candidates and then seeing them not deliver when they get into office.  I think this will be the last straw. 

Maybe not the President, but certainly the political culture. During the 1920s, productivity rose faster than wages. Such itself creates increasing economic inequality, and in the end the super-rich who get the gains can't spend enough to prevent the decline of the economy.  Much the same happened in this decade; in the 1920s the cause of productivity outstripping wages was  the electrification of factories; in this decade it was the use of computers that  made business able to do more work with fewer employees. As a symptom of the trend the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality) for income in the US rose to the high 40s, the highest that it had been since... 1929!


Take a look at any US dime minted since 1946 for a clue. You know exactly who I mean by the Antichrist -- and he barely got a chance to wield power, and he milked that chance to establish one of the most vicious despotisms in human history. Hitler's Nazi Party was bankrupt, and his political support was beginning to shrink when some fools chose to let him get power.

I concede that Lincoln and Hitler had one thing in common -- death at age 56  by a gunshot wound to the head from a madman at or near the end of the war for which he is best known.   


TR and Eisenhower as "peacetime" presidents? Please, you clearly haven't gotten a clue.

(Coolidge was still better than either of them, by the way)
[/quote]

Really? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_United_States_Presidents)

Theodore Roosevelt is consistently considered one of our greatest Presidents, Eisenhower  is well above average in all but one scholarly poll taken two years after he left the Presidency, and Coolidge is on the borderline of the worst.

There is a good chance he wont even make it to 2012 because we will win back the house and sen in 2010 and if we elect Republicans who care more about american than being pc, obama will be impeached for treason.  there is going to be hell to pay for his cottling of hassan and the moslem extremists. (check out the WND story about how hassan served as an "adviser" to obama on the war on terror.)

But if the democRATs weasle thier way out of that some how then obama will be landslided out of office like President Ronald Reagan did with 2 straight democRAT pussy types carter and mondale.  What we have now is a carter with dark skin.  And unlike carter he is corrupt on top of it.  More of this will come out as we control congress and get to hold hearings into his many shananningans.

So R in 2012.  Just pray its a conservative and not some RINO

The blame for the initial stock market crash lies squarely upon the Federal Reserve. Coolidge is only guilty insofar as he failed to abolish the Fed.

Hmm, is this Jeopardy? Who is Roosevelt? Or is it Lincoln?

They were also both fascistic totalitarian megalomaniacs who started wars that killed lots of people.

Yes, really. Thanks for the Wikipedia link making it apparent you don't think for yourself.

What war did Lincoln start?

The war in which he invaded a sovereign nation for no other reason than his own ego and political career.

What nation?

The Senate? 

Don't listen to Coburn, he's a troll and a fake poster.

The C.S.A. invaded the U.S.

And Poland invaded Germany.

What?

Ah, yes, Pbrower is correct, since the KKK flourished under Coolidge, Coolidge was a bastardly oppressor of minorities, I mean it took twelve years of FDR to give minorities the rights they deserved. I mean FDR was the one that granted Native Americans citizenship in 1924, and it was that bastard Coolidge that locked up thousands of innocent German, Italian and Japanese Americans. While Coolidge appointed every Klan member under the sun in his administration, there were certainly no KKK members in the great FDR administration. And that evil racist Coolidge was lying when he said that the United States was not just a "White Man's Country."

Geez, Pbrower, I should listen to you more often.

What's wrong with relying upon Wikipedia for objective treatment of history? What is my alternative -- to rely upon my own authority? I have no such authority.

Does anyone have a problem with the idea that Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were two of our better peacetime Presidents and that Calvin Coolidge was not one of the best? I well know that there is some controversy, but nobody is going to claim that Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan are among the greatest Presidents.  

Yet this list also has Woodrow Wilson in the top ten...........

Because an article on Wikipedia about a survey is not an "objective treatment of history".

At least you are aware of your own ignorance.



Yes, I do. Dwight Eisenhower was mediocre and Theodore Roosevelt sucked big-time. Calvin Coolidge was better than either of them.

I love how pbrower conveniently leaves out the fact that Eisenhower and Roosevelt had hardons for military interventionism in other nations. Roosevelt got aroused by the thought of sending our navy around the world just to get all the other bitch nations wet for our seacocks of death. And Eisenhower, don't even get me started on how "peaceful" a president he was.

Sending the navy around was a poor example of Roosevelt's interventionism. In fact, that was more an act of Roosevelt that showed he did not want war, and therefore, persuaded other nations against it. :)

What we should focus on is the Roosevelt Corollary.

Yeah, T. Roosevelt definitely had some psychiatric issues that made him genuinely love war. And his domestic policies were no better.

Eisenhower was quite the hypocrite considering he allowed the growth of the military-industrial complex all through his presidency.

Coolidge is miles ahead of Eisenhower and Teddy.

obama loses. me (okay, i can't vote, thus the next sentance) and a good chunk of people on the left are less than pleased with him. Nader won't run, so it can be someone who has less bagage.
unless, of course, the Republicans nominate Palin, or to a lesser extent Huckabee. THEN, it might get more interesting

The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act are so evils!!!11!!!!111!

With all due respect, I find it hard to take a 14-year-old kid's political predictions very seriously.

If it takes some saber-rattling to stop a war, then by all means mobilize troops and show the fleet. Pure pacifism has never stopped a war.

As part of TR's overall campaign to assault domestic freedom, yes, they were.

Lean Obama.

Right now, the lack of anyone even remote resembling a competent leader is the biggest problem with the Republican field.

I suppose if John Thune (not very bright) or Mike Pence (too bright by half) are able to sand away some of their rougher (extremist) edges between the primary and the general, then they could be poised for a win.

I suppose, though, that Romney is the most adept at changing his image as the circumstances warrant.  To win the primary, he can be the ultra-conservative, government-hating Mormon who made his fortune because of tax cuts, trickle down and Ronald Reagan.  And to win the general, he can be the socially moderate, fiscal conservative Governor of Massachusetts, who realizes that sometimes, government has to play a role in solving peoples' problems.

Since he's well-familiar with both sides of the coin...and since he has a limitless fortune to spend...my money's on him to win the primary at least.

Worst case scenario: Huckabee wins primary, but is defeated by Obama in a close election in which Virginia, Indiana, North Carolina, Colorado and possibly Florida all flip back to Republican, while Arizona goes Democratic.