2014 October Presidential elections, political winner

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Even with one of the disasterous presidency of DemPGH and low(er than normal) approval ratings, still managed to gain a seat in the senate in the Mideast.

In fairness, Windjammer winning the Mideast Senate seat was largely due to pretty blatant strategic registration and the Federalist Party's bizarre failure to say a word about it while it was occurring

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Labor gave us the most disastrous presidency in Atlasian history - and, let me be clear, I blame the festering hand of the Politburo more than DemPGH for everything that's gone wrong over the past four months - and suffered almost no electoral consequences. (Yes, even the presidential election - Labor has a natural disadvantage in presidential elections, and was never a favorite to win in October.) If that's not proof of political genius, I have no idea what is.

Well that's just ridiculous. The Politburo operated the very same as it did during your presidency and Marokai's presidency. The previous administration simply was...prone to bad decisions. Personally, I advised against both the resignation of windjammer (which ultimately triggered a cataclysm of events and consequences no one could foresee), against making sirnick GM (expecting bad behavior), and a couple other specific ones I forget at the moment.

Though perhaps a different handling of things was needed; you know first-hand that I practically never asked any Senator to vote a given way on a piece of legislation, and in two year's time, I can count on less than one hand the number of times I ever lost my temper over a Senator's vote. I regret not exerting more control over the caucus during the energy debate, even though I did grow disappointed when I saw our caucus fracturing on it after those who had offered no discussion whatsoever suddenly decided to chime in at the end. The difference between having effectively four members of your own party in the Senate during a term (which was what you really had) versus five members (which is what DemPGH had) makes a world of difference in how one acts as President; you were in less of a position to make bad decisions not because you are incapable of them, but because you didn't have the ability at the time to make them. Between Napoleon, Polnut and the right, you were quite constrained. I wonder if things would have been different had you not called Kalwejt "fycking useless" in IRC (something that for some reason, he still seems to hate me for)?

I don't want to re-litigate DemPGH's presidency, but I should clarify a few points:

1. I also advised against the Sirnick nomination and was the sole Senator to vote against his re-confirmation. You know that there's no disagreement between us on this. I wish that you had applied the same skepticism to the disastrous Hifly nomination.

2. Accepting Windjammer's resignation was probably the single best decision of DemPGH's presidency. (Those of us who were closest to the situation understand why.) Tyrion's first confirmation was never destined to fail, and would have passed easily had the White House been willing to work with a single non-Labor Senator.

I urged DemPGH to build alliances outside of the Labor Party throughout his presidency, even before leaving the party myself. You simply cannot be a successful president without those relationships, even if you have a slim majority in the Senate. Unfortunately, this never happened, and, yes, I blame the Politburo for creating a paranoid and intolerant atmosphere in which collaboration with those outside of the party was impossible.

3. Do you really want to revisit the energy nationalization bill? How you can look back at that debacle and decide that your greatest failure was not controlling Labor's Senators is beyond my understanding.

4. I have said far, far worse things than that on the IRC, but I'm not sure what that that has to do with anything.

FTR, I never made the first quoted post, that was by Nix