(04-13-2019, 04:48 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: [quote pid='42441' dateline='1555136582']
(excised for brevity)
Do you know which candidate that you're going to be voting for/ supporting in 2020 like me? Does the candidate matter more to the Democratic voters these days? I know it shouldn't but does it these days? You don't mock people with mental illness's. You just blindly accuse people of having a mental illness like most blues tend to do these days. Hey, do you think any blues who lack the real life experience of getting/having had their asses kicked or finding themselves in a scary situation having it happen to them understand the consequences of doing stupid stuff like that in real life. I'm sorry dude but the odds are now in his favor to win re-election and he knows it and he will have a couple of years to watch, listen, study and size up your pool of candidates.
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I am nearly a year away from deciding for whom I will vote in the 2020 Democratic Party. We have a quarterback controversy that will have to settle itself. I can only hope that we can find a Democratic nominee around whom a majority of Americans can find acceptable.
Trump is so objectionable to practically any Democrat that he will lose well over 90% of the Democratic voters. No incumbent President has ever shown so many examples of personal vileness as he has. People who voted for him with the suspicion that he is a rogue but capable of doing some important things right have often come to the recognition that he is a Frankenstein monster.
I will spare you of any contention that people who support Donald Trump are intellectually deprived or mentally ill. Diagnoses of mental illness are for experts, but sometimes behavior is so erratic that we can recognize that someone is crazy or exudes such obvious stupidity that an observer can only assume mental retardation. Even the smartest people, often the supposed great thinkers, can be very wrong. Just read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals.
Staying the course with Donald Trump looks like a big mistake. This man entered the Presidency with lesser knowledge of how the political process works, lesser knowledge of American and world history, unprecedented contempt for expertise, and a dismissive attitude toward anyone who disagrees with him for any purpose. He acts as if the President is some dictator capable of forcing any political change that he wants. He does many things that I would not do as President. I would no more way that there are good people on both sides on violent, Nazi-style racism any more than there are good people on both sides on... armed robbery. People who do bad things in knowledge that the rest of Humanity disparages such things are evil. Armed robbery is indefensible.
Donald Trump stands for the worst in American life -- corruption, cronyism, bigotry, and an anti-intellectualism that encompasses anyone with an above-average education. This man selects people who gut the responsibility of regulatory agencies. His foreign policy is muddled in the extreme. Just imagine a liberal thinking that he could kiss up to Kim Jong-un and get miracles. A conservative would rightly be aghast. If I were President I would be doing everything possible to squeeze the horrid regime in North Korea to cause it to divest itself of weapons of mass destruction. Two of North Korea's neighbors have officially stated that they want a nuclear-free Korean peninsula: China and South Korea. That would make my policy obvious if I were President.
Only fools cast off policies and practices that work well. Maybe they might try to refine them incrementally, but only fools would throw away something that works well. Drastic, irreversible change is not my choice except in a desperate situation.
Finally -- Trump is far behind Obama at a similar stage in his Presidency. Obama never got disapproval ratings above 50% nationwide, and never had approval below the mid-40's. Sure, he had to campaign for re-election, and he may have needed to get the CIA to hone in on and Special Forces to whack Osama bin Laden to get re-elected (he barely won a majority of the vote in 2012) -- but he did that. Obama may not have been a chest-pounding militarist, bit he was probably the worst President that one could have as an implacable enemy. Obama recognized the effectiveness of Special Forces and the ability of the CIA, and did not treat them with hostility common among people of the new Left. Trump needs a miracle or few to get his approval ratings in the range in which a spirited and competent campaign for re-election can put him over the top.
I am accustomed to assuming that the incumbent President holds all the advantages. In the last three Presidential elections involving an incumbent President, and in each case the map changed little from the election that installed a President and the election that fave the incumbent involved changes in the voting in few states. Five states changed sides from 1992 to 1996; three from 2000 to 2004; two states and one Congressional district from 2008 to 2012. I see Trump gaining nothing that he lost in 2016, and having plenty of opportunities for losses in 2020. Florida and any state with ten or more electoral votes defeats him. Pennsylvania and any two states with ten or more electoral votes defeats him. In view of recent electoral history in America, it is counter-intuitive for me to accept that Donald trump will not be defeated decisively. Just because we have not seen an incumbent President go down to defeat for a quarter of a century does not preclude such. This said, Trump loses unless he can change perceptions drastically in his favor.
But let's remember the purpose of this thread: it is either light-hearted ridicule or gallows humor about this awful Presidency. It is not really for analysis of the polls. If you want to push the idea that President Trump really has a chance, then I have a thread on polling of approval, which includes approval and disapproval (I see disapproval as more critical than disapproval because disapproval is harder to undo than approval is possible to increase) or whether people want to re-elect Trump or get someone else as President.
The polls that I see seem to confirm my opinion that Trump sucks as a leader and as a person. We are simply lucky that nothing big has really gone wrong for people likely to vote for President. Puerto Ricans can vote for President -- if they reside in the Continental United States -- but otherwise do not matter to Trump.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.