11-16-2022, 03:15 AM
(11-15-2022, 01:56 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Attitudes and alignments have shifted since the sixties. There were important political and cultural shifts and changes. I think it's still an interesting comparison of Obama and Ike, especially in how the political label switched in the Obama-era's "blue" states indicated in white on your graph, but Obama was a 4T president and Ike a 1T president. Both were S&H nomads, but Obama is a cusper idealist and that makes a difference. He is capable of visionary thought that inspires; "the hope and change guy". Ike was a wide-smiling confident moderate unifier like Obama who nevertheless appointed more-reactionary cabinet members than did Obama, and whose talk and speeches were practical-oriented and often sounded a bit irritated in typical-nomad "don't bother me and get off my lawn" nomad-elder style rather than middle-aged idealistic and inspiring. Ike's horoscope score was quite inferior to Obama's but vastly better than his "egghead" opponent's.
Yes, some attitudes have changed. The big demographic change in the Mountain South was that a huge number of Presbyterians, a sane-but dull sect, got self-righteous and connected to the reactionary Falwell wing of the Southern Baptist church. This is an intellect-distrusting sect that pushes an anti0modern view of the world on science, race, and gender. Both the Mountain (Ozarks and Appalachians) have long been weak areas for mass education by overall standards in America. This area was infamous for Negrophobia; its disdain for slavery during the American Civil War reflected its view that the slaves of the planters who expected the Mountain South to be cannon fodder were the tools of the planter elites.
If you recall "Granny" (Irene Ryan) from the tacky, but popular, Beverly Hillbillies sitcom, she frequently excoriated "Yankees" of the Civil War. Eastern Tennessee saw the Union armies as liberators and not as oppressors. Li'l Abner and the Dukes of Hazzard are from here; even if those seem derogatory images to people not from there, the people of the area liked those caricatures. Their shift from Presbyterian supporters of the New Deal to Southern Baptist arch-reactionaries appeared in much of the difference between the Carter win of 1976 and the Carter ouster in 1980.
Quote:A yougov poll puts DeSantis ahead of Trump now in some key states. It's way too early to tell, and the campaigns would make a difference. Could Trump run if indicted and jailed? Trump has a higher horoscope score than DeSantis, and so is indicated to be the better campaigner, but Trump has enough baggage that it could over-rule his higher score. Biden outscores both of them, but his age is a factor. His incumbency is still an advantage though, and he is still fully functional, even if "slow" at times to do what is really needed. But his latest speeches show him physically and rhetorically rising to the occasion spendidly. It is great to still have Obama as a supporting character. His score is vastly better than that of Biden, Trump or DeSantis, as is amply demonstrated.
"Duce Santis" made a rabble-rousing speech about opposing everything "woke" and praising himself for keeping Florida "open" to fun-seekers who became prey for COVID-19. He has thrown down the gauntlet, expressing to liberals that he welcomes their contempt. It's profit over life, an essential value of right-wing ideologies. "Duce Santis" got away with it because Florida keeps attracting elderly Northerners who would rather die in the sun in the winter than die in the winter gloom of the Midwest and Northeast. Trump reversed the D trend, at least temporarily, among Cuban-Americans in Florida in part by suggesting that they should keep their bags packed so that they can reclaim the old privileged lives of grandparents who lorded it over Cuban proles and peasants. (The problem is that the math does not quite work because there are too many Cuban-Americans who expect to take over such a role, and they would be alien in Cuba after 60+ years of Communist rule. Descendants of Russian Whites did not get their estates back after 75 years oc Communist rule, and the Cuban Communist Party has already ruled Cuba for almost as long as the Communists ruled Russia. He'd like to be America's Bolsonaro except to get re-elected and transform America into a Christian and Corporate State, a nightmare world in which workers are treated badly and are expected to express unending love for their oppression, as there will be pie-in-the-sky-when-they-die as a reward for toiling under brutal management strictly for the greed of a Master Class ... and will burn in Hell for any show of dissent according to that twisted view of the world.
Quote:Gavin Newson is waiting in the wings, and he will support Biden if he runs again. Newsom has a lot of work to do to get California back on track, and he knows it. His re-election support declined by a point or so against an unknown opponent, and Democrats could not take back the 2018 House seats they lost in 2020. The 60-40% 2022 Democratic statewide officer victories down the slate is not quite the 64%, 5 or 4 million-vote margin win CA gave opponents of Trump. But Newson is an on-the-ball character who knows how to work and how to speak well.
Because California is in no way a swing state, Gavin Newsom gets little attention to the east of Reno, Las Vegas, and perhaps Phoenix. We shall see.
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.