McCain concedes race to Obama and congratulates him!

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
Rhetoric doesn't matter; record does. He's one of the most liberal Dem candidates since Carter.

Er, I never denied that. We weren't talking about what makes a good President, but rather what made an electoral victory, i.e. what idiot voters care about (rhetoric).

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
You have no real evidence for this. It fits with your personal bias, but we don't know if it's true or not. A number of commentators on the left disagree with you.

No real evidence?

*cough*

[Naked Gents Rut]

Hopefully Boris will come along and give you the progressive line on why the financial crisis didn't matter and Obama would've regained the lead regardless.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Besides, if you think the GOP lost this time around because the political climate was just too harsh, there's nothing "self-destructive" at all about swinging back to the right. GOP electoral prospects would improve as the political climate does, regardless of whether the GOP is a McCain-style moderate party or a Bush-style conservative one.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
Hopefully Boris will come along and give you the progressive line on why the financial crisis didn't matter and Obama would've regained the lead regardless.

Even if true, wouldn't that support my point? I was arguing from the start that it didn't matter even if they swung left (which they didn't do in the first place) because other dynamics made it a Dem year anyway, in response to your suggestion that the GOP should "emulate" them by swining right.

[Arrian]

I think Obama would've won anyway, but by a much smaller margin.

-Arrian

[Naked Gents Rut]

in response to your suggestion that the GOP should emulate them by swining right.

I never suggested that the GOP should emulate the left by swinging right. I was just pointing out that calling people "self-destructive idiots" for wanting to emulate the recent strategy of the party currently in power doesn't make any sense. Seems to me that they're thinking pretty logically, although I don't know if I agree with them or not.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
Besides, if you think the GOP lost this time around because the political climate was just too harsh, there's nothing "self-destructive" at all about swinging back to the right. GOP electoral prospects would improve as the political climate does, regardless of whether the GOP is a McCain-style moderate party or a Bush-style conservative one.

Well that may be. The voters' attention span is awfully short, but they'll remember well enough that any future conservatives would have to cook up some ways of distinguishing themselves from Bush. Not sure what those could possibly be without incidentally leaning toward the center in the process.

Anyway, 2016 is a long ways away and will be more of a referendum on Obama's actual results than ideology. Anyone who thinks there's any serious chance in 2012 is smoking crack. After a mere four years, anything that goes bad would simply be blamed on ripple effects from the Bush years, and be framed as proof that Obama needs more time. There's no way to reframe that debate.

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
I never suggested that the GOP should emulate the left by swinging right. I was just pointing out that calling people "self-destructive idiots" for wanting to emulate the recent strategy of the party currently in power doesn't make any sense. Seems to me that they're thinking pretty logically, although I don't know if I agree with them or not.

I still haven't accepted your the premise implied by "emulate" that the Dems swung left in the first place. Even the idiots I referred to aren't making that contention very often. You still haven't shown me any reason to believe that their platform is significantly less centrist than in 2004, except for the voting record of their presidential candidate, which is utterly meaningless in an electoral sense.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Moderates have an instinctual bias towards thinking that moving to the political center is the best response to any setback, just as progressives think moving left is best and conservatives thing moving right is best. I think you're letting your bias toward moderation influence you into thinking there's a clear lesson from this election (ie. that the GOP has to move to the center or they're doomed), when it's not clear at all what the real lesson is or whether there even is one.

You still haven't shown me any reason to believe that their platform is significantly less centrist than in 2004, except for the voting record of their presidential candidate, which is utterly meaningless in an electoral sense.

Dude, do I really need to rehash years of political developments on the Dem side that brought Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi and Obama to power? The Dem VP candidate from 2000 is about to get kicked out of the party, for god's sake.

[Darius871]

Originally posted by Naked Gents Rut
Moderates have an instinctual bias towards thinking that moving to the political center is the best response to any setback, just as progressives think moving left is best and conservatives thing moving right is best. I think you're letting your bias toward moderation influence you into thinking there's a clear lesson from this election (ie. that the GOP has to move to the center or they're doomed), when it's not clear at all what the real lesson is or whether there even is one.

I never said that going moderate was necessarily the best strategy, so that's not my bias; I've merely backed up my statement questioning the bias of others that swinging right is necessarily the best strategy.

Personally, IMO they're both idiotic positions which fail to recognize what is an electoral year with so many unique circumstances as to make its long-term predictive value virtually nil.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Personally, IMO they're both idiotic positions which fail to recognize what is an electoral year with so many unique circumstances as to make its long-term predictive value virtually nil.

We should stop arguing then, because I agree with you.

They're not "idiotic", though. Just drawing the wrong conclusion about this election, IMO.

[Arrian]

The Dems also ran a bunch of people who could win in the South/Midwest - more conservative than Dean, Pelosi and Obama. They expanded their tent (helped, certainly, but the GOP's disasterous rule).

Now the GOP must expand theirs. If they think they can do that by moving to the right... ok, perhaps. I'll certainly concede that as a moderate I'm prone to thinking moderation is the answer. Sure.

I could see the GOP going "back to basics" and doing it well, and I could see them doing it badly. Again, my personal inclinations might be coloring this, but I figure conservatism wrt taxation & spending still plays well with the electorate (they simply don't trust the GOP on that right now, with good reason, but the passage of time & some rebranding can fix that), whereas hardline social conservatism turns too many people off, even if it excites the base.

$.02.

-Arrian

[Naked Gents Rut]

The Dems also ran a bunch of people who could win in the South/Midwest - more conservative than Dean, Pelosi and Obama.

Yes and these new Congress critters have no seniority and only a fraction of the power of their liberal leaders. It's obvious that the Dem caucus would get more conservative on average as it expands and gains representatives from more conservative states, but to say that this necessarily moves the Democratic party to the center is ridiculous. It might in the future (some of the more moderate new Dem reps are reportedly pushing to take some of the leadership positions away from the liberals), but it hasn't happened yet.

[KrazyHorse]

If the Dems are at all smart they're going to realize that they need to empower the new Dem Congressmen and Senators to win reelection

[Naked Gents Rut]

That's a big "if". Reid and Pelosi haven't exactly shown a surfeit of brains in the past two years.

[KrazyHorse]

They seem to have done pretty well for the Dems this cycle.

(I know that circumstance has a lot to do with it, but I think their major need was to differentiate themselves from Bush/Repubs/McCain; that need is now gone, since they're in charge)