DC Area Voters

If I understand the latest whispering campaign about Obama correctly, being black automatically puts you in bed with Louis Farrakhan and makes you an anti-Semite?

Originally posted by vansmack:

Originally posted by Mobius:
And who the f**k is on the other end of the line?

It's the terrorists.

gaddam evildoers have no respect for other people's cut-off times.

Originally posted by They call me Doctor Doom.:
I'm also not sure how her "experience" qualifies her for this. Even presuming she was sleeping in the same bed as Bill, the most her experience in a situation like this meant would've been that she would've been woken up by the sound of the phone while Bill took the call.

I very much hope there will be a woman president some day, but it's not going to be Hillary. It's much more likely going to be someone who rose to that stature on her own, rather than on the coattails of a political marriage.

…except that she has served in the Senate since 2000? I agree that it is difficult to pinpoint whether being first lady actually qualifies as legitimate experience or not. But stop omitting her other qualifications.

Originally posted by you be betty:
…except that she has served in the Senate since 2000? I agree that it is difficult to pinpoint whether being first lady actually qualifies as legitimate experience or not. But stop omitting her other qualifications.

when she talks about her experience with the phone ringing in the white house at 3am its pretty clear that didnt happen in the senate

Originally posted by They call me Doctor Doom.:
If I understand the latest whispering campaign about Obama correctly, being black automatically puts you in bed with Louis Farrakhan and makes you an anti-Semite?

the farrakhan link is that the head of the church that obama attends (and is very close with) recently named farrakhan as the churchs' man of the year (or something along those lines) and praised farrakhan for doing so much for black america. i don't need to explain farrakhan's stance on whites and jews, so, the problem becomes whether obama has done enough to distance himself from his church leader? that's my understanding of the farrakhan issue. frankly, i don't really care because for every sharpton and farrakhan on the left, there's a hagee and others on the right; plus, i'm more interested in the anti-NAFTA/free trade positions that obama and hillary have all of sudden taken.

And Obama has served in the Senate since 2003. So Hilary has exactly three more years Senate experience than Obama. Doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.

Further, if you count the Illinois legislature, where Obama served seven years, his total time in elective office exceeds Hilary's – Hilary was never elected to any office prior to her current junior Senate seat.

Actually, legislature experience is no indicator of how someone would be as a President, because it is not an executive role – it doesn't involve running anything. So one might argue that with any of the candidates – McCain, Hilary, or Obama – one has to look for some other indicators as to how they'd be.

Originally posted by They call me Doctor Doom.:

Originally posted by -kat-:
the electoral college cost the election, Nader didn't.

Keep telling yourself that, Greenie.

No reason to vote for a Dem if it's a state that will go Republican no matter what. It's pissing in the wind. So yes. I wouldn't vote if there weren't third party candidates.

Originally posted by -kat-:

Originally posted by They call me Doctor Doom.:

Originally posted by -kat-:
the electoral college cost the election, Nader didn't.

Keep telling yourself that, Greenie.

No reason to vote for a Dem if it's a state that will go Republican no matter what. It's pissing in the wind. So yes. I wouldn't vote if there weren't third party candidates.

Florida was not, and is not, a state that will go Republican no matter what.

I know it's easy to cast a vote and walk out of the voting booth feeling righteous, without actually having accomplished anything, but if you've really got issues with the Dems or the Republicans, your best bet would be to work inside one of those parties to change it. In our lifetimes, a third party will never win the Presidency.

Originally posted by They call me Doctor Doom.:

Originally posted by -kat-:
the electoral college cost the election, Nader didn't.

Keep telling yourself that, Greenie.

You're a retard, Doctor Doom. Put you in the group with all the impotent, Rock Band-playing losers.

I completely have ZERO respect for people who say Nader "cost" Gore the election. Bitter much?

Have you EVER played sports, "Doctor Doom?"

I can't believe I'm responding to someone who calls themselves "They Call Me, Doctor Doom." Grow up! It must be tough being an asthmatic virgin in 2008.

People voted for Ralph Nader. That's it. Asshats like you and Moby and Joel Stein (all three really brilliant people, may I add) bitch and whine and menstruate about how if "Nader wasn't in it, they would have voted for Al Gore." How the f do you know that? What kind of public school, retarded logic is that? If, if, if… Hey, if Ross Perot didn't run do you really think we would have had eight years of Clinton?

People who are angry at Ralph Nader for "stealing" the 2000 election are stupidest, whiny people I know.

Hey, genius. If you ever meet Tom Brady, impress him with this little nugget: "IF you had scored more points in the Super Bowl, you would have won." He may get down on his knees and blow you, "Doctor Doom."

Brian

Originally posted by pdx pollard:

Originally posted by you be betty:
…except that she has served in the Senate since 2000? I agree that it is difficult to pinpoint whether being first lady actually qualifies as legitimate experience or not. But stop omitting her other qualifications.

when she talks about her experience with the phone ringing in the white house at 3am its pretty clear that didnt happen in the senate

Well I suppose I'm not presidential material, because if the damn phone rings at 3am in my house the fucker is going straight into voicemail….

Originally posted by -kat-:

Originally posted by They call me Doctor Doom.:

Originally posted by -kat-:
the electoral college cost the election, Nader didn't.

Keep telling yourself that, Greenie.

No reason to vote for a Dem if it's a state that will go Republican no matter what. It's pissing in the wind. So yes. I wouldn't vote if there weren't third party candidates.

I thought it was Florida's 'conveniently dodgy' vote counting and the Supreme Court that stole the election from Gore.

His second term was, well, a case of 'how many fucking morons can there be in a country of 300,000,000 people. Over 150,000,000 evidently.

<img src="http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc159/miniminimal/america.gif" alt=" - " />

So I was all geared up to make a prediction, because, well, there's nothing better than having the balls to be publicly wrong. And godspeed to the rest of you if I'm correct.

But then I decided that a prediction is not what's needed today. Today requires a plea.

Stop.

Stop lowering expectations after calling Super Tuesday your "wrap up" day and today your firewall day. Win and you're welcome to stick around - the public has asked for it. But if you don't, do the right thing for the party.

Stop talking about superdelegates until you lock up the public vote. It didn't work for your opponent, and it won't work for you. If you really believe that you can win the popular vote, then stick with that message.

Stop talking about NAFTA and Health Care when you agree. Save it for the Republicans, who clearly don't agree.

Originally posted by vansmack:


But then I decided that a prediction is not what's needed today. Today requires a plea.

Stop.

Agreed. I think this just needs to end. The longer it goes on, the worse it is going to get.

Its a small sample, but I have talked to several friends who have been motivated in this primary season, when they never have been before, who are becoming more and more disinterested the longer this thing drags out. Yesterday I was really feeling the same way, I just couldnt read any more of the back and forth. Whether it be Hillary praising McCain over Barack or Barack having to talk about Rezko again. Getting to the point where both candidates are hurting dem general election chances.

Originally posted by pdx pollard:
Its a small sample, but I have talked to several friends who have been motivated in this primary season, when they never have been before, who are becoming more and more disinterested the longer this thing drags out. Yesterday I was really feeling the same way, I just couldnt read any more of the back and forth. Whether it be Hillary praising McCain over Barack or Barack having to talk about Rezko again. Getting to the point where both candidates are hurting dem general election chances.

I completely agree. I've been pretty fascinated with election coverage this year, but I'm starting to feel my interest fade because of the bickering.

Originally posted by callat703:

Originally posted by vansmack:


But then I decided that a prediction is not what's needed today. Today requires a plea.

Stop.

Agreed. I think this just needs to end. The longer it goes on, the worse it is going to get.

You're both wusses. Don't you want to see a brokered convention in your lifetime? How 60's! Maybe you can get the BEATLES to get back together! That would rock! With Misters Cutler and Shanahan putting the finishing touches on the Bronco's 2008/2009 Super Bowl season and a brokered convention, there would be rioting in the streets in late August in Denver!

Whine, whine, whine. Both of you have no poltical balls. I hope Clinton wins Ohio and Texas (she won't win by much) plows through PA and chugs right on to Denver!

"Why negotiate when you can fight?"

BROKERED CONVENTION! BROKERED CONVENTION! BROKERED CONVENTION!

Brian

Originally posted by Brian Wallace:

Originally posted by callat703:

Originally posted by vansmack:


But then I decided that a prediction is not what's needed today. Today requires a plea.

Stop.

Agreed. I think this just needs to end. The longer it goes on, the worse it is going to get.

You're both wusses. Don't you want to see a brokered convention in your lifetime? How 60's! Maybe you can get the BEATLES to get back together! That would rock! With Misters Cutler and Shanahan putting the finishing touches on the Bronco's 2008/2009 Super Bowl season and a brokered convention, there would be rioting in the streets in late August in Denver!

Whine, whine, whine. Both of you have no poltical balls. I hope Clinton wins Ohio and Texas (she won't win by much) plows through PA and chugs right on to Denver!

"Why negotiate when you can fight?"

BROKERED CONVENTION! BROKERED CONVENTION! BROKERED CONVENTION!

Brian

The Ballot Brawl of 1924
Relive the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, at the Democrats' Deadlocked Convention

By Peter Carlson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 4, 2008; C01


Those TV yappers are in a tizzy about the upcoming Democratic convention. They keep jibber-jabbering about how neither Clinton nor Obama will have enough delegates to win the presidential nomination and they'll need to woo the high-powered superdelegates. They keep yakking about a deadlocked convention! Or, better yet, a brokered convention !

These young whippersnappers don't know doodley about a deadlocked convention. Most of them weren't even born the last time a convention fight went beyond the first ballot, which was in 1952.

Back in my day, Democrats had real conventions with real nomination fights that went on for dozens of ballots. It took 46 ballots to nominate Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and 44 ballots to nominate James Cox in 1920. Jeez, it took four ballots to nominate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 – and he was FDR, for crying out loud!

In those days, people weren't in such a damn hurry. They liked to vote for their state's "favorite son" candidate for a few ballots just to show some local pride. In 1932, FDR's campaign manager asked Sam Rayburn, who was the campaign manager for John Nance Garner of Texas, if he could get the Texas delegation to vote for FDR after the first ballot.

"Hell, no," Rayburn said, "we've got a lot of people up here who've never been to a convention before, and they've got to vote for Garner a few times."

But you didn't come all the way out here to the old folks' home to hear me beat my gums about the good old days. You want to hear about the greatest deadlocked convention of them all, don't you? That would be 1924, when the battle went on for 103 ballots and even governors were getting into fistfights on the convention floor.

Give me a minute to put my teeth in and I'll tell you all about it.


* * *

It was the Roaring Twenties, the days of hot jazz and bathtub gin, and the Democrats met in Madison Square Garden, which was packed to the rafters with New York characters, described in The Washington Post as "Tammany shouters, Yiddish chanters, vaudeville performers, Sagwa Indians, hula dancers, street cleaners, firemen, policemen, movie actors and actresses, bootleggers . . ." Plus 1,098 delegates and 15 presidential candidates.

To win, a candidate needed the votes of two-thirds of the delegates and, as the convention opened on June 24, nobody was even close. But the obvious front-runners were Al Smith, the governor of New York, and William McAdoo, a California lawyer who had been Woodrow Wilson's Treasury secretary and was Wilson's son-in-law.

Smith and McAdoo represented the two sides of America's cultural divide – what today's TV yappers would call the red states and blue states. Smith's backers tended to be Northern, urban, Catholic and "wet," meaning anti-Prohibition. McAdoo's supporters tended to be Southern or Western, rural, Protestant and dry.

Just to make things more interesting, a lot of McAdoo's rooters were members of the Ku Klux Klan, which was then at the height of its power. The Klan hated Catholics and Smith was a Catholic. (Needless to say, there were exactly zero black delegates.)

It wasn't going to be easy uniting these factions, but the party bosses tried. They managed to finesse the Prohibition issue with a compromise that called for the enforcement of all laws but avoided mentioning the hated law against hooch. They tried to finesse the Klan issue in the same way, writing a platform that denounced violent secret societies but neglected to actually mention the Klan.

That didn't work. The anti-Klan folks balked, demanding a resolution that named the Klan. This sparked an anti-Klan demonstration on the floor that led to fistfights as pro- and anti-Klan delegates fought for possession of various state banners. Believe it or not, the governors of Kentucky and Colorado got into fistfights trying to keep their state banners out of the hands of anti-Klan delegates.

Governors throwing punches – now, that's the kind of convention high jinks you just don't see anymore!

Ultimately, the anti-Klan resolution that didn't mention the Klan beat the anti-Klan resolution that did mention the Klan by exactly one vote.

And then this seething, angry crowd settled down to try to pick a presidential candidate. First came 15 windy nominating speeches, followed by 15 windy seconding speeches. This torrent of oratory produced only two words that anybody still remembers: FDR calling Smith the "happy warrior."

When FDR ended his speech, the crowd went nuts. Smith's Tammany machine had packed the galleries with thousands of hacks armed with drums, tubas, trumpets and a bunch of ear-piercing electric fire sirens that were so loud that people scooted out of the hall with their fingers in their ears.

"It sounded," The Post reported, "like 10,000 voodoo doctors in a tropical jungle beating 10,000 tom-toms made of resonant washtubs."

The hacks in the galleries weren't so friendly to McAdoo. Anytime a speaker uttered his name, the hacks chanted, "Oil! Oil!" – a snide reference to the fact that McAdoo had received two mysterious payments from an oil baron implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. It was as if Obama delegates greeted any mention of Hillary by hollering, "Whitewater! Whitewater!"

Anyway, after all this folderol, they finally called the roll for the first ballot and, needless to say, nobody got the 732 votes needed to win. McAdoo led with 431, followed by Smith with 241, and 13 other guys, mostly favorite sons with delusions of grandeur, each with fewer than 60 votes.

What happens when you get no winner? Those TV yappers probably don't know but the answer's simple: You vote again. That first day, which was June 30, they took 15 roll-call votes and still nobody was anywhere near victory. The next day, they came back and took 15 more roll-call votes and still nobody won.

This was the first convention broadcast on radio, and all over America people listened to the endless roll calls, each of them beginning with an Alabama delegate drawling, "Al-a-ba- ma casts twen-ty fo-ah votes fo-ah Os-cah Dub-ya Unnn-der-wood!" Soon, everybody in America was mimicking that drawl, saying, " Os-cah Dub-ya Unnn-der-wood!"

The voting was weird, even for Democrats: On the 20th ballot, the Missouri delegation switched all 36 votes from McAdoo to John W. Davis, the favorite son from West Virginia, which got everybody all excited, but on the 39th ballot, they all switched back to McAdoo.

On Wednesday, the third day of voting, William Jennings Bryan asked the chairman for permission to explain his vote for McAdoo. Bryan was the grand old man of the Democratic Party, which had nominated him for president three times. He was the "Great Commoner" who'd delivered the legendary "Cross of Gold" speech at the 1896 convention. But when he started orating for McAdoo, he was drowned out by angry boos from the gallery and chants of "Oil! Oil!"

"His voice, which had competed in the past with foghorns and tornadoes, sounded like the hum of a gnat," The Post reported. "For the first time, Bill Bryan's larynx had met its master."

Listening on the radio, Americans were shocked to hear the rabble of evil New York shouting down a good Christian gentleman like Bryan.

On and on the voting went – 50 ballots, 60 ballots, 70 ballots. The convention was supposed to be over but it still hadn't nominated a candidate, so it went into extra innings, like a tied baseball game. Some delegates gave up and left, others wired home for more money. The McAdoo people complained that rural delegates couldn't afford New York prices and urged the party to pay their hotel bills, which caused the Smith people to accuse the McAdoo people of trying to bribe the delegates by paying their hotel bills.

"This convention," wrote H.L. Mencken, the most famous reporter of the age, is "almost as vain and idiotic as a golf tournament or a disarmament conference."

But still it continued, day after day – 80 ballots, 90 ballots, 100 ballots. Finally, both Smith and McAdoo gave up and released their delegates and on July 9, after 16 days and 103 ballots, the Democrats nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia for president.

The band played "Glory, Glory Hallelujah" and the delegates limped home, weary and bleary, their self-loathing exceeded only by their loathing of the other Democrats.

In the November election, Davis was creamed by Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge, a laid-back dude who didn't let the duties of his office interfere with his afternoon nap.

* * *

What? Speak up, young fella, I don't hear too good. Those Tammany fire sirens ruined my ears.

Fun? You wanna know if the 1924 convention was fun? Well, it was fun for the first 20 or 30 ballots, but after 50 or 60 it got a tad tedious, and by the 80th or 90th even the driest of the dry delegates longed to take a swan dive into a bottle of bootleg bourbon.

People said the 1924 convention was so ugly it would kill the Democratic Party. It didn't, but it did kill the romance of the deadlocked convention. After 1924, Democrats hated deadlocks even more than they hated rival Democrats.

At the 1932 convention, the party leaders started to panic after three ballots and McAdoo got up and urged the convention to avoid "another disastrous contest like that of 1924." FDR's people offered the vice presidency to anybody who controlled enough votes to break the deadlock. John Nance Garner took the deal, delivered the Texas delegation and ended up vice president, a job he later reportedly described as "not worth a bucket of warm spit."

The last time a convention went more than one ballot was 1952, when the Democrats took three ballots to nominate Adlai Stevenson, who was trounced by Dwight Eisenhower. These days, both parties confine their brawling to the primaries and by the time the convention rolls around they're cooing and kissing like newlyweds. Now, conventions are just long infomercials for the candidates. They're so dull they make you pine for a deadlock.

Maybe that's why the TV yappers are jabbering about a deadlocked Democratic convention. If Clinton wins Texas and Ohio today, they say, then neither she nor Obama may have enough delegates to win, so the nomination will be decided by the 796 superdelegates, the people we used to call the party bosses.

Well, I think they're full of baloney, but I hope they're right. A little deadlock livens things up, and the prospect of floor fights, fistfights and backroom wheeling and dealing quickens the blood.

Two ballots, five ballots, 10 ballots – that would give an old geezer a reason to go on living. But, please, not 103 ballots. Take it from me, young fella, that's a little too much of a good thing.

That's EXACTLY what I'm talking about, ggw! Backing up all the "talking the talk" with regards to Obama, "change", "Yes, we can", "The Clintons", etc. with "walking the walking" or maybe even "punching those who need punching."

Am I the only when I see news footage of those rallies (or read any of vansmack's sub-politico coverage) that all these people crying and cheering and feeling that Obama is almost Christ-like and Hilary is almost…Mary Magdalene-like that it's the equivalent of asking somebody whether they need help and then being taking a back when they actually say "yes."

Brian

I don't watch much of the rallies because quite frankly they make me sick to my stomach…but what's the deal with people fainting at Obama rallies? His rallies remind me of those PTL congregations were some chump slaps some bigger chump on the forehead and his polio is cured….then you send a couple of grand via your credit card.