'08??? He was a noob.

agreed

How long ago did the reps have to practically beg Paul Ryan to be speaker now they all hate his guts they're so fickle

I know a few trump voters who say another four for President Obama would be better than either. Ask two i was talking to why they would rather have a secret Muslim than them. Didn't get answers but a chuckle.

lol @ highstakesfan just randomly melting down on some racist right wing bile. i thought that dude was a liberal or something, he provided daily embarassing twitter updates for trump and other republicans. and then this ****. just lol

Here's what I don't get: Hillary will ostensibly be Obama only with the hindsight of knowing what to expect from the GOP. No naïveté there. She'll be more accomplished after her first term than he was imo. So, if you're fine with Obama, I don't see how you're not extra fine with HRC.

HRC is probably ideologically closer to the Republicans though, particularly on foreign policy -- she seems like a genuine hawk. Probably on finance laws too -- she's not going to break up the big banks, she's not going to reinstate Glass-Steagall. I'd assume tepid movement on shadow banking and some hand-waving gestures like regulations on hedge funds. I don't think you're going to see her move an inch on civil rights, privacy, rolling back the surveillance state, anything like that.

She is probably a good bet to remain stalwart on entrenching a lot of Obama health care initiatives, either Obamacare itself or reforming it but not moving away on universal coverage. She'll probably give you some decent SCOTUS Justices or get Garland approved if he's not done during the lame duck.

But remember she's never been the fiery leftist type her moron detractors on the right paint her out to be. The Clinton's seem ideological centrists or basically moderate left operators. Remember she spent the first 6 months of the general election campaign from like April until now mostly just courting the Bush Administration despite literal pleading from like everyone to give more overt overtures to the left. It's only after Trump has basically imploded that she's taking a bit of a victory lap and only then trying to tie Trump to the Congressional GOP presumably out of simple practical convenience; she's not necessarily driving hard to the left.

I agree that the Democrats maybe, finally, have dispensed of the notion that the GOP can be pleaded with and cajoled into governing in good faith. But I don't think that's going to change Hillary's core principles which imo are basically moderate, Beltway/corporate approved center left stuff, mostly reaffirming the status quo and not rocking the boat too much.

I'm guessing Trump voters who think Obama > Clinton are caught in the fever swamp hysterics that America is on death's door and Hillary Clinton would put the nail in the coffin or just hate women more than blacks.

Obama has not been particularly left wing on financial regulation.

I doubt that HRC's policies will be much different than Obama's, except on foreign policy, where I agree she is more hawkish and probably closer in general to the Republicans than she is to Obama.

What Dvaut said. Hillary was absolutely front and center and a driving force in the Democrats' movement towards the center or center-right. I think Obama ran into some realities of politics that made him not quite get where a lot of progressives wanted him to go, but he's clearly part of a progressive shift of the Democratic Party.

My hope for Hillary is that her history of law and order and militarism was just part of an opportunistic move for the Dems to get support from the center after Reagan had taken away so many voters and that she'll see backing off from that as politically expedient at this point. I think it's really important for progressives to keep pressure on things like ending mass incarceration and military adventurism and not just assume they're all good because there's a D in the White House.

Not sure how anyone watched the primaries and somehow expected the whole party would be jazzed up for President Hillary. I know slappies gonna slap, but still.

People talk about this a lot here: The Democrats need to find compromise. I think Obama was really really guilty of this.

Fwiw, I don't think that attitude is bad, but it has to be reciprocal. It used to be at least somewhat. But the GOP really became more and more uncompromising and obstructionist.

I think Hillary will be more liberal and play more hard ball than Obama.

"Democrats need to compromise...or else we'll shut down the Federal Government! And by compromise, we mean give us everything we want while getting nothing in return."
-Your Friendly GOP Spiderman

Can confirm that for my family, after chopping up babies, bathroom gender laws are the most pressing issue facing the nation.

Sounds like it could create lots of bathroom security guard jobs.

Right, the whole hands-across-the-aisle thing is predicated on an implied reciprocity. So it has to be cast aside when you're dealing with bad actors who routinely defect from it. It's standard iterated prisoner's dilemma.

I don't know if any of these things exist on the left unless you get to where you're an Authoritarian/Stalinist, but if you are pushing for political pledges and contracts then you're ****ed up.

I know in other forms it goes back beyond this, but here's a pretty big moment for this movement:

GOP 2016: Putting the trickle in trickle-down economics.

I can think of 3 times that Obama tried to compromise. I'm sure there are others.

1) When Obamacare was in the formative stages he designed it based on the Romney implementation. He used Romney's architects. The senate had a bipartisan committee. Even when it became clear the Republicans weren't going to continue participating the senate kept in some of the proposals of the Republicans on the bipartisan committee. And yet not one Republican senator voted in favor of a Republican created plan, implemented successfully by a Republican Governor, with provisions amended by sitting Republican Senators.

2) Bowles & Simpson came up with a bipartisan tax plan to slow government spending and restructure taxes. Obama negotiated with Boehner (?) to come up with a "grand bargain" that would severely cut spending including social security (if I remember correctly). Boehner basically approved the plan behind closed doors. And then apparently he couldn't get the Republican votes so the plan was abandoned.

3) On immigration, the Republicans claimed to not trust Obama. They thought that once any compromise was passed in law that included any amnesty provision, Obama would just opt to not apply the border security measures in the bill. So Obama spent a couple of years stepping up deportations. In fact there were more deportations under the Obama administration than under any prior one. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill (led by Rubio). However the House wouldn't take it up. Not even after Obama's compromise act of good faith. In a quirk of fate, the shutdown of the government was the ultimate demise of this bipartisan piece of legislation. Had the House taken up the bill it would have passed easily. But the House was being run under the "Hastert Rule". The House would only consider bills in which a majority of Republicans would pass. A House rule that would have allowed any House member to bring a Senate passed bill "as is" to the Floor had been revoked prior to the government shutdown so that a Democratic House member couldn't take up appropriations bills passed in the Senate to the Floor of the House for a vote.

The thing that is most extraordinary about this set of Republican politicians isn't even their complete inability to compromise on issues of importance. It is that they then blame the Democrats for this failure of governing.

It is similar to several Republican's primary claims that income inequality had risen under Obama which while true would have risen less dramatically or not at all, if there had been compromises on raising the minimum wage, taxes on the wealthy, or closing loopholes in the tax law that benefitted primarily the wealthiest Americans.

U.S. elections reduce to identity politics. (C.f. Molly Ball: "This is not an election about policy. Possibly none of them have been, and we’ve all been fooling ourselves our whole lives. I feel like that’s been one of my learning experiences — that elections were, maybe, never about ideas. Maybe they were always about issues of identity and tribe and people’s sense of where the interests of their group lie and who they identify with.")

So the GOP is screwed by the demographic argument unless they can find a way to inject some narrative-driven politics.

People respond to superlatives and precedents. Thus, an appropriate narrative for the GOP would look like: Proposing to take historic measures to solve, for the first time in American history, some bitter problem.

Offhand, I would target inequality and propose a one-time 5% wealth tax on the top 1% of households to raise $100B and incorporate Our American Futures, a publicly traded C-corp whose IPO distributes its shares equally to all US citizens.

OAF would engage public and private partners to create businesses at all scales; and also have privileged status to pilot novel, for-profit infrastructure projects. Existing corporations would receive significant tax benefits for collaborating with OAF to train skilled labor.

Pfft, yeah nice plan, comrade. This job-killing OAF boondoggle will waste taxpayer money if it tanks and hurt job-creation if it keeps sputtering along. And it'll keep sputtering along, because you know what, folks? It's the government. And the government always costs more than it says it will. Always. And it's always you - the ordinary, hard-working American people - it's always you who pays for it. And pays for it. And pays for it! Me, I wouldn't accept those shares, folks. Not if you paid me. I'd put them in the garbage where they belong.

etc

I mean, it's a nice thought, but I can't see them digging anything (not just that specifically, but anything) that will survive the gauntlet of perverse incentive driven by the primary process and the nature of the base.

edstone

Blimey!