Romney vs. Obama

[ArtK78]

Conservative columnist David Brooks has an interesting piece about how republicans might go about recapturing the votes of sensible conservatives by adopting the positions of young writers and bloggers: The Conservative Future

 

 

Indeed it would be valuable for the US if the national republicans stopped doubling down on being (to use Governor Jindal's words) "the stupid party." It's always important to have a plausible electoral choice.

Recapturing the votes of sensible conservatives? Surely those votes did not go to the Democrats in the last election.

 

While I can understand why "sensible conservatives" would not be happy with the choices provided to them by the Republican Party, I am sure that they went into the voting booths, held their noses and voted Republican.

 

[bTW, I guess that "sensible conservative" means something entirely different than "severely conservative"]

[dwar0123]

Recapturing the votes of sensible conservatives? Surely those votes did not go to the Democrats in the last election.

 

While I can understand why "sensible conservatives" would not be happy with the choices provided to them by the Republican Party, I am sure that they went into the voting booths, held their noses and voted Republican.

 

[bTW, I guess that "sensible conservative" means something entirely different than "severely conservative"]

I identified as a Republican up until Bush's invasion of Iraq. The ensuing years and the frequent 'doubling down on stupid' have only furthered my disgust. I did not hold my nose, I vomited violently and voted democratic.

 

I feel much better getting all that sickness out, but I would still feel even better if the Republican party started to appeal to sensible conservatives, though at this point I would personally be a very hard sale.

[PassedOut]

Recapturing the votes of sensible conservatives? Surely those votes did not go to the Democrats in the last election.

I'm conservative, but cannot vote for "the stupid party." I voted for Obama. I voted for Debbie Stabenow for senator. And I voted against the tea party guy who represents my my district. On the local level, of course, I voted for several republicans and several democrats.

 

My congressional district (Michigan 1st) was one of those redrawn to help the republican (tea party) candidate, and he did win by a very narrow margin. We had to wait a couple of days to be sure of the result.

 

Republican Pete Hoekstra ran against Debbie Stabenow, but he was too extreme to get my vote (nor did he get many others). For example, he believes that state legislatures should choose senators as the founding fathers originally established. (He would have been our senator, had that been the case.)

[ArtK78]

Republican Pete Hoekstra ran against Debbie Stabenow, but he was too extreme to get my vote (nor did he get many others). For example, he believes that state legislatures should choose senators as the founding fathers originally established. (He would have been our senator, had that been the case.)

Does he also believe that only the landed gentry should be allowed to vote, and that blacks should count only as 3/5 of a person for enumeration purposes?

[PassedOut]

Does he also believe that only the landed gentry should be allowed to vote, and that blacks should count only as 3/5 of a person for enumeration purposes?

Can't say. I didn't look that far into Pete Hoekstra's "qualifications."

:unsure:

[wyman]

Yoopers ITT!

[y66]

When Internal Polls Mislead, a Whole Campaign May Be to Blame By NATE SILVER December 1, 2012

 

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/11/30/us/politics/fivethirtyeight-1130-intpoll2/fivethirtyeight-1130-intpoll2-tmagSF.png

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/11/30/us/politics/fivethirtyeight-1130-intpoll1/fivethirtyeight-1130-intpoll1-tmagSF.png

 

the seeming inaccuracy of Mr. Romney’s internal polls ought to present a warning to future campaigns. The problems with internal polls may run deeper than the tendency for campaigns to report them to the public in a selective or manipulative way. The campaigns may also be fooling themselves.

 

Our self-perceptions are very often more optimistic than the reality; 80 percent of people think they are above-average drivers, for example.

 

These problems can be worse when we join together to form businesses or organizations. Honest self-assessment is a challenge for any business, and it is one reason that management consultants are sometimes engaged at considerable expense to provide a supposedly more objective and unbiased take on the state of the organization’s operations. (Much of Mr. Romney’s success in business, of course, came precisely because he was able to identify companies whose organizational cultures prevented them from functioning efficiently.)

[blackshoe]

80% of people may think they are above average drivers. If so, and we assume the other 20% of people are right in thinking they're below average drivers, then 62.5% of the 80% are right - they are better than average. Not sure what that conclusion means, though. B-)

[mycroft]

Well, by survey, 90% of bridge players are better than their partners (to pull out the old joke).

 

I believe I am an above-average driver. Please note, I didn't say "great"...or even "good". Just "above-average".

[kenberg]

All of which reminds me of the also old, and possibly true story: A first grade teacher, at the beginning of the year, sent home forms for the parents to fill out. One question was whether the parents woould describe the child as a leader. One mother wrote that her son really showed little interest in being a leader but was a friendly and cooperative child. She got a not back from the teacher that the first grade class consisted of 23 leaders and her son.

[Zelandakh]

Since noone came back on it, I thought I should provide the answer to my little "quiz" from post 986:

the best country in the world

and lets say it: with <snip name of Head of State>, the finest Head of State on earth.

I was trying to think of my favourite moment.

Was it telling President Hollande that no, we hadn't cheated at the cycling, we didn't have rounder wheels, it was just that we peddled faster than the French?

This is still the greatest country on earth. We showed that again this summer.

and

The job of this party ... of this government ... is to help to bring out the best in this country. Because at our best we're unbeatable.

were said by David Cameron (PM of GB) at the Conservative Party conference. The full text is available online. Waving the flag is not a specifically American thing. I could have come up with plenty of other examples from various other countries but I thought the references to cycling and the summer would make this one easy to guess.

[kenberg]

I read part of the Cameron speech that is linked above.. reading the full speech, any speech, by any politician, is difficult. But I saw one part that also has a U.S. echo:

 

Now I know you are asking whether the plan is working.

 

And here's the truth: the damage was worse than we thought, and it's taking longer than we hoped.

[/Quote]

 

 

Back to the claims of greatness:

Whether at the personal level or the national level, I have never thought that "l am the greatest" is a very good way to start a conversation. Worked for Ali I guess, but ...

Anyway, I make an exception for speeches like the above whether by Cameron or Obama or whomever. . It's blah blah, and no one is expected to regard it as anything else.

[PassedOut]

This article in The Atlantic gives an interesting perspective on the folks working on the technical side of the Obama campaign: When the Nerds Go Marching In

 

That next most technically advanced CTO, in 2016, will not be Harper Reed. A few days after the election, sitting with his wife at Wicker Park's Handlebar, eating fish tacos, and drinking a Daisy Cutter pale ale, Reed looks happy. He'd told me earlier in the day that he'd never experienced stress until the Obama campaign, and I believe him.

 

He regaled us with stories about his old performance troupe, Jugglers Against Homophobia, wild clubbing and DJs. "It was this whole world of having fun and living in the moment," Reed said. "And there was a lot of doing that on the Internet."

 

"I spent a lot of time hacking doing all this stuff, building websites, building communities, working all the time, " Reed said, "and then a lot of time drinking, partying, and hanging out. And I had to choose when to do which."

 

We left Handlebar and made a quick pitstop at the coffee shop, Wormhole, where he first met Slaby. Reed cracks that it's like Reddit come to life. Both of them remember the meeting the same way: Slaby playing the role of square, Reed playing the role of hipster. And two minutes later, they were ready to work together. What began 18 months ago in that very spot was finally coming to an end. Reed could stop being Obama for America's CTO and return to being "Harper Reed, probably one of the coolest guys ever," as his personal webpage is titled.

 

But of course, he and his whole team of nerds were changed by the experience. They learned what it was like to have -- and work with people who had -- a higher purpose than building cool stuff. "Teddy [Goff] would tear up talking about the President. I would be like, 'Yeah, that guy's cool,'" Reed said. "It was only towards the end, the middle of 2012, when we realized the gravity of what we were doing."

 

Part of that process was Reed, a technologist's technologist, learning the limits of his own power. "I remember at one point basically breaking down during the campaign because I was losing control. The success of it was out of my hands," he told me. "I felt like the people I hired were right, the resources we argued for were right. And because of a stupid mistake, or people were scared and they didn't adopt the technology or whatever, something could go awry. We could lose."

 

And losing, they felt more and more deeply as the campaign went on, would mean horrible things for the country. They started to worry about the next Supreme Court Justices while they coded.

 

"There is the egoism of technologists. We do it because we can create. I can handle all of the parameters going into the machine and I know what is going to come out of it," Reed said. "In this, the control we all enjoyed about technology was gone."

But the US came through. Well done.