Plan B Forum

"That's pretty painful"...



Starts at the 54 second point...

"John Kasich wins over Hillary by eleven points, so he's absolutely out... nobody wants a loser like that..."

I 've said a few times over the course of this election cycle, I don't agree with a lot of what Lindsey Graham says, but he's willing to speak the truth as he sees it, and that isn't true of most politicians.

(cue wes to make another homophobic comment about Graham)

I intend to vote for John Kasich, in the GOP primary in California on June 7th (assuming he's still running)

with one caveat...

If the polling suggests that Kasich has no chance of winning the winner-take-all primary, and Trump winning the primary will give him the votes needed him to gain the nomination...

And Trump and Cruz are running neck-and neck in the polls...

Then I will hold my nose and vote for Cruz for the nomination even though I won't vote for him in the general election...

Anything to stop Trump...

It is a rather bizarre turn of events - the candidate whom Clinton will blow out of the water is leading, and the candidate who would blow Clinton out of the water is a distant third. Do Republicans actually care about who will be moving into the White House next January, or are they only concerned about sending a "message"?

I don't agree that Kasich would "blow Clinton out of the water" but I do think he'd do far better against her in the general election than either of the other alternatives. And, while I don't agree with much--or anything--that Graham says, I think he would have been one of the few Republican candidates who could have held his own against Clinton in a debate on foreign policy.

And BTW, I'm still predicting that if Trump doesn't get the nomination, Cruz will get the VP slot (with either Kasich or Ryan at the top of the ticket).

It's utterly absurd...

If you're a Republican who cares about winning the election, who should you support:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls ... s_general/

It's not rocket surgery...

But we have a situation where the likelihood of winning the nomination is inversely proportional to the action of sanity...


There's a profound toxic ugliness going on here with Trumpism, that transcends both parties...

And all of us , from the Reaganite center-right, to the Clintonite center-left, must stand against it...

Do Republicans actually care about who will be moving into the White House next January, or are they only concerned about sending a "message"?

That's a damn good question...

If the answer to that was the former rather than the latter, then John Kasich would be rolling to the nomination...

There's a lot of talk about Trump coming close on the first ballot, and then giving him the "win"...

Not if it's up to me...

I don't care if this toxic con artist is one vote short...

If he gets 1236 delegate votes, that would leave him one vote short of the 1237 needed for a majority, and lets move on to a new ballot...

On the next ballot, I guarantee you he will have fewer votes...

I'd have to do some research, but I suspect there is no major party front runner in modern political history who failed to gain more than 50% of the vote in a caucus or primary by this time in the nominating process...

Trump has failed to do so...

Trump has not gotten 50% of the vote in any caucus or primary...

He has come closest to that number in states with a huge amount of early voting... where there isn't early voting he does poorly...

When was the last time a front runner for the nomination of either major political party hadn't gotten 50% of the vote, in any caucus or primary in the nominating process, and still won the nomination?

The answer is never...

Local rag reports Kasich leads Clinton in Ohio

MajGenl.Meade wrote:Local rag reports Kasich leads Clinton in Ohio

And probably in Florida and every other state the GOP needs to win an electoral majority...

Normally, a major party marches off a cliff to make a "point" in an election cycle they have no chance of winning anyway...(Goldwater in'64, McGovern in'72)...

But you don't march off a cliff when you have a golden opportunity to win the election...

The yammering Trump-thing idiot thinks a good response to the threats we face would be to pull out of NATO...

I agree 100% with Hillary when she said that if Drumpf's approach were adopted, it would be "Christmas in the Kremlin"...

I watched her speech earlier this week about the challenges we face internationally and how we should deal with them...I have to say that at least on this critical issue, I was very favorably impressed...

She and John Kasich are the only two candidates left in this race that seem to have a realistic grasp of what we're facing, and what we need to do...(and, I might add, a more realistic grasp than our current Commander-in-Chief)

Don't stick your head in the sand and pretend its "just a small gang of thugs" (which appears to be our current policy) but also don't go to the other idiotic and self-defeating extreme of declaring war on all Muslims...

ETA:

John Kasich as President, Richard Haas as Secretary of State, and Lindsey Graham as Secretary of Defense...

Now that's what I call "bringin' your A game"...

Okay, then...what's next for the GOP?

This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative. For decades now the Republican Party has been groaning under the Reagan orthodoxy, which was right for the 1980s but has become increasingly obsolete. The Reagan worldview was based on the idea that a rising economic tide would lift all boats. But that’s clearly no longer true.

We’ve gone from Rising Tide America to Coming Apart America. Technological change, globalization and social and family breakdown mean that the benefits of growth, to the extent there is growth, are not widely shared.

Republicans sort of recognize this reality, but they are still imprisoned in the Reaganite model. They ask Reaganite questions, propose Reaganite policies and have Reaganite instincts.

Now along comes Donald Trump, an angel of destruction, to blow it all to smithereens. He represents not only a rejection of the existing Reaganite establishment, but also a rejection of Reaganite foreign policy (he is less globalist) and Reaganite domestic policy (he is friendlier to the state).

Trumpism will not replace Reaganism, though. Trump is prompting what Thomas Kuhn, in his theory of scientific revolutions, called a model crisis.

According to Kuhn, intellectual progress is not steady and gradual. It’s marked by sudden paradigm shifts. There’s a period of normal science when everybody embraces a paradigm that seems to be working. Then there’s a period of model drift: As years go by, anomalies accumulate and the model begins to seem creaky and flawed.

Then there’s a model crisis, when the whole thing collapses. Attempts to patch up the model fail. Everybody is in anguish, but nobody knows what to do.

That’s where the Republican Party is right now. Everybody talks about being so depressed about Trump. But Republicans are passive and psychologically defeated. That’s because their conscious and unconscious mental frameworks have just stopped working. Trump has a monopoly on audacity, while everyone else is immobile.

But Trump has no actual ideas or policies. There is no army of Trumpists out there to carry on his legacy. He will almost certainly go down to a devastating defeat, either in the general election or — God help us — as the worst president in American history.

At that point the G.O.P. will enter what Kuhn called the revolution phase. During these moments you get a proliferation of competing approaches, a willingness to try anything. People ask different questions, speak a different language, congregate around a new paradigm that is incommensurate with the last.

That’s where the G.O.P. is heading. So this is a moment of anticipation. The great question is not, Should I vote for Hillary or sit out this campaign? The great question is, How do I prepare now for the post-Trump era?

The first step clearly is mental purging: casting aside many existing mental categories and presuppositions, to shift your identity from one with a fixed mind-set to one in which you are a seeker and open to anything. The second step is probably embedding: going out and seeing America again with fresh eyes and listening to American voices with fresh ears, paying special attention to that nexus where the struggles of Trump supporters overlap with the struggles of immigrants and African-Americans.

This is a moment for honesty. Valuably, Trump has exposed the rottenness of the consultant culture, and the squirrelly way politicians now talk to us. This is a moment for revived American nationalism. Trump’s closed, ethnic nationalism is dominant because Iraq, globalization and broken immigration policies have discredited the expansive open form of nationalism that usually dominates American culture.

This is also a moment for redefined compassion. Trump is loveless. There is no room for reciprocity and love in his worldview. There is just winning or losing, beating or being beaten.

It is as if he was a person who received no love and tried to compensate through competition. That is an ugly, freakish and untenable representation of the human condition. Somehow the Republican Party will have to rediscover a language of loving thy neighbor, which is a primary ideal in our culture, and a primary longing of the heart.

This is also a moment for sociology. Reaganism was very economic, built around tax policies, enterprise zones and the conception of the human being as a rational, utility-driven individual. The Adam Smith necktie was the emblem of that movement.

It might be time to invest in Émile Durkheim neckties, because today’s problems relate to binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections, relating across the diversity of a globalized world. Homo economicus is a myth and conservatism needs a worldview that is accurate about human nature.

We’re going to have two parties in this country. One will be a Democratic Party that is moving left. The other will be a Republican Party. Nobody knows what it will be, but it’s exciting to be present at the re-creation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/opini ... share&_r=1 (My emphasis.)



ETA: (I guess I probably should've started a new thread with the above, but I seem to have an aversion to doing that and a preference for hijacking an existing thread.)

I see where this howler monkey is now screaming , "I got way more votes than anybody else"

Who gives a flying fuck? He still got way less votes than a majority; a majority of Republican primary voters and caucus goers have voted for someone other than him...(and that's likely to be the case throughout the remaining part of the process...)

The Party has no obligation to crown this vile con-artist with its nomination...

Scooter, party politics in the USofA, particularly GOP version, is beyond arcane. Here in Delaware we have a long tradition of good, reasonable, stolid individuals in the governor's mansion and in the delegation to the nations capital. The jobs get passed around regularly among both parties and elected officials of both parties work together pretty cooperatively. The state officials even have a ceremony after each election where they bury a real hatchet, symbolic of putting aside the conflicts of the election to work together.

Last presidential cycle, the GOP primary dumped the incumbent congress-critter, who had a long record of accomplishments--because he was not conservative enough. He actually voted for several compromises! Instead they nominated a card-carrying wicca Witch with an outstanding record of failure in business and politics. The Dems had been sure the incumbent was unbeatable and put up a sacrificial lamb who was clearly too inexperienced for the job. But he was willing to put his name on the ballot and take the loss for the good of the party.

He won, did a surprising good job and got re-elected. Now he has a solid chance to become the next governor. Because for the GOP, conservative principles allow no moderation. Real world facts are irrelevant.

snailgate

If Kasich somehow made it to November as the Rupug nominee, and then somehow beat Slick Hillie, I could live with that outcome. But Fantasyland is just that... ain't gonna' happen.