ok, the diebold connection is suspect and definitely represents a conflict of interest (especially in ohio where ken blackwell's a stockholder) but can we collectively admit that the last election was lost by kerry being a horrible candidate who ran a horrible campaign and not by some grand conspiracy?
democrats deserved to lose the last election. they got what was coming to 'em. they're a giant pack of swollen colostomy bags, swollen only slightly less than those of their competitors.
discuss...?
Labels: ohio
posted by the cold cowboy @ 2:52 PM
13 Comments:
yep. nailed it, vaquero loco. we's so very glad you've thrown in yr dem towel.
democrats being lame or weak or ineffectual or "swollen colostomy bags" does NOT excuse voter suppression or the very real possibility of rigged voting machine.
well naturally you're right about it not being an excuse - but rigged voting machines aren't the reason why kerry lost. he lost because he was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign - worse than the other guy's. were we really that shocked that he lost? hardly any of the people who supported him trusted him.
of course we should be concerned about voter suppression et al - i actually don't think adding receipts to voting machines would be as effective as just going back to paper ballots. while we're at it let's do away with voter ID laws in places like indiana and georgia that keep poor folks from voting. there are no shortage of areas for reform.
but i'm not willing to write up his loss to the conspiracy theory. i think the other guy was more appealing to most people and for legitimate reasons.
The last election was lost by Kerry being a horrible candidate who ran a horrible campaign. Agreed.
But not all conspiracies need be grand and overarching; some are small and localized. Whether or not it was the direct work of Diebold/Cheney/Rove, in my old district in Columbus there plainly was a conspiracy to suppress black votes. People passed out flyers announcing the wrong election date, fed black neighborhoods misinformation about ID requirements, etc.
Did this swing the vote? Perhaps not, and in any event it doesn't excuse Kerry for being so lame. But let's not get so rational and uncynical that we forget that the Republican party is corrupt to the gills.
these same arguments were made against gore back in 2000, and all signs point to the fact that he did indeed win, and the confluence of republican operators pushed the decision to bush's side. to wit: the voting dispute took place in florida, where his brother is governor; cnn and other media outlets give bush the win early; bush is appointed president by the supreme court, some of whom were appointed by his father and his father's predecessor.
so, is it possible that kerry did indeed run a worthy -- though not entirely exciting -- campaign that was close, and that the diebold guarantee was there to simply ASSURE the win for bush?
more simply put: it doesn't have to be either/or.
I agree with candycanesammy. what i think points to the fact something's up is, in every other major western democracy, exit polls are accurate. just not this one. and I believe in 2000 and 2004, the democrats were significantly ahead in them. yet somehow, they end up losing worse than the red sox. and then guys from diebold say shit like, "Mr. President, i promise you ohio." ummmm....
sarge, only you could make a worthwhile point while still taking a low blow to pribbs and the red sox.
Since this topic seems to have potential for yielding interesting discourse, I refuse to stoop to the Sargeant's jabs and turn this into yet another mire of baseball trash-talk.
That said, I think CCS's point about it not being an either/or question is the most important factor to remember here. Both sides offer the potential for excuse making, and I think all the CCS and the cowboy are arguing for is an acknowledgement of something that's probably true, and a refusal to make excuses for it. It appears likely that John Kerry was not a good presidential candidate and that it would be a grievous error for the Democratic party to chalk their loss up to a conspiracy. On the other hand, I would like to support CCS's ironshod, zero tolerance position for suppressing the voting population. So probably the huge brains God and Evolution have supplied us with should probably be put to use.
Otherwise the two sides of the debate will be the worst excuse makers since the '06 Dodgers and 49ers.
(Does anyone even remember that the Dodgers were supposedly in the playoffs? Coulda fooled me...)
2000 is a different ball o wax altogether--let's talk 2004.
i'm with you both that the diebold thing is creepy, that it's an obvious conflict of interest, that paper trails are necessary (and personally, i'd like to see a return to paper ballots - electrifying everything was a classic congressional knee-jerk) and that voter suppression is real.
i agree with candy that it doesn't have to be either/or. hence, just because there was shady business going on doesn't mean that was the reason kerry lost.
kerry ran a terrible campaign, there were no new ideas, there was no attempt at adapting to new challenges. most importantly, his advisers were old guard democrats who had largely been involved with losing campaigns and used the same tired strategies.
people overwhelmingly chose the other guy in the popular vote, whether or not johnny diebold pulled his secret levers.
as for polls, the exit polls in ohio early in the day predicted a narrow kerry victory. exit polls tend to be an accurate predictor of results when taken in the aggregate - they can swing back and forth all day.
for democrats to change these trends, they need to accept responsibility. when we place the blame on outsiders, the insiders can continue pretending they did nothing wrong. bob shrum, john kerry - they still blame the conspiracies. the truth is, they did a bad, bad job.
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hell, after what I just heard down here in TN, I say that Diebold is only one of our problems. Pole volunteers are under NO circumstances supposed to speak about the issues that people are voting on. Yet, we have people telling early voters to "vote no on issue 1 (the tennessee marriage ammendment) if you want two men and three women to be able to get married." (a vote of No is a vote against ratifying the ammendment) It's things like that that make me want to live somewhere else...I'd gladly take stuck up and unfriendly Boston over the South right now.
i'm sure that several posters have a better idea about how Kerry "really" did as a campaigner, but the call that the Dems got what they deserve, there was no conspiracy, they ran a bad campaign reeks of 2000, when the same charges were lobbed at Gore.
"Sure he really won, but it never should have been this close, he ran a bad campaign."
And i bought that for a while. He should have walked with the election, he didn't, thus it must have been his fault.
Then i read a couple of books which address how Gore was handled in the media, and it was really shocking, shocking because they'd gotten me. All of the impressions that were put out there were the impressions of Gore that i had, but few of them had anything to do with reality.
Gore was a really good candidate actually, and a corporate media erased that. So, again, perhaps some posters have inside information, but while i'm willing to admit that voting machines may not have been the only factor that put Bush back in the whitehouse, i'm not willing to say that there wasn't a conspiracy or that it was Kerry's fault (though i never liked him).
If campaigns are primarily conducted through the mainstream media, and the media is so slanted toward one side, how can the other ever run a "good" campaign?
as i said before, i think 2000 was a different story altogether.
i'd agree with you that media slants toward one side but it hasn't always been that way. there are good ways to frame the debate that just haven't been done by dems in recent elections--especially by kerry. for one, people generally respond better to statements that tie into a common theme. i don't know anybody who can tell me what kerry's common theme was. everybody knew what bush's was. kerry also had no common theme for his challenger. there were a million different things wrong with him to be sure, but to make is resonate, you need to tie them together. it's hard to process a million attacks and people tend to dwell on the few attacks that had no merit.
it's very possible to run a good campaign with a hostile media. have the press been able to dig up anything on obama? it's because he knows how to work them. clinton was great at it too until it was obvious. bush was good until it was obvious. there are ways to slant the media to your side and dems have adopted a defeatist attitude. it's not every year there's going to be a set of events like this one that makes things easy. really, they need to just be more creative.
media looks for messages that tie to a common theme just like everybody else and they need a storyline. they also are lazy and don't like to come up with one. i think some (but certainly not all) of the reason the press appears so pro-republican is because the dems give them nothing to work with.
i'd agree with everybody it's not an ideal situation to have a media like we do. but it's not hopeless. there are ways to penetrate.
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