My original post was inartful…I didn’t mean to say the obvious answer ALWAYS is Republicans creating or supporting a phantom 3rd party candidate that had no juice of their own.
I meant to say I would never skip that part of the equation now. I wouldn’t put a single thing past them. I would look at any 3rd party candidate as a probable R plant until proven otherwise.
This is for all the marbles and I expect them to pull out all the stops.
Not sure what you are saying here…give the Rs a break because they don’t do this hideously unamerican thing as often as I imagine? The same folks who conspired with Iran to hold US hostages longer for the purpose of winning the presidential election? The same party that lied and meddled with the Vietnam War for election purposes? Or the bullying of the FL recount and SCOTUS with Bush V Gore? Or Merrick Garland and Boof Kavanaugh? Same party that just gave us over to the Russkies? I begin to think my imaginings are falling short, not the other way around.
Many of those people haven’t changed their voter registration though. Just like many people in states like Pennsylvania are registered as Democrats despite not having voted for a Democratic candidate since before 1980.
More significantly though, looking at registration rather than identification masks that many states don’t register voters by party at all.
No of course not. But give third party candidates a break from being automatically considered dupes or stooges (at least locally), and blame the candidates themselves instead.
Also, don’t underestimate how many mentally ill people run for office. Lots of third party candidates fit into that category as well.
If Schultz runs as an Independent, effectively pulling a Nader/Stein on our democratic process, thereby increasing the likelihood of the GOP holding the White House, then I’ll never buy another Starbucks product. As it is, I’m considering starting a boycott soon, just because he’s considering it. If he’s going to run, it should be as a Democrat or a Republican. Period.
Because we don’t have a parliamentary system, we effectively have two party domination. Schultz either plays in that domain and runs as a Democrat or Republican, or he can go to Hell as nothing more than a fucking spoiler. I’d feel differently if we did have a parliamentary system, but that would require a Constitutional Convention, and I think calling a Constitutional Convention with all the right wing demagoguery we currently have would be a very dangerous and destabilizing endeavor.
A funnel is required. Many people might want the job, but only one can have it.
In 2016 specifically, we saw two starkly different pictures: the Dem side consisted of all the sane, reasonable folks who are serious about government (and that applies to the candidates as well as the voters); the GOP side was an absolute shit-show of virulently ignorant, stupid, underqualified attention whores, corporate shills, and foreign agents.
Bernie did the right thing and unequivocally threw his support to Hillary when he lost the primary. Bernie Bros were recklessly stupid to refuse to vote for her, but it’s a tall order to expect the political system to compel individual voters to make good choices.
If Russia hadn’t started a hot cyber-war with us by conspiring with Trump, then our political process would have worked and produced the correct result.
Let’s not be too quick to suggest that 2016 proves our political system is entirely broken. If Russia had literally executed air strikes in 20 states in the days leading up to the election, we wouldn’t describe that as a failure of our politics.
That said, our politics does have some real dysfunction, a lot of it deliberately cultivated by the Kochs and their oligarch allies. The GOP has become an empty husk that plutocrats operate like a ventriloquist’s dummy. This becomes a real problem when you take into account that lots of election law and practice has become ossified around the two major parties, which means that special powers and privileges become available to anyhow who successfully captures one of those two parties.
One must hope the DNC Press has a hard-drive full of clips of Imbecile-1 and its acolytes comparing the FBI to the Gestapo and GOP-approved crapping on other federal LEOs for pre-emptive strikes and/or rapid response.
He wrote a bestselling book that was everywhere in the '80s and '90s, especially on TV.
Speaking of TV, even if you never watched a single episode, commercials for The Apprentice were all over NBC for years and years. He was definitely a household name. Let’s not forget, too, the whole premise was that he was some sort of hot-shot super businessman who had a keen eye for people’s acumen.
The number of people who saw Trump primarily as an inept clown and Graydon Carter’s favorite punching bag from when he ran a small satirical NY-centric magazine a quarter of a century back was really quite small.
That’s the thing. The hot cyberwar was part of that capture, a pretty fucking successful part in fact. It was the very failures of our political system that allowed them to corrupt it.
In a way, I wish it were just the Russians. It would be easier (and less constitutionally conflicted) to combat.
But the calls are coming from inside the house too. The weaponization of social media has been used for terrorist recruitment, by our own candidates against each other, and certainly by the likes of the Mercers and former president Bannon to harvest votes from the susceptible and suggestible.
I think we may be helping to enable our own media warlords by focusing so intensely on Russia. It’s an enormous problem, way bigger than just the Russians no matter that their abilities and expertise here is unquestionable. We’re doing it to ourselves too.
I see your point. It was probably more the TV show and his presence in the tabloids, because I don’t think a lot of people in rural American cared about his book
You know the kind of people who got Business degrees in college? They all read that book back then. It was all over the media too, the “Art of the Deal”, Trump’s pose on the cover, you’d have to have been living in a hole to not know about it or recognize that cover, even if (like me) you never read a page. Basically, a cultural meme - cf. Home Alone 2 (1992).
Basically, and this is true Trump, you didn’t have to care about the book, you just needed to know about the cover.
I was waiting tables/tending bar at a restaurant on U of Pennsylvania’s campus in the mid 80’s (I was a student at Temple U myself), and many Penn students were quite gaga over the book. Keep in mind that a few of these same Penn students also tried to convince me of the virtues of cocaine.
Nowadays, I think one would be hard-pressed to find a Trump supporter on U of Penn’s campus.
