Biden-Harris / Dems

"Hilary only lost because of [One Thing]" is a mantra that Democrats really need to stop repeating. She lost for many reasons, piled one on top of each other, many of which were self-inflicted. She was arrogant, entitled, and unlikable. She expected to be Crowned President by the DNC and the public alike. She felt that she had a mandate and anyone who said otherwise wasn't worth talking to or about. She ran a disaster of a campaign that failed to understand Trump's appeal to voters from the beginning, and failed to pivot when her initial strategies against him failed to gain ground. She perfectly embodied the problem Republicans and Independents have against Democrats, that they know best and anyone who doesn't agree needs to shut up and let smarter people (i.e. Her) tell them what to do.

Would she have been a better President by every possible objective metric? Of course. But you can't be President until you succeed at being a Candidate. And Hillary Clinton was horrible at being a Candidate.

nothing's changed in 24 years...

Xaaron said:

"Hilary only lost because of [One Thing]" is a mantra that Democrats really need to stop repeating. She lost for many reasons, piled one on top of each other, many of which were self-inflicted. She was arrogant, entitled, and unlikable. She expected to be Crowned President by the DNC and the public alike. She felt that she had a mandate and anyone who said otherwise wasn't worth talking to or about. She ran a disaster of a campaign that failed to understand Trump's appeal to voters from the beginning, and failed to pivot when her initial strategies against him failed to gain ground. She perfectly embodied the problem Republicans and Independents have against Democrats, that they know best and anyone who doesn't agree needs to shut up and let smarter people (i.e. Her) tell them what to do.

Would she have been a better President by every possible objective metric? Of course. But you can't be President until you succeed at being a Candidate. And Hillary Clinton was horrible at being a Candidate.

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Honestly if you wanna go the One Thing route, she lost because of the 20+ year smear campaign the right wing had been running on her. Kinda hard to fight that sorta thing and your opponent who seems to be Teflon when it comes to scandals.

Ironbite-it was literally a perfect storm.

Xaaron said:

She expected to be Crowned President by the DNC and the public alike.

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And after having already lost a primary to some guy no one had ever heard of, too. You'd think she would have learned something from that.

And speaking of "some guy no one had ever heard of", it really is amazing how rarely a presidential candidate is someone everyone is already familiar with, isn't it? Former vice presidents running for office, like H.W. and Gore and Biden, are about as famous as they get, and even then people aren't entirely sure what they spent the last four to eight years of their lives actually doing. Generally, I don't consider that a bad thing. The race for president should not be a name-recognition contest. Sure, there have been movies about a celebrity with no political experience running for office, and almost always winning, but that's just movies, right?

I'd argue the only reason it had never happened before in real life is that no one had ever been crazy enough to try. Let's face it, if you're successful enough to win an election on fame alone, you're probably at a point where being President is a step down more than anything; even Trump gave the impression that he had only run for the attention and was disappointed to have to spend the next four years of his life being a politician. But he had spent the last few years of his life as a quasi-political figure, lashing out at Obama and spreading rumors that he wasn't a native-born American and all that. He wasn't just the most A-list famous person to ever run for President; he was also the closest thing to a popular political pundit running for President. Remember when people tried to get Stephen Colbert to run for office? Remember when Al Franken did run for the Senate, won, and held office for multiple terms before finally getting outed as a sex pest and tossed out?

Trump was running against like a dozen people in the primary, but the only one with any sort of name recognition was Jeb Bush, and well... as Bloom County's rundown of the primary put it, "Try saying 'President Fiorina' five times fast. Try saying 'President Bush' at any speed."

It wasn't a fair fight at all.

I am unclear how many people knew Ronald Reagan the actor. I have heard he was in B-movies, but I'm really not sure how much exposure that is. We don't have B-movies now.

We don't have...?

Anything that skips a theatrical release is a B movie. The definition has changed, but they still exist.

wonko the sane? said:

And my point was: it doesn't matter who runs for the democrats; republicans will smear them regardless.

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Yes, I caught that. Smear tactics only matter to those who might change their votes. There was literally decades of smear against Hillary Clinton whereby people who might have voted for her learned to dislike her. That wouldn't be the case today.

wonko the sane? said:

We don't have...?

Anything that skips a theatrical release is a B movie. The definition has changed, but they still exist.

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Do you really get to change the definition just to keep the word in play?

It could be that TV actors are the modern parallel. There are a lot of TV actors that are pretty well known, but never break into movies.

There have been a number of Presidents that ran on little more than being a celebrated war hero.

Axaday said:

Do you really get to change the definition just to keep the word in play?

It could be that TV actors are the modern parallel. There are a lot of TV actors that are pretty well known, but never break into movies.

There have been a number of Presidents that ran on little more than being a celebrated war hero.

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I didn't define it. Hell, just about any of the Tubi made movies are B-movies. They do exist, it's just harder to come across them now.

And I'm fine with presidents whom have actual military service (preferably in which they were honorably discharged.) because it means they understand and can live with the requirements of an oath of service, work in a highly rigid bureaucratic structure and understand the nature of sacrifice.

Correct, the term B Movie changed naturally. While it once referred to the lesser movie in a double feature, the meaning has shifted. Heck by the 80's the meaning had shifted to mean pretty much any movie with a highly constrained budget and questionable production values(granted at that time a Made for TV movie wasn't considered a B Movie, further shifts in language would probably make them the same at this point). Heck Troma still exists as does The Asylum. Granted we are getting a bit off topic, lol.

Well, what I was getting at was I don't really have a feel for how many of the people who voted for Reagan in 1980 loved one of his movies. Was he Matt LeBlanc or Peter Stamore?

To summarize some of what's on his Wikipedia page, he was in the top 100 stars according to Gallup polls in 1941/1942, but post WWII didn't quite have the same star power and started doing westerns (I vaguely recall they were what he was mainly known for when he ran for president). Given Republican voters tend to skew older, I feel pretty safe in suggesting that they would have been familiar with his film career.

Also consider that the 1940s were only 40 years removed from the 1980s. People who were watching his movies at the peak of his movie career would have been as young as 50 at the time of the election. His movies were also re-released in theaters AFTER that time period and were eventually being shown on TV as well. Many boomers would have been just as familiar with him as the earlier generations.

Yeah but again, IT IS LITERALLY TOO LATE FOR ANYONE ELSE TO RUN and have even like 10% the chance he does of winning. No one voted for anyone else in the primaries because no one else ran in them. No one is going to vote for someone the party just decided to declare the candidate by fiat.

If Biden isn't the nominee it will be Kamala Harris, and I think she'll fare about as well as Joe. She'll clobber Trump in the second debate but face her own problems (unfairly) by being black and a woman. It's going to be a toss up no matter what we do.

Plan for a long night on election night.

Is it too early to start making "But he's old" memes along the lines of the "But her email" memes from 2016?

Nah, that's been going on for a while now.

Wheelimus said:

If Biden isn't the nominee it will be Kamala Harris, and I think she'll fare about as well as Joe. She'll clobber Trump in the second debate but face her own problems (unfairly) by being black and a woman. It's going to be a toss up no matter what we do.

Plan for a long night on election night.

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Kamala would be a Ghostbuster scenario. She would get a lot of unfair criticism from racist and sexist....... But also she sucks.