News US Republican candidates 2016 discussion

blues said:
Please excuse my political awkwardness of US politics .....the only threads I read about the whole scene over there are on VV , but who is the leader of the Democrats ? .

Maybe they haven't elected one yet ?
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There's not a leader of a political party here the way there is in parliamentary systems. Each party has a chairman, who is elected by the national committee of each party. For the Democrats, the process is this:
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the formal governing body for the United States Democratic Party. The committee coordinates strategy to support Democratic Party candidates throughout the country for local, state, and national office. It organizes the Democratic National Convention held every four years to nominate and confirm a candidate for president, and to formulate the party platform. While it provides support for party candidates, it does not have direct authority over elected officials.[2]

The DNC is composed of the chairs and vice-chairs of each state Democratic Party committee and over 200 members elected by Democrats in all 50 states and the territories. Its chairperson is elected by the committee. It conducts fundraising to support its activities.[2]
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Democratic National Committee - Wikipedia

The chairmanship of the national committee is really an administrative post. Politically, the party's candidate for the U.S. presidency is the de facto leader of the party.
 
Mischief said:
There's not a leader of a political party here the way there is in parliamentary systems. Each party has a chairman, who is elected by the national committee of each party. For the Democrats, the process is this:

Democratic National Committee - Wikipedia

The chairmanship of the national committee is really an administrative post. Politically, the party's candidate for the U.S. presidency is the de facto leader of the party.
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Yes it is different to other forms of parliamentary systems Mischief , lets face it , Trump has made a few cock ups, big enough to drive a bus through . But with no candidate as yet elected for the US presidency (the Democrats), the system seems to come across as yet, with no effective opposition to take the debate to them .
 
Andy_T said:
I certainly don't feel anything like that!!!
If anything, then Hilary (together with the DNC) is one of the worst culprits responsible for the current mess.
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You're not wrong about that. The DNC did set up the Cheeto as an obvious losing candidate to campaign Clinton against, and certainly helped get him where he is now due to a serious underestimation of how ridiculous the electoral college is. But I honestly think the integrity of the Democratic party (it has none) is a separate issue from whether or not it, corruption and all, would have been a better alternative to the surreal shitshow going on right now (it wouldn't be a viable alternative but it would at least be stable and accomplish at least a few surface level things. Not the change we deserve even remotely but vastly preferable to the toddler in chief).

And I certainly do not think that it is misogynistic to point out that a horrible female candidate should not be selected over a good male candidate because she is a woman. I would have campaigned for Elizabeth Warren any day :)
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Nope, and I agree with you there, I would have preferred Sanders to Clinton by far, and still do. But it's important to acknowledge that misogyny as a cultural construct played a role in downplaying Clinton as a candidate and allowing the Cheeto - who regardless of your opinion on Clinton is quite possibly the worst presidential candidate in history and thus by default a poorer alternative than even the most corrupt ******* - to get as far as he did despite doing literally everything wrong.

ledboots said:
It used to be that people in the US could debate politics with those who have different opinions, and listen to speeches from those with whom they disagree without shouting, violence, name-calling, and labelling. Those days are gone, at least lately.
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Hey, if someone wants to debate things that are a matter of reasonable disagreement, I'm all for it. However, whether or not people deserve basic human rights is not up for debate. It's not a matter of opinion. If someone supports the people who want to rob good people, innocent people, my friends, of their human rights, treat them like dirt and get them hurt or killed, then I'm not going to entertain their opinion because them trying to enforce their opinion is an act of violence. I am going to do everything within my power to prevent them from hurting innocent people, because people having human rights is more important to me than some distant ideal of respecting every side of a disagreement, even when one or more of those sides happily advocates the systems through which murder and even genocide is enacted, constantly.

Mischief said:
Interesting tidbit: In a poll taken about a month or two ago, an unnamed Democrat beat dt handily in a projected 2020 election, but dt beat Elizabeth Warren handily. That means (a) Americans prefer dt over a progressive, 0r (b) misogyny plays a powerful role, or (c) both (a) and (b).
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I won't say you're wrong, but I will say that at this point, I distrust polls so much that if I were stuck in a burning building and a poll came to help me get out, I would tackle that poll to the ground and let us both burn, because it would be worth it to get rid of that great deceiver before it could spread its lies further.
 
Andy_T said:
This is an interesting article:

A new tell-all about the Clinton campaign is a searing indictment of the candidate herself
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I refuse to read this.

There's a whole f****** industry established with the sole intent of destroying the reputation and career of Hillary Rodham Clinton (and the rest of her family as well). I can only imagine how much money these people are making, not to mention getting a lot of perverse satisfaction, from trying to convince millions of people that the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the United States (and one who not-so-coincidentally happens to be of the "wrong" sex) is somehow the most evil, despicable person on earth, worse than everyone else, even worse than Donald Trump or even Adolf Hitler. And the sad thing is, they've managed to succeed with this, even with a lot of supposedly smart people who should know better.
 
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Amy SF said:
I refuse to read this.

There's a whole f****** industry established with the sole intent of destroying the reputation and career of Hillary Rodham Clinton (and the rest of her family as well). I can only imagine how much money these people are making, not to mention getting a lot of perverse satisfaction, from trying to convince millions of people that the most qualified presidential candidate in the history of the United States (and one who not-so-coincidentally happens to be of the "wrong" sex) is somehow the most evil, despicable person on earth, worse than everyone else, even worse than Donald Trump or even Adolf Hitler. And the sad thing is, they've managed to succeed with this, even with a lot of supposedly smart people who should know better.
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The article itself is disparaging of the book. The title of the article refers to what the book tries to do, but the article is clear in pointing out that the authors are trying to promote two mutually exclusive theories, as well as a number of other flaws with the authors' "reporting."
 
Yeah, Vox is usually pretty level-headed.

As for the situation itself, we're at this weird point where criticizing Democratic elites like Clinton is absolutely necessary to start explaining to mainstream liberals why the Democratic Party is not a true force for change - in the hopes that somehow, our shitty two-party system might be retooled or even just broken entirely and rebuilt from the ground up to prevent another Cheeto from coming along (this is a distant hope, the Left will undoubtedly just cannibalize itself like it did last year and let Fascism stroll boldly into power once again) - but doing so will inevitably cause people to place you in the same category as right-wing asshats who just hate Clinton because she's a woman, because they read fake news articles and think she's running a child sex trafficking ring from a pizza shop, because they interpret her as more progressive than she actually is and want to lash out against that perceived threat (if Republicans stepped back and actually looked at her plans most of them would probably have loved Clinton).
 
Mischief said:
The article itself is disparaging of the book. The title of the article refers to what the book tries to do, but the article is clear in pointing out that the authors are trying to promote two mutually exclusive theories, as well as a number of other flaws with the authors' "reporting."
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While the article is critical of some claims made, it still does not "disparage the book" IMO...

The Article said:
But even if not every bit of campaign gossip improves our understanding of Clinton’s loss, the book provides crucial value when capturing the central problem for her team — an endless struggle to figure out its exact vision for the country.

Shattered makes clear that Clinton had no problem deciding what she was against. The authors write that she was convinced Sanders had made a fatal mistake by rejecting the label of “capitalist” in favor of “democratic socialist.” She thought much the same of Trump’s rampant misogyny and racism, they report.

Much more difficult for the campaign was figuring out what she should stand for. Of course, there were the endless policy proposals: paid family leave, a debt-free college plan, a higher minimum wage. But stitching those threads into a coherent storyline was still proving elusive, and her staff knew it from the beginning.
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