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So how exactly did this happen?

no surprise that republicans love the machinery that restricts actual democracy, especially when it bails them out of 2 of the last 5 contests
 
Elizabeth Warren. There are not any charismatic politicians out there now. Trump and Bernie were basically it in the primaries.

Not sure Warren appeals to a broad enough group. I probably just have a naive expectation that charisma can overcome disagreement. That's probably stupid on my part. Obama is as charismatic as it gets, and can't get any traction across the aisle. We are at the mercy of ideological turnout now. Compromise is dead.
 
Charisma isn't going to bridge ideology. It will get people out to vote.
 
Are the Mississippi plants actually paying taxes? Are the jobs paying good money?

They have certainly received very favorable corporate tax plans/breaks, but they are great paying jobs, and those jobs are certainly paying taxes. The people in communities that have jobs are spending money at other businesses who are paying taxes, etc.... So we don't really care if Toyota pays corporate taxes for the next decade (if that is what it took to get them here). Their business is flooding their community with great jobs (low education, middle education, and high education). Pretty much the opposite of Michigan/Detroit. Detroit businesses aren't paying taxes either btw. Had a conversation with a Detroit city councilman a few years back and he told me they were actually paying companies to try and relocate back to Detroit and they were having trouble getting them to come because once they set up business the overhead was too high due to unions. That is why they had to go to casinos because they couldn't make the bottom line work, and casinos were willing to come in and feed off the suffering (all the while paying taxes and keeping the city afloat).
 
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Not sure Warren appeals to a broad enough group. I probably just have a naive expectation that charisma can overcome disagreement. That's probably stupid on my part. Obama is as charismatic as it gets, and can't get any traction across the aisle. We are at the mercy of ideological turnout now. Compromise is dead.

Warren doesn't really get me that excited. :noidea:
 
If we're isolating for women, Michelle Obama definitely has it. Haley probably does. Maybe Gillibrand? I'm not super familiar with all the options that may be out there.

Michelle, Palin, Oprah, Jennifer Lawrence, Elizabeth Warren, Margaret Thacher, Ellen, and Lady Di had it. Merkel, HRC, Haley, and Gillibrand don't.

Obama had it. Colin Powell might have won earlier, but Sharpton, Jackson, Cain, and Carson were never going to be POTUS. Timing no longer works for Haley. Gillibrand may be on the 2020 Dem ticket, but only as VP.
 
I love Warren right where she is, as a watchdog over Wall Street. I think she single handedly got John Stumpf removed at Wells Fargo.
 
A demagogue stirred up hate, and the dumbest and saddest of us latched on first, of course the fucking uneducated rednecks listened, and then, slowly but surely people who are not happy with their lives latched on. After all, it's kind of nice to think that all of the failures in your life are the work of external forces and not your own shortcomings. It gives people a place to channel all of their disappointments and frustrations and anger, they now have something to explain it away. Something to focus their hate on.

The deplorables will never be reached, they are just to fucking dumb to function; its all they can do not to accidentally kill themselves between sunrise and sunset.

But again, the worst thing to me is perfectly educated people who ignore all the hate and get down and wallow with these people. Its not just disappointing, it's gross.
 
By the way, the spoiled millennial brats rolled the quad Tuesday night.

Another reminder this site hasn't had any new active posters in a long time. If OG Boards was a person, it would definitely be an OWG.

Kind of weird to blame a 20 or 30 something for not getting old and disillusioned.

He probably is disillusioned if he want to Wake and is working a crappy retail job. He's the guy who started the "Possible labor law issue at work?" thread.

These posts touch on the real reason Trump won.

Go back over every previous presidential election and rate the two candidates on a scale of 1-10 measuring only one quality: charisma. You have to go back to 1988 where it is even close, but in a year where the Democrats were gifted Bush 1, they ran Dukakis. 1968-1976 are narrow differences, but it's not hard to see the winner as tied or better in the charisma category. You have to go back to well before the advent of TV, before this notion doesn't explain the winner.

There are a few reasons why this doesn't universally hold in the primaries, but it does influence the results within each party's nomination process.

So, Democrats in 2020 and 2024 have to decide if they want the best representative of their ideology, or if they want to win.

A guy I work with mentioned the charisma history a few months ago. Had forgotten about it until now. Very legit point. Also syncs up with Trump's losses among educated voters and gains in non-educated voters.

jhmd, Haley is Nikki Haley, SC Governor. Handled the Charleston church shooting aftermath very well, and supported the effort to remove the Confederate flag from the State grounds.
 
The Midwest auto jobs would come back if you broke the unions. The labor force there is incredible for auto construction and repair. They have done it their whole lives and many of them have had it handed down generationally (I know because a good portion of my family lives in Michigan and are auto people).

Think of the paradigm shift if they finally said no to the unions. I think almost immediately you would see the current auto companies reinvest in their properties in the region and the next time a bid came for a new plant you would have experienced people ready to go to work on a level playing field with South Carolina and mississippi.

Don't get me wrong - Mississippi loves the auto plants that are being built here and the jobs and tax money that comes out of that but there is really no reason those plants shouldn't be built in Michigan. The state is just dealing with half the deck.


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The jobs are not coming back

Even if manufacturing comes back, it will be a fraction of the old jobs
 
They have certainly received very favorable corporate tax plans/breaks, but they are great paying jobs, and those jobs are certainly paying taxes. The people in communities that have jobs are spending money at other businesses who are paying taxes, etc.... So we don't really care if Toyota pays corporate taxes for the next decade (if that is what it took to get them here). Their business is flooding their community with great jobs (low education, middle education, and high education). Pretty much the opposite of Michigan/Detroit. Detroit businesses aren't paying taxes either btw. Had a conversation with a Detroit city councilman a few years back and he told me they were actually paying companies to try and relocate back to Detroit and they were having trouble getting them to come because once they set up business the overhead was too high due to unions. That is why they had to go to casinos because they couldn't make the bottom line work, and casinos were willing to come in and feed off the suffering (all the while paying taxes and keeping the city afloat).

GM just announced layoffs of 2000 workers in MI and OH.
 
Redneck.

I raise my hand.

In my teens I worked in tobacco fields. Started a couple hours before dawn, took out two barns, went to the fields and worked till the barns were full. Got a break around 10:00 with a soft drink and an hour for lunch, afternoon break include a pack of nabs with the drink.. Made $6 a day. My brothers and sisters did the same.

Dad had a post grad degree and mom was a schoolteacher.

So TTAB, kiss my redneck as%.
 
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Should be required reading for and comprehened by the resident left liberals:

"Clinton’s supporters among the media didn’t help much, either. It always struck me as strange that such an unpopular candidate enjoyed such robust and unanimous endorsements from the editorial and opinion pages of the nation’s papers, but it was the quality of the media’s enthusiasm that really harmed her. With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda station. Here’s what it consisted of:

Hillary was virtually without flaws. She was a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer, a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice.
Her scandals weren’t real.
The economy was doing well / America was already great.
Working-class people weren’t supporting Trump.
And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.
How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?"

"Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!"

Thomas Frank is the author of Listen, Liberal


good find, jhmd

I 100% agree with this. The Democratic party has lost its way. It no longer stands for the people that it once did. The limousine liberals have taken it over.
 
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Rosie Odonnel for 2020. Think about it Dems. First gay and first woman ! Thats a double whammy! The debates would be huuuuge draws for the networks.
 
The jobs are not coming back

Even if manufacturing comes back, it will be a fraction of the old jobs

On e thing in this arena that very few people talk about is that cars last much, much longer today than they did even 25 years ago. Even then other than Volvos and Mercedes. a car with 100K miles was not that usual. Today, a lot of cars are on the road with 150-200,000 miles. Even with more people, we don't need proportionally as many cars.
 
But it shouldn't be the United States of Iowa and Michigan and Ohio either. There's no ideal system.

The ideal system is one person, one vote, and everyone's vote counts the same. That is far from what we have now.
 
I didn't read through this whole thread, but to answer the question of How did this happen? I heard an excellent short and sweet analysis from someone on a radio show.
Regarding Hillary.....
People don't like her, they don't trust her, she's had no real accomplishments and she had no core message.

Lots of people don't like Trump either, but he had some very clear core messages and represented change.
 
Good thing you are above hatred. I mean, your love of the commoner just oozes from every sentence.

This will be a concept that goes over your head, but we shouldn't be tolerant to intolerance and ignorance. Calling someone out for being dumb and racist is the right thing to do. Tolerating that behavior is not.

If you were a Trump voter you either embraced the racism, fascism, misogyny etc or you are a complicit enabler. Tell yourself whatever you need to look yourself in the mirror in the morning, but those are the facts.
 
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