We can do better than Hillary Clinton.

[MADem]

352. Well of course that's what Speaker O'Neill meant. And I did not miss the point at all.

People vote on issues of interest to THEM.

People also vote for candidates who are from THEIR state--like Nixon and Reagan. Their INTERESTS include having someone working at the federal level who will throw a little largesse their way. It's not just "Oh gee, he's one of ours" -- it's "He's gonna make OUR lives better, BECAUSE he's one of ours."

See? All politics is LOCAL.

If Christie runs for President, NJ will probably go red.

How the hell do you think Mitt Fuckin' Romney became governor of MA? He played that game, and the 80 percent of voters who are woefully and willfully stupid BELIEVED him.

He pretended--despite his Michigan upbringing and his Utah mansion--that he was a Massachusettsian, based on the house where no one lived in his wife's name in Belmont. His lousy little rape-the-workers business was centered here, and he flat out lied in dozens of commercials that he had "friends" who would "bring jobs" to MA, particularly the western part of the state, where jobs are sometimes scarcer than the eastern part.

Of course, he was LYING...but he was LYING about an "issue" that was important to people here.

At the end of the day, no "friends" came to create jobs, and things got worse, not better, with some of his line-item tactics. User taxes went up, senior benefits and benefits for the disabled were stripped away, and life for those on the margins became close to untenable. That's why he was a one-term governor, and he pranced off, three quarters of the way through his term, to run for President, leaving a thick-as-a-brick LGOV to stumble around ineffectually.

Fortunately, MA is a weak governor system--the actual "governor," during Mittsy's term, was the MA legislature, who laughed at him and overrode every veto of every new law they put forward. It's why people made jokes that if you wanted a MA state trooper, you had to go to NH, because half of them were "protecting" the governor as he lived out of his lake home up there, trying to drum up support for his presidential run. Of course, his dickishness became known through his pisspoor performance in MA, and the people of NH weren't terribly swayed by his attempt to play the "All Politics is Local" game in that state--they'd seen him fuck their neighboring state quite royally by then.