Clinton for President: Support / Don't Support

[TheKentuckian]

39. President gets air on a national board because it is a national election.

The local nature of other elections makes them more difficult to discuss. Folks don't know the players, don't connect to the local politics, and district primaries are pretty deep into the woods to hash out in this far in advance.
As the races move to the generals then it is possible to whip a little and get folks to donate or help phone bank but right now it is clunky to speak about. I have one of the juicer bits with Grimes v McTurtle because he is the minority leader so it generates more broad interest than most but there is only so much folks in New York and Oregon can discuss and debate about right now.

Meanwhile, the Presidential conversation is one that we all get a piece of and more to the point, serves as an anchor point for the debate about the future and direction of our party that hundreds of individual races just can't even if they have more actual impact on those who we are and what do we aspire to be questions.

I think this is why even the 2014 nannies have little to discuss about it other than to admonish folks for not being focused enough on 2014.

Of course we could discuss issues and then parlay that into candidates that measure up well on those issues but then folks are accused of being purist who will lead us to defeat against radical regressives (who magically are semi default and not as extreme as what used to be a fairly average Democrat).

That leaves us with essentially rah - rah national generic Democrats and boo - hiss national generic Republican which while great and true is not much of a discussion or debate. It especially doesn't work when election season is expanded to essentially forever and seems to require a significant amount of ignoring what the people we elected actually do unless it is good or can be spun as good because otherwise one is trying to elect (insert boogiemam de jour here).

The most important election in history is always the next one. Okay, fine but what that has become our politics to the point of getting elected is getting lost in the shuffle other than mitigation to varying degrees of the worst possible outcomes of the machinations of the soulless cruel, the staggeringly stupid, dragon like avarice, and sociopaths while playing friends with the same fucks and ever moving in their direction while simultaneously forcing them to even further extremes in some phony chess match that the people seem to be losing more and more in by the day.

Start some good threads and they will come, wag your finger and snark and they will be sour. Wanna elect more Democrats? The ones we have need to suck less to keep folks that only show up on "the big one" to be more consistent, for those that vote third party to stay with us, and most importantly to get some of that big ass chunk that sits home to make sure they keep getting a better deal.

Chasing independents is a silly distraction because almost all of them are partisan or leaners at minimum. It is running after shadows and worse the few that do exist tend not to be ideological at all, they are appealed to by charisma, humor, appearance, and all kinds of things that don't tie to policy but policy is used as the rationale for winning after the fact.

That goofy conflation I might hate the most, that insists without basis that if Dukakis had run on Clinton's agenda he would have won and that a pol with the talent of Clinton couldn't even make a run on the policies we had the previous election.

Shit, our biggest problem is we tend to favor the dull and the soft spoken. Lots of what folks might call nerds. Obama is almost a hybrid able to play preacher or professor. We get all professor and folk's yawn, nod, and vote for whoever they think they would want to have a beer with or stay home.