Posted on 06/15/2005 8:53:15 AM PDT by areafiftyone
Correction, I don't know if Kerry could have won it, even with the Big Bend.
However, if Gore had won the Big Bend in 2000, he'd be President (well, would have been till Jan 20 of this year at least)
No dispute on anything you said. You sound like you really know the South politically.
I have watched over the past few election cycles as the Midwest ends up being the place where things are as unpredictable as the weather, and yet neither party really makes a bid for the Midwestern vote.
I can hazard a guess why too: it would be too expensive.
You can bring along the other four regions, one way or the other, by a powerful social issue or two:
Abortion in the Northeast, abortion and gay rights on the West Coast, guns in the Mountains, and God, abortion and guns down South. Social issues don't cost anything.
But the Midwest?
This is the world of vast corporate industry and farms.
They aren't going to override their pocketbooks for guns, or abortion, or God, or gays...or anything. They are, in fact, exactly like the white shoe East Coast conservative Republicans who tenaciously focus on the economic bottom line, except of course they don't have the power the Easterners do.
To win over the Midwest to be a solid voting bloc for one party or the other would require dealing with things that are going to alter money flows. And THAT is expensive. Neither party will play that game, and so the Midwest remains up for grabs.
This is an E.J. Dionne wet dream. He's an ardent Lefty and McKinnon is merely a hired media gun. It was an employee from McKinnon's shop that mailed secret and sensitive Bush campaign documents to the Gore campaign, remember? McKinnon has run campaigns for lots of Democrats and I think I recall reading that he's a liberal. There's a lot I don't understand about GWB, and his close friendship with this guy is one of them.
They won't play that game because the one area of the country where a Populist argument could hold as gospel is the Midwest.
Half of the vote for Kerry in Illinois came in Cook County. Now, I know this would be hard, but, if Republicans could get into a position where they could get maybe 37-38% of the vote in Cook, they'd be able to take back Illinois.
But, notice the trend over the last 20 years, all these big business cities grow more and more Democratic. During this same time, the Democrats basically abandoned the populist model and followed the DLC model which says, become socially liberal corporate guys as opposed to the GOP's socially conservative corporate guys. And to a degree, I think it worked.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I seem to remember Clinton using the presidential option on a strike back in the 90s.
That's the problem the Midwest presents, because it is a region that has seen better days, unlike other parts of the country, it always had a vibrant two party system.
If a candidate actually ran on an anti-NAFTA platform, I think he'd sweep alot of those midwestern states, but given the current constitution of the leadership in both parties (I don't mean Dean and Mehlman, I mean the people that actually run things), that ain't happening.
If another Wallace (economically populist, socially conservative) ran as a third party candidate, I think he'd do real well in the Midwest (if he didnt run on race), because he'd give them the populism they want, and the morals they want. Incidentally, Wallace did well in the Midwest when he did run.
But you're right, the real reason they don't want to deal with the Midwest is, it would piss off their backers. What the Midwest wants I think, is to again become the Heartland of America, where everything is prosperity, Ozzie and Harriet, etc. Because they see the rest of the country passing them by, they see their cities being abandoned, their farms going belly up, etc. And West Virginia I think could be lumped in here too, because no state more typifies what happened to the Rust Belt/Midwest than West Virginia.
Yes. And I'm sure voting for Hillary before McCain sure helps solve THAT problem...
It is ok to be angry at this party for doing some stupid, stupid things in the past few years. It is not ok, however, to be such vengeful idiots that we would be willing to shoot "conservative principles" even more in the foot by voting Hillary (or not voting for our guy) in 2008.
FINALLY! Somebody who makes sense! I've been reading through these posts, and it is incredible how many folks here would rather be vengeful and just vote for Hillary because they hate McCain, instead of be rational and realize that Hillary's election would be the worst possible thing that could ever happen to us.
I'm not too concerned, though- this site represents the far right for the most part, at least amongst most of the posters. Every vote McCain loses from people on this site, he will gain from moderate independents and regular Republicans. Now, if the people on FR actually voted for him if he got that far, he'd probably win in a Reagan-Mondale type victory given how much support the media and moderates give him. But FR won't, so he'll win by a smaller margin. But a win is a win.
By the way, are any of the other three people on this site who don't hate McCain incredibly cautious about speaking up on this issue? I sure am, given all the vengeful people around here. And to everyone else besides the three: flame away!
This is the dumbest trial balloon yet.
Here you go...
http://www.vote-smart.org/bio.php?can_id=CNIP9093
As for Tancredo, sure he is strong on the illegal immigration thing, but that won't get him elected. He is a one issue wonder (ever heard of Nader?) and is better served by staying in the HoR and becoming a governor first.
It is extremely hard to win out of the House....
"But you're right, the real reason they don't want to deal with the Midwest is, it would piss off their backers. What the Midwest wants I think, is to again become the Heartland of America, where everything is prosperity, Ozzie and Harriet, etc."
Interesting.
You are right that they don't want to deal with the Midwest.
And I will even venture that you're right that this is reason why the leadership don't deal with the Midwest, because this is what they think.
Let me give you a different perspective.
Midwesterners feel very economically insecure.
I don't think that the socially liberal corporate model works there, because the Midwest, unlike anywhere else in the country, has really huge industrial concerns as the basis of its manufacturing economy. This is often denigrated as "the Rust Belt", etc., and farm subsidies are criticized too...as though the US economy could SURVIVE if GM and Ford, Chrysler and Dow Chemical, the Steel industry, General Foods and General Mills and the Furniture Manufacturers and Meat Packers and Beer Makers all went out of business, and all of the farms dried up.
The old smokestack industries are not glamorous, at all, and they certainly are the "old economy", agriculture is even the OLDER economy. But the economy cannot survive without either. Computers and telecoms and financial planning is all great, but they don't generate enough jobs or products to feed and house and transport (or provide washing machines to) the whole nation. Shut down the heavy, labor intensive industries and try to import everything from China, and you will have plunging imports and everything else, because you'll have 50 million unemployed Americans.
So, the Midwest isn't glamorous, and its industries are not cutting edge. And nobody sophisticated wants to deal, really, with the facts of agribusiness or with big, heavy smokestack industries. You can't make an auto plant into a lean, mean, flexible machine. They aren't flexible in China or in Japan or Germany either. Heavy manufacturing is, by its nature, a behemoth, with huge capital investments, sprawling plants, and tens or hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers. There isn't any other way to do it, and America needs it. Practically all of that is in the Midwest, and it isn't going away.
It is not a favored business model in the US, and is often criticized by folks who pretend that the Goldman Sachs model of aggressive capital investment can somehow grow corn, make cars or manufacture gypsum plaster board. The rest of the country, but especially the political East which is also the capital investing East, does not like the way that manufacturing business is done. They don't like the MODEL. They don't live with it, and they don't understand it. Nor do they really much THINK about it. They just think it is old, and bad, and "rust belt" and that Midwesterners should join the modern world.
Everywhere in the modern world that makes cars or washing machines or plaster boards, makes them exactly the same way they do it in the Midwest. It's big, heavy work with thousands of workers in big heavy plants. No other way to do it. So, if you're going to have heavy industry, you're going to have that, and the "model" isn't going to go away, because it CAN'T, not if you're going to have that sort of industry.
So, sitting out there in the Midwest, toiling away in "rust belt" industries that folks in the capital East want to make money investing in, but also (shortsightedly) want to disparage and see disappear in favor of the boardroom capital model (which cannot manufacture a damned thing, nor grow it), are tens of millions of people working in industries that are, essentially, great big armies.
There is no such thing as an "entrepreneur" in the auto industry. The last one who tried was De Lorean, and if anyone had the experience and skill to do it, he did. Of course it failed. Heavy manufacturing is an industry for which the initial capital costs are so immense, and the margins on products are so low after expenses, that the barriers to entry are insurmountable to those who do not have billions of dollars in long term financing.
So, the nature of Midwestern industry is huge corporations, with huge manufacturing labor forces that cannot simply leave and start up their own shop. There is a great deal of DEPENDENCE, therefore, across the workforce on the business decisions taken by the leaders of the industry, and on the vagaries of the economy itself. Midwesterners are not interested in seeing dramatically new clever ways to invest money. They are much more focused on having good shelter from the economic storms that rip through manufacturing and leave hundreds of thousands of people out of work at a shot.
Agriculture is the other huge industry. There, the storms and droughts are literal, but once again, these are capital-heavy industries which produce high-quality, ultra-low margin products. The "entrepreneur" from Goldman who takes a zillion bucks out to the Dakotas is not going to be able to do any better at getting wheat from the ground than the experienced farmer using the latest no till techniques and all of that heavy equipment needed to make it work.
And so you have a whole workforce that is organized into very, very large working organizations, and vulnerable to storms in the economy everywhere in the world. Microsoft is producing for a market and an economy that really only embraces maybe a fifth of the world population. Nobody in Africa or most of Asia or, for that matter, most of Europe or the Americas is competing with Microsoft. Workers on the assembly lines in the Midwest, and farmers raising crops out in the Midwest are producing products in direct competition with low-price workers throughout the entire globe.
To keep this segment of the country running at all, government MUST be involved. Specifically, trade agreements and no-dumping policies HAVE to be enforced. The Japanese would never have set up plants in America and employed Americans to build cars to sell to the American market but for heavy American political and diplomatic pressure. Likewise, without food purity standards and restrictions on importation based on cleanliness and health standards, vegetables grown in truck farms out in the Midwest can't possibly compete with Chinese peasants growing roots in human feces.
Midwestern "populism" is really not the sort of boiling emotionalism of Marxist movements in Europe, it is the collective reaction of people exposed to terrible economic storms and huge economic players who - rightly - understand that they will be scraped off and pitched into penury if there are not government programs and laws to stablilize the market and smooth out the sharp and ugly changes in the businesses that Midwesterners mostly work in.
So, rather than a sort of LaFolette populism, what I expect would be immensely popular out in the Midwest would be a rational plan for pooled national health insurance. You have Ford and General Motors buckling at the knees and being degraded to junk bond status thanks to the spiraling health care costs. The big corporations certainly want to shift this burden, and all of those workers and pensioners want security in their health care. This is THE region where a sensible conversation of how we are going to provide for this can be had. Of course, to ideologues elsewhere, that sounds like socialism.
Likewise, farm subsidies. President Bush has talked about cutting them. You cannot do that if you don't step in with pretty rigorous enforcement of international trade rules on agriculture, and anti-dumping provisions. You can't eliminate farm subsidies and maintain a laissez-faire open borders trade regime on agricultural products, not unless you want to convert half the Midwest back to grasslands. Likewise, Midwestern agricultural business relies heavily on US government power in dealing with the Europeans, who of course would block all food coming from the US if they could do it.
Midwesterners are pretty religious overall, but as socially libertarian as they are conservative. These folks are less likely to be stampeded by emotional social issue campaigning. I recall, for instance, back when California passed its Proposition 13 property tax rollback. Up in the state of Michigan, a local drain commissioner named Tisch pressed very hard to get an identical ballot measure put before the Michigan voters on a Michigan ballot initiative. Michigan voters heavily rejected the measure, not because they were stampeded by emotion, but the opposite: they did not reasonably think that the things they think government needs to do could be properly funded under the California scheme. Californians, of course, have learned to their chagrin that that is the case. Midwesterners are not gimmicky sort of people. They live in a tough place, with huge economic players and world economic forces blasting on them, and they pragmatically seeks laws and insurance against these things. That is Midwestern populism, and it is singularly out of step with what the Democrats want to offer, which is a bum's rush based on racial preferences and racial politics, or the Republicans, who seem to be opposed to the necessity of laws or social insurance in the first place.
I believe that the Midwest is the region where a regional third party alternative to both Democrats and Republicans has the best shot of arising, or where at any rate third party candidates have the best shot of swinging elections by taking a substantial percentage of the vote. Plain talking Jesse Ventura is an example of that.
This is distraction from the fact McLaim will be HILLARYS VeeP in 2008.. securing most of the RINOS for Hillary. You can take that to the bank..
Whoever servives the pubbie primary will BE a RINO.. anyway..
Which also is in Hillarys favor.. I will not knowingly vote for another RINO like in 2004..
At least a real democrat might cause a revolution.. If not all is lost anyway..
Heck these days I would be happy with the Mother of all Riots..
Pubbies (the cowards) seem too afraid to actually revolute..
Do you REALLY think the GOP would nominate a more conservative candidate if McCain lost to Hillary in 2008? Not a chance. They'd have to swing to the left, because Hillary would be an incumbent. As we saw by the John Kerry nomination, moving further to an extreme when running against an incumbent doesn't work. They lost the moderate vote.
The GOP would thus nominate a moderate, or someone totally ineffective like Bob Dole in 1996, both of which would set our movement back even more. Point is that voting against McCain if he was nominated in 2008 would be suicide for this party AND this movement.
Can you show some proof because they asked him that on t.v. and he said the only democrat he endorsed was mario cuomo.
I'm an Independent, and I detest McCain. Democrats behavior over the past 30 years and especially over the past 10 years have convinced me never ever to vote for them for anything even in local elections. If McCain gets the Republican nomination, most likely I just won't vote and will hang my hopes on 2012.
You can forget it.
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