Your questions are meaningless because they avoid the real issue: How does voting for an obscure third party candidate defeat Obama?
Thankfully the numbers in question are so low as to be ineffective in disrupting Obama’s defeat, but it’s fascinating to see the anger and discomfort anyway.
Don’t believe me? Let’s play the “front door” game: go out your front door and ask the first ten (or 100 or 1000) people you see the following questions:
1) Do you know who Mitt Romney is?
2) Do you know who Barack Obama is?
3) Do you know who Virgil Goode is?
4) Do you know who Tom Hoefling is?
Stack the results of 1) and 2) against 3) and 4). It’s not about purity of policy at this point. It’s about name recognition. The political/current events junkies aren’t enough to sway anything at this point. It’s about the masses, their knowledge of the names, and their general attitude towards that individual.
MY "real issue" is refusing to cast my vote for an open and unapologetic socialist... of either party.
YOUR "real issue" is, thankfully, your own dizzy lookout, and no concern of my own. (*WHEW!*)
Mine has the singular advantage of keeping me off of my knees. Which makes for precisely one of us.
Future Snake Eater,
Like you, I joined FR in 2001, in my case shortly after 9/11 when I was inspired to get back into discussions of politics on the internet.
Previous to that I bounced around from forum to forum and didn’t even know FR existed. Some of the forums I went to were leftist forums and on one in particular (TableTalk, Salon.com) I read leftist posts that had an obsession with what they called “Freepers”. I myself was accused of being a Freeper, though I didn’t know what it was and didn’t find out until 2001.
My point is that I have a very clear memory of leftists more than 10 years ago obsessing on the existence of Free Republic.
What does that mean to me today?
It means this:
I believe that over the long years, various leftists have planted themselves in FR with the intention of being useful to various leftist causes without outing themselves.
The perfect leftist cause has now presented itself: the re-election of Barack Obama.
And the perfect “cover” is now in place: the attacks on Romney as being “no different than Obama”.
I don’t know who is a sleeper leftist on FR and who isn’t but based on what I remember from TableTalk and based on how I know leftists think, I would say that there are definitely SOME sleepers here in FR pushing “Romney is the same as Obama” in an attempt to limit the anti-Obama vote.
Again, I have no idea who is or isn’t a closet sleeper (with one exception — there’s one person who basically says “Romney is as bad as Obama” who I am sure is a true blue conservative), but I know there are at least some sleepers here.
There have to be.
For every “Romney is as bad as Obama” post that you read, you have to judge for yourself whether it’s worth arguing about.
For one thing, you might be arguing with a good conservative who just, as a matter of conscience, cannot support Romney under any circumstances. Even though I think their reasoning is flawed (this is a battlefield, not a university debating society), I respect their feelings and I respect their emotions.
On the other hand, you might be arguing with a dedicated leftist out to re-elect Barack Obama.
I just think that’s worth keeping in mind.