[marktwain]

I’m not in the LP, and I’m not talking about who is drawing voters from where. I’m pointing out that if you blame the voters for not liking your candidates you’re making a mistake. That’s what the dems did in 2002 and 2004, blamed the voters, said they “couldn’t understand the message”, we of course made fun of them, said the voters understood just fine. We were right then, and what we said then is just as true today. If the voters don’t want to vote for your candidates that’s not the voters’ fault, that’s your candidates’ fault. I wish there had been better candidates, there weren’t, and there aren’t. We’ve run mostly libs with Rs after their name in this century. Not gonna stop leftists big government by blindly voting for the R even if they say all the same things as the D. Actually at this point I think the issue is the parties. The parties are obsessed with power, they don’t really have agendas or goals or beliefs anymore. They just want numbers and power, they want to be in charge. Every couple of years they throw together slogans, pretend they’re vastly different from each other, but when you look at how they actually govern there isn’t that much. How many of Obie’s signature pieces did McCain vote for, and yet during the election they insisted they were as different as night and day.

We see reality differently, obviously. It is clear to me that the reason that both parties have fairly similar policies in many ways, is that both are operating from the playbook controlled by the MSM. The new media has changed that, and now there are considerable numbers of Republicans that buck the MSM, using the new media as a way to communicate to voters. Voters can only make decisions based on the information that they have, and for many decades, most of that information was filtered through the "progressive" or, if you prefer "socialist" agenda of the MSM.

Yes, McCain was very similar to Obama. Both are "progressives". Bush was a "progressive" as well, but conservative constitutionalists, though the new media, were able to push him to appoint a couple of much more conservative constitutionalists to the Supreme Court than he would have otherwise.

Romney is not nearly as committed to "progressive" ideology as Obama, so he is much more subject to pressure from the Republican base using the new media.

If we do not get control of spending, yes the Government will crash by 2035. If you read much history, you should know that historically, it is highly unlikely that a less restrictive government will come from that. Most such situations result in a much more restricted and regulated state, which exacerbates the problem, of course.

[discostu]

I’m not sure how we can consider a guy that pushed socialized medicine on his state less progressive.

Yes we do need to get spending under control. And Romney isn’t going to do that. I don’t think anybody is going to do that. Even if Romney wanted to Congress uses the budget to buy votes, they won’t allow a major budget reduction, and the way earmarks rule the budget now (so much we’ve had no budget approved for Obama’s entire term) a president no longer has the threat of a government shutdown veto.