Posted on 11/10/2008 12:33:31 PM PST by BlueStateBlues
If Barr's votes had gone to Palin and her running mate they would have won North Carolina and Indiana. North Carolina: Obama 49.9%, Palin 49.5%, Barr 0.6$ Indiana Obama 49.9%, Palin 49%, Barr 1.1% This would have been more important in a closer election, but it caught my interest when I looked the figures up.
So, I'll repeat my comment to you and my questions and hope for an answer this time:
JAG wrote:
You're kidding, right?
What kind of incentive do Americans need to convince them to not vote for a Marxist?
If people want to live in a welfare state, what Republican could POSSIBLY in any way, shape or form attract their vote?
I am sincerely interested in your answer.
The American people voted for a Marxist and you are claiming if only they'd been offered "true small government policies" they wouldn't have wanted Marxism?
WTH kind of logic is that?
That's like saying people voted for free cotton candy, but they would have voted for broccoli if that had been on the menu.
Again, I would like to know:
What kind of incentive do Americans need to convince them to not vote for a Marxist?
If people want to live in a welfare state, what Republican could POSSIBLY in any way, shape or form attract their vote?
It's not about what was on the "menu," it's about changing Americans' "tastes." No candidate can do that. It's a bigger task than that. We have to already want and be committed to freedom and understand when it is a risk.
If they know they can’t win, the other Parties should stick to STATE Elections and leave the Federal Elections to the Demos and Repubs.
Cynthia McKinney probably took a vote or two from Obama but not like Barr did from McCain.
Thank you Bob Barr for screwing up the National Election and giving the USofA a Socialist Illegal Alien (not approved terminology in AZ, please ignore if you live there) President.
Hagan 2,225,961 Obama 2,123,390
We are never going to win so long as people think that if we just get the right candidate and he just says the right things, he will magically get elected.
We have a problem in this country, but that isn’t the half of it.
Obama will likely give us at least sixteen years of radical Rat “rule.”
The demographers say that by 2012, over 50% of the country will be on the dole.
There is NO GOING BACK then, no matter who gets elected.
Hell’s Bells, we haven’t even been able to put a dent in LBJ’s Great Society welfare state, how will any administration even be able to get elected on an anti-socialism stance if more than 50% of the population is on welfare?
Just like you had lots of blacks voting against gay marriage in California right after they hit the button for Obama, who will be the most virulent anti-traditional values president ever.
How does ANY candidate overcome that? People knew or should have know what Obama is about. They voted for him anyway.
I don't think that most people want to live in a welfare state; I think that most people just don't care. Here's why McCain lost: the economy. It was the number one issue with a plurality of voters and it killed McCain.
It's not that people listened to Obama's socialist message, processed it, and then affirmatively accepted it, it's just that Obama was the default when Republicans were rejected for their failure to properly "manage" the economy.
Now, we can debate until the cows come home as to whether it should be the government's job to ensure that the economy is humming along, but for better or for worse, that's what people currently expect from the government. If the economy is still bad in two years, Democrats will probably lose seats in Congress. If it's still bad in four years, Obama will probably lose. If it's better, then he'll probably win, barring some other huge issue. That's sort of the deal.
I wrote in Ron Paul, and I live in Pennsylvania.
In general, the states where Nader did best, really weren't swing states.
But you could say with justification that he cost Obama Missouri.
Everywhere else but MO, IN, and NC, the margins of victory were greater than the third party vote.
That’s why we used to call them the Party of One.
You know, there’s one person in the Party-—you. That way you always agree 100% with your party. And if you get the nomination, which you will since there’s only one person in the party, then you always agree 100% with your nominee. Perfect!
It won’t be long before these people “discover” that their current hero, Palin, isn’t conservative enough for them either and they start searching for some other Barr-like political nematode upon which to take their Glorious and Highly Principled Stand.
Which then results in the country going further and deeper and faster down the toilet than it would have had they taken the-—in their view-—highly unprincipled stand of those who would rather vote for a RINO (or whoever) to try to defeat a Marxist than to stand by and do nothing whatsoever.
I disagree. My little brother voted for Barr in Nevada. Even w/Palin, he couldnt get behind McCain (and didnt think he had a chance) so my brother voted on informed principle after finding out what Barr stood for.
If it werent for Palin, I wouldve voted for Barr. I cant stand McCain. (We didnt have a choice in Indiana - he was already nominated by the time our primaries got here... so I voted against him out of protest.)
For the record, I did vote for several libertarian candidates on local elections - including Governor. Andy Horning had much better thoughts/ideas than even Mitch. (As in get the government out of stuff its not supposed to be involved in.)
Libertarian Party gives us some kind of choice.
We haven't tried.
All this whining over a guy who got 0.9% and 1.1% in two close states is emblematic of the problem of RINO Rationalization of why McCain lost
McCain was a liberal who stood with Obama on most of the issues...open borders, border security, bailout, blocking conservative judges, enviro-extremism....all shared by both McCain and Obama
The bombast over a small percentage of people who didnt vote for McCain or Obama is silly.
Had the GOP ran a real conservative....this would never be an issue. Bob Barr or Chuck Baldwin would have had no impact if the GOP ran a real conservative
The “Blame Bob Barr” crowd is about as ignorant as the “Fred Roberts Whiny Liberal Elitist” crowd blaming Palin for the loss
JAG, I agree Obama is horrible, and I am frightened for the future. But simply saying “Marxist” over and over again is not going to convince most people of anything. You ask, “What kind of incentive do Americans need...to not vote for a Marxist?” I think the better question is, “What kind of incentive do Americans need to get out to vote against him?” The answer is that they need a clearly superior alternative. The current GOP is not a clearly superior alternative for most people. You are talking about a party that—after spending 60 years promising small government if they finally got into power—FINALLY got into power in Congress and the White House and proceeded to double the debt, double the size of government, accrue enormous unConstitutional powers onto the Executive Branch, get us involved in two expensive interventions abroad and yet fail to capture Bin Laden, and finally nationalize the banks, insurance industry, and mortgage industry! And THEN they managed to nominate just about worst RINO Establishment hack running, a man who is the very definition of “Same Old Thing.” Saying “Obama is Marxist” isn’t enough incentive to get a lot of people to go along with that.
What the GOP needs to do is provide the incentive by being a true, clear, viable alternative. That means being the Party of small government, free markets, sound money, civil liberties, peace, and freedom, rather than the Party of huge government, managed markets, inflation, the surveillance state, war, and statism. People don’t WANT the Welfare State. What they want is true freedom alternative.
Thanks for Obama....thanks for an uberliberal Supreme Court...the detainees at Gitmo wish to thank you too.
Yup, if ever there was a political party that had it's cake and ate it too, it was the Dimocrats. The sad state of this economy lies at their feet. It sure hasn't been the Republicans that have spent the last sixty years making us dependant on foreign oil blocking nuclear power and pushing the sub prime loans.
hey Barr and you minions...LET THE THE CELEBRATIONS BEGIN!!
So someone "didn't like" McCain and Palin "wasn't enough."
Doesn't that sound ridiculous just to even say it?
Isn't it embarrassing to even admit to thinking that way?
As if one has no clue that if you don't vote for candidate A you help candidate B win?
"I 'didn't like' McCain and Palin 'wasn't enough'"---that's grounds to stand by and, therefore, help elect a Marxist by refusing to vote for the only candidate who could defeat him?
The "logic" here is appalling.
"Daddy, what did you do in the election?"
"I didn't like McCain, and Palin wasn't enough, so I refused to help try to defeat Obama and that's why we're now living in the United Socialist States of America."
how about just admitting that third party votes ALWAYS get the worse candidate elected....ALWAYS!
I tell ya, I dislike pundits that say "If only X number of people had voted for our candidate, then we would have won." Didn't like it in '00. Didn't like it in '04. Still don't. About the most hideous instance of this recently was the FR post "If only 500,000 people had voted for McCain, across 7 different states, then we would have won!" ...Geez, is that all? And if my chair had wings I could fly it.
While I agree that it's important to identify what went wrong, so that (ideally) the GOP doesn't repeat history, I think that it's far better to start thinking about ways to win the next election instead of re-hashing political history.
Otherwise, we're nothing more than a bunch of whining liberals.
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