Just as Elias Isquith predicted, Villagers are starting to Gore Romney. The dickwhisperer:
Romney, the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg argued this week, has an “authentic inauthenticity problem.”
And that is precisely why his struggle is so familiar. He is the political reincarnation of Al Gore, whose campaign I covered with an equal amount of cringing a dozen years ago.
[….]…combined with Romney’s frequent fluctuations on the issues, his awkwardness has left an impression that he is a phony and not to be trusted. Romney isn’t necessarily doomed — Gore, after all, received more votes than the other guy — but this much seems clear: Over the next 10 months, Romney will be getting the Gore treatment.
Look, if the media sabotages Romney for inventing the internet or wearing earth tones, it’s all good, in a way. They played it for them, they can play it for us. But I’ll never get over the 2000 election. In my professional opinion, the media stole the election from a smart, decent man and crowned an idiot the cowboy king. We’ve never recovered as a nation, and I’m not sure that we ever will.
Linkmeister
And yet the media will never admit its complicity.
beltane
The media’s treatment of Gore in 2000 was bad enough. The fact that they continue to smear him by claiming that Mitt Romney is his reincarnation is just adding insult to injury.
JGabriel
DougJ @ Top:
We won’t, not really. Someday, most things will start improving again, at the pace they were going in 2000, before Bush II, but we’ll always be a decade or two, or three, behind where we should have been.
And then there are other losses from which we’ll never, ever, recover. The Bush II regime’s sins of lying us into war with Iraq and resorting to torture are stains on the American reputation and our national conscience, like slavery, that will never be wiped away.
.
MikeJ
There’s crime and it’s never complete.
arguingwithsignposts
Wait, he’s quoting Jonah fucking Goldberg?
John O
This.
Baud
Dana Milbank always plays both sides. I’m not yet convinced the Village won’t prop up Romney, if for no other reason than to make sure the election remains a horse race.
gogol's wife
“But I’ll never get over the 2000 election. In my professional opinion, the media stole the election from a smart, decent man and crowned an idiot the cowboy king. We’ve never recovered as a nation, and I’m not sure that we ever will.” Amen, brother. Also what JGabriel said.
The comparison of Romney to Gore is deeply offensive.
General Stuck
Agreed, but I wouldn’t put it all on the media, though certainly a lot of it. I personally think the root of it goes back to 1980, when the country decided to make a decided turn to the right, swooned by the pretty words conservatives were saying, and wanting to put the 60’s and 70’s angst in their rear view mirror. It is what spawned the republican light DLC movement, that Gore got caught up in and campaigned like some kind of wooden puppet, to not say anything too liberal, and if he had to, put it in some acceptable code to not upset the republicans.
The media were just along for the ride, to not upset the apple cart and ratings. Neither of which is what the country needed from the 4th estate. And all of it based on free lunches and plastic money bliss, that all came crashing down, with Bush’s bloody minded gluttony kicking the last legs out from under any meaningful caution.
Then we got TARP one, and now are free floating with the crazy tea tards having at least one hand on the steering wheel. While the country has a cool cat smart presnit, trying to hold it all together, one day at a time. Until the voting public hopefully pulls its head out of its ass, and buries the carcass of conservatism that caused it all. along with their votes.
smintheus
Agreed, it’s disgusting for the media to turn against a candidate to the point of misrepresenting him. But it’s one thing for reporters to turn on a guy because he’s a phony and doesn’t seem to stand for anything for very long (that’s Mitt all over and he’s earned every bit of scorn he gets). It’s another to turn against a candidate just because you dislike his personality (e.g. find him pretentious or full of himself, which is what was behind the Gore-hatred).
FlipYrWhig
I don’t want to go Full Daily Howler Monty on this, but it certainly would be nice for the punditocracy and the rest of the media to knock off the personality and offhand-comment bullshit already and attempt to inform us about, you know, what politicians are actually promising and planning to do with their power if elected. Big Media was cruelly unfair to Gore, and while I think it’s marginally more fair to hit Romney with unlikeability and inauthenticity stuff, that’s probably just the tribalism talking. Going this direction is really no way to cover an election, and is definitely no help to the larger causes of liberal-to-left politics.
Violet
Agreed. The Village wants an exciting race. They’ll do what they can to create one.
WereBear (itouch)
After Hoover, there wasn’t another Republican President until Eisenhower, who was a screaming liberal by the standards of today, and then they still didn’t elect another one until Nixon. That’s a thirty year stretch; while people remembered how much they had suffered during the Depression.
Maybe it can happen again.
Chuck Butcher
Mitt is lugging around some luggage that seems a bit more substantive than some of the stuff hung on Gore.
JC
Agree with you about Romney – we’ll see whether Romney – who actually IS the wooden fake liar person that the media pretended Gore was – will actually report their personality crap correctly, for once – or whether they go silent on it.
David Koch
But Nader told me there was no difference btwn Bush and Gore.
Baud
@FlipYrWhig:
This. While it’s nice to see Romney get clobbered about Bain, the fact is that no one is (yet) connecting that with the actual economic policies he would pursue as President and what that would mean for the country.
John Weiss
The country’s gone right, then left, then right again. The MSM has got it right, then wrong, then right.
What I see is classic ‘drunker’s walk’, but it seems to me, over many years, that the drunk is leaning left. I look at my son and his friends, I’ve no doubt: we’re leaning left.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@JGabriel:
.
I know they’re dead, but Principal Broder and Monsignor Russert were both on record as saying the Clinton’s blow jobs were a greater sin than Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and I suspect if you woke most Beltway types in the middle of the night, they’d agree with that statement. John McCain says we should have stayed longer than eight years, and is taken seriously as a foreign policy sage. Rick Perry says he’d re-invade and it causes barely a ripple in the commentariat. They really are moral and intellectual bankrupts.
Maude
@arguingwithsignposts:
You have to go with the quote you have, not the quote you want.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck: I think the root is the 1960 election cycle, with “The Making of the President,” followed by the ’72 season and “The Boys on the Bus.” Behind the scenes views, personalities and melodrama, etc. But IMHO it was the 1988 election, which (thanks to Lee Atwater) was _entirely_ about trumped-up nonsense like the Pledge of Allegiance and Willie Horton, where the politicians themselves started to cater to and capitalize on feeding trivia to a bored and credulous media.
[edited slightly after posting]
Cat Lady
Following Mitt around for months and months will not be entertaining in any way shape or form for the press corps, and they will end up taking it out on him in some way shape or form. Romney’s no McCain – he won’t do BBQ because Romney, near beer and BBQ – really? Where, at his newest manse in LaJolla? He’s so secretive, and so elitist, that all the press corps will be able to enjoy is snipe hunting, and Romney will be the snipe. He’s going to make it impossible for others to humanize him. Popcorn!
Svensker
@JGabriel:
I’m reading a book written by an Allied saboteur who was captured in Italy in 1942. He’s injured and is left overnight unattended, cold and unfed. When the Italian commander shows up to interrogate him the next morning he excoriates his men for treating a prisoner so badly, reads them the relevant parts of the Geneva Convention, and orders clean, warm clothes, a filling meal and a doctor for the saboteur before the interrogation begins.
It made me sick inside to read that and then contrast and compare to the Bush/Cheney/Addington/Yoo actions regarding prisoners. Bastards.
amk
@General Stuck: Amen.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
I wouldn’t argue with that. But I think it congealed into an electoral juggernaut for the GOP with Reagan until TARP one/. Clinton managed to get two terms, but they were about useless for getting anything like progressive leg passed, and mostly to keep the door wide open to the national vault, like republicans wanted. He did slow down the right wing march to dismantle liberal programs, but that is about all.
GregB
You go to the election with the RomneyBot 3000 you have, not the one you want.
Benjamin Franklin
@David Koch:
So if it’s a close election, we can count on Romney doing the right thing and caving to the opposition….
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck: Are you counting the Gore ’88 campaign in that too? Because that year Gore was almost explicitly running as the favorite son of Even The Liberal New Republic. Remember the appellation Atari Democrat?
Jewish Steel
Your professional opinion? As a math prof?
chopper
for me 2000 is the litmus test. people like to define 9/11 as the big national turning point of this generation, but for me it’s still 2000. that decision did more damage to this country then multiple 9/11s.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck: I think you’re talking about the roots of modern conservative belligerence, while I was trying to get at the roots of modern media lassitude. Alas, when they combine we all have to weather some perfect storm poo-flinging.
Baud
@Cat Lady:
Add to that, Romney is not liked by most in his own party. And if you’re one of the 50 or so Republicans who thinks they’re going to be President in 2017, do you really want Romney to win this election?
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes, as the public support of the conservative movement in general cast a pall over about every election, to one degree or another. It affected the entire body politic and dem/liberal messaging especially/
smintheus
@FlipYrWhig: Policy is more important than personality, but reporting on it would require them to spend time first figuring things out. Wiring back your impressions of a candidate’s personality is so much easier and more fun than analyzing what matters.
Not to say that some personality traits aren’t important. Character, integrity, consistency, introspection, fairness, patience, diligence, intellectual honesty/modesty, concern for others, matter a lot in a president. Unfortunately, those aren’t the traits that the pre-teen boys on the bus tend to dwell on.
SIA
Among the truest and most poignant words I’ve ever read on a blog. I suddenly realized the load of grief that I – that all of us – have carried these last few years.
And fuck SCOTUS.
Angry DougJ
@Jewish Steel:
It was a joke!
Really?
You are all so quick to demand the msm admit to gross misinformation regarding Gore but you hypocrites mock anyone who says the same demonization happened to Hillary.
gex
@Angry DougJ: Look, we can just fix this in post production. I’ll pay you for that opinion and it will all be good.
MikeJ
@General Stuck:
People tend to forget that DADT was an actual improvement on the pre-Clinton status quo. RU-486 was approved. He cut taxers on low income people and raised them on the top 1.2% He balanced the budget so that liberal programs could continue to exist. He brokered the peace deal in Northern Ireland and stopped the genocide in Kosovo.
Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us?
Roger Moore
@chopper:
The big point is that you can’t separate 9/11 from Bush v. Gore. Does anyone think Gore would have blown off his national security team when they presented him with a document saying bin Laden was planning on striking inside the US? Or that if he hadn’t stopped the 9/11 attacks he would have used them as an excuse to attack Iraq instead of finishing things off in Afghanistan? The whole
GWOTGSAVE shit sandwich is the direct result of letting Bush steal the 2000 election.Odie Hugh Manatee
This has to be fed to the right every hour of every day between now and the election:
Mitt Romney is your Al Gore.
That anchor around his neck, plus his many other anchors, will keep the USS Romney from docking at that White House.
Those fuckers on the right are depressed as hell and they need MOAR depressing!! As much as they hate Gore, this line will just kill them.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
The most galling thing about 2000 still is not the what but the how. They managed to make Gore out to be chronic liar and Bush out to be the Most Honest Man in the World, and despite the utter mendacity we know Bush and his crew were capable, Gore still is treated like the Liar of All Liars and we get subjected to ‘Miss Me Yet?’.
It’s fucking depressing.
Donut
Oh, Jebus on a stick, puh-lease stop with the hand wringing over this. Village Press Coverage: Advantage: Democrats – for now.
We don’t win by being high-minded and espousing fairness for all when it comes to press coverage. The Village is still going hate on Obama with a passion. Fer fuck’s sake.
We win by kicking te other side when they’re down and grinding their nose in their own shit.
It doesn’t work when training a puppy, but it works in politics.
The fuck???
Comrade Dread
So ROM-N3Y is fat and has a big house?
amk
Any news on willard’s veep ? The votes are not gonna come in on their own, you know.
So which rabblerouser it’s gonna be ?
FlipYrWhig
@smintheus: I think that the post-Making, post-Boys media has been for decades trying to do a kind of Gonzo Lite that inevitably turns into MaureenDowdiness. Bruni was particularly awful in the 2000 cycle, but they’re all like that: bored easily and more interested in clothing and gaffes than in nuts-and-bolts politics. It’s kind of like the way the post-Daily Show cable news has gotten infected with raised-eyebrow silliness, which you can see to differing degrees in the shows of Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, and Erin Burnett, and in the appearances of their media guests, even the smart ones. Struggling to stay “relevant,” they try for clever. It’s a losing game, I think.
Baud
@General Stuck:
Although Clinton was of the DLC ilk, he is like Obama in that we can only guess at what more might have been achieved if they didn’t lose control of Congress 2 years into their terms.
Villago Delenda Est
There are bazillions of motor vehicles in Washington, DC. Why can’t one of them, just one of them find and hit the Dick Whisperer and put him out of our collective misery?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik: I remember when the Shrubb, with a sneery little snort, warned that Al Gore wanted to turn Social Security into a ‘federal program’. I thought, that’s it, this is over. It was treated as a cute little slip of the tongue, like subliminable.
Jewish Steel
@DougJ: Whew! I thought you’d maybe been signed to one of the big labels. Woulda had to throw out your split 7″.
General Stuck
@MikeJ:
I don’t care to bash Clinton, as I think he was a decent president, that yes, managed to do some good things. But also some very bad things he let happened, such as repeal of Glass Stegal, among other all out laissez faire policies. Like I said in my first comment, I put most of the long term fail on the voting public’s shoulders. It is a democracy, after all.
mclaren
That’s too easy, kiddo. I was there. I listened to the first presidential debate. I saw a smirking sniveling sadistic frat boy with a total contempt for facts (“I don’t have my calculator,” sneered the Drunk-Driving C Student to one of Al Gore’s rebuttals).
And everyone around me who watched the debate agreed: the Drunk-Driving C Student had won. Hands down.
Whaaaaa…?
I was watching that goddamn debate, I saw Al Gore wipe the floor with a creepy no-neck little frat boy asshole who couldn’t find his ass with both hands in a hall of mirrors. Yet most people thought the Drunk-Driving C Student won that debate.
The American people are to blame. They fell in love with a creepy little asshole frat boy who didn’t have a goddamn brain in his head. It wasn’t the media. It wasn’t the Villagers. They were just following the lead of the thoughtless callow shallow American people, a nation of born serfs and craven bully-worshipers.
In the 2000 election, the American people saw a bully, and they fell to their knees to lick his boots. Blame the real culprits, DougJ — the goddamn shiftless feckless foolishly ignorant American people.
gex
@amk: Well Intrade has Christie at 29% followed by Rubio at 24%.
Me? I’d like to see them pick Bachmann. Actually, I’m torn on that, because should they win…
burnspbesq
DougJ:
Your professional opinion is dead wrong on every level imaginable.
There is only one villain in the 2000 election: Ralph Nader. If Nader hadn’t been on the ballot, Gore would have carried Florida by on the order of 75,000 votes, a margin that would have been impervious to any Republican attempts to steal Florida’s electoral votes.
It’s unclear whether you don’t understand this or refuse to accept it. Either way, your credibility is pretty well shredded.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gex: No way in hell can the Mormon from Massachussetts pick the snarly Yankee. As happy as I was to see Obama-Biden kill the CW that a Dem can’t win the White House without a Southerner on the ticket, I think it’s true of Romney.
@mclaren: There were a lot of factors that made it close enough to steal, the Village was one of them. The Village narrative filters down to the sort of “independents” (Chas Pierce definition: People who follow politics for two weeks every two years, but vote in every election) in ways us junkies can’t understand.
General Stuck
@Baud:
Clinton lost both chambers of congress, a big deal for the minority getting its way. Having only one chamber now, the wingers are having to resort to some draconian levels of obstruction. And the fact the public still blames them more for the current econ mess, than dems, is something that is different now, than when Clinton was president. We have another election coming up, so we’ll see if the public votes more for their interests this time around, or goes the other way..
FlipYrWhig
@Donut: “The Village” doesn’t hate Obama, though. They don’t knock down Republican bullshit about him the way they might, but that’s not because they dislike his personality.
Cat Lady
@gex:
I think he’ll pick John Bolton, for you know, the foreign policy cred and Very Serious Person status. Villager swoon, also too.
gnomedad
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
The trouble is, after (FSM willing) Obama is re-elected, this will feed the “Romney wasn’t a real conservative!” narrative. With luck, this will help kill the GOP, but it will still suck.
FlipYrWhig
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I thought Romney would pick Haley Barbour. But then Barbour issued all those pardons on his way out the door. I wondered if he was deliberately sabotaging his chances to be on the ticket.
Angry DougJ
@burnspbesq:
I can never tell you whether you’re spoofing or not these days.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Just this.
Gore would not, out of pure petulance, ignored the Clinton staff people warning the minions of the deserting coward that Al Qaeda would be their greatest concern.
9/11 would have been VERY different even if it happened under Gore. As would a great many other things.
Yeah, Al Gore is “boring”. But he and the people who would have worked for him would have been infinitely more competent than the gang of warmongering shitstains who were the lackies of the deserting coward and the Dark Lord.
Gin & Tonic
Gore couldn’t win his own fucking state, for heaven’s sake. Florida, Shmorida, with his legacy in TN, he couldn’t carry it? Puh-leeze.
amk
@gex: The fat fucker (fuck the PC crowd) ain’t gonna bring in the fundie votes. Two wall-street kidz on the ticket ? And the cuban’s shine has worn off. If batshit bachmann couldn’t hack it in IA, she ain’t a vote getter either.
KG
The media didn’t cost Al Gore the election in 2000. Al Gore (and his political consultants) cost Al Gore the election in 2000. If he’d have carried his home state of Tennessee, or Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, OR ANY OTHER FUCKING STATE THAT BUSH WON, he’d have been president and Florida would have been a historical footnote.
gaz
@burnspbesq: Jello, is that you?
Donut
@FlipYrWhig:
January 16th, 2012 at 7:53 pm
@Donut:
That’s not an unfair assessment, I’ll grant you. I would counter, however, that they gleefully kick him when he’s down (which they do to every president).
My point is more that liberals/Dems need to spend a lot less time worrying about fairness in media. I appreciate the media critiques that arise on our side, but as more os an awareness issue, rather than having the expectation that things will change.
At this point, working the refs, unless you’re actually a paid PR flack, is kinda pointless, IMO.
As a whole, the old guard media is kind of a lost cause. YMMV, of course.
amk
@mclaren: For once, I agree.
ChrisNYC
Don’t worry. Mitt’s got some friends in the media.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/15/mrs-santorum-s-abortion-doctor-boyfriend.html
gex
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree on the southern thing. But sometimes it seems like Michele fits right in to that southern Bible thumping tradition enough to pass.
Marc
There’s a lot of blame to go around for the 2000 election. The media, the Supreme Court, Rove, Nader and his followers, it’s like fucking Murder on the Orient Express. Hell, even Al Gore owns a tiny percentage of that one for running such a lackluster campaign. (Worse hiring decision–Donna Brazile or Joe Lieberman?)
But I have to take issue with this:
Well, 49% of them did. And they got a little help from five Supreme Court justices and a couple thousand purity trolls.
gnomedad
@KG:
Al Gore and Bill Clinton and the media and Ralph Nader and Jeb Bush and the Supreme Court cost Gore the election. It was a perfect shitstorm.
gene108
Gore treatment? The media’s going to point out his lies?
That’s the media doing its job.
Gore got screwed by a well orchestrated right-wing echo chamber and a lazy MSM.
gex
@Cat Lady: Not enough Jesus. Much of the base already consider him to not be a Christian. He has to look for a Jesus approved candidate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@gex: true, I wouldn’t rule out Thune or Pawlenty either
@gnomedad: and the fucking butterfly ballot, that caused so much chaos.
amk
@Marc: well, what’s the excuse for 2004 ratfuckery? amurikan voters are dumb fucksticks (except when they vote for dems, that is).
pluege
We’ve never recovered as a nation, and I’m not sure that we ever will.
one thing is for sure, several hundred thousand Iraqi’s will never recover.
And then there’s the depleted Uranium wide-scale poisoning of the Iraqi environment giving the gift of birth defects and cancer for thousands of years.
bush, cheney, rumsfeld, rice, wolfowitz, powell – all abominations that should have been tried for the crimes long ago.
gaz
As far as comparing Gore to Romney, I’ll give the MSM a pass on this one – not because it’s true – the comparison is farce – lolworthy even, but just because it’s so damned inconsequential.
Even if the meme sticks, some people hate Gore – oh well. If those people transfer some of that hate to Romney after absorbing the meme, * shrug *. Al Gore wins either way, because it makes it just that much less likely that Romney will ever take the WH… BFD
Honestly, maybe my standards are just slipping, but with the unrelenting shower of bullshit we get in each news cycle, isn’t it kind of too much work to care about every baseless fallacious comparison?
I mean, OTOH – I don’t think discussing it does any harm, esp with a slow news cycle – but really, Al Gore is a big boy, and I’m sure he can handle it.
hitchhiker
A sample of village-style laserlike focus during the 2000 campaign:
That was Margaret Carlson, who for some unfathomable reason wasn’t ashamed to publish it. They most definitely were a part of the 2000 story, along with a dozen other factors, all of which were no doubt necessary to get someone as painfully incompetent as W into office.
Benjamin Franklin
@gaz:
There’s always room for it…..
Marc
@amk: What’s the excuse for 2004? The advantages of incumbency, a decent economy, plus a Democrat who campaigned even worse than Gore–and was compromised by his support for the trumped-up war that Bush used to win his re-election.
Oh, and the Swift Boat people.
No denying that the public can screw up royally (see also: 2010), but 2004 was a narrow (51%) win for Bush under highly favorable circumstances. Most of them rigged for his benefit.
lamh35
@amk: Santorum. The polls are already out and GOP voters seem to like it.
gaz
@Benjamin Franklin: What’s funny is after my cat jumped my keyboard – what was left actually says something quite the opposite of what I intended. heh. I tried to edit that, and BJ broke on me.
On a related note, I should really consider reworking the layout of my computer workspace. I’m not sure precisely how to catproof my lap though
amk
@lamh35: jeebus, I never thought of that… or him.
It’s a possibility.
agorabum
@Marc: Let’s not forget the 27% floor on crazy.
Bush was going to get the republican nutters even if he showed up to the debates drunk and peed his pants.
and that’s the Alan Keyes type of floor on voting republican.
Of the 49% that voted for W, only about 6-7% of that was really open to vote for anybody; the rest were always going to end up voting for the R.
But I do have to hate the sanctimonious Nader voter who just shouted ‘those two are exactly the same; voting lesser of two evils is voting for evil!’ Cuz for millions of Americans, votin the sensible, corporatist Dem that does actually want to help the non-1% as well is going to make a huge difference in their lives.
amk
@Marc: Nah, I’ll go with that daily mirror “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?” FP
Jamie
It’s already started
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-romney-ran-bain-capital-his-word-was-not-his-bond/2012/01/12/gIQACvQxwP_story.html
John M. Burt
We will never recover from the Bush pseudo-Presidency in the sense that we will never be as well off as if the disaster could have been averted, any more than Germany will ever “recover” from the World Wars.
The best we can hope is that, like Germany, we learn from our past failures, and make sure not to let it happen again.
And yes, Bush’s being installed as President was a failure on our part. We didn’t protest even as much as the racists did after the 2008 election, and we had a legitimate grievance.
geg6
chopper @30:
Haven’t read any further than this comment, but I have to say that I agree. 2000 is exactly when I realized how fucked we really and truly are as a country. I suspected as much since 1980 but I knew for sure in 2000. People thought I was nuts, just like they did when I was running around with my hair on fire in the runup to the Iraq invasion.
It doesn’t feel a bit good to have been right. No one likes a Cassandra, not even Cassandra herself.
Frapalinger
Doug, I really don’t think the villagers are going to turn on Romney. I think quite the opposite is happening, that the village is circling the wagons around him. In the last few days all the talking heads came out against Newt and his Bain ad, calling it a bunch of nasty lies. These same people treated the swiftboat ads like they had a point about Kerry, and bought the Bush team’s denial of responsibility for them. Crooks and Liars had a post up today that showed Candy Crowley interrupting Axelrod with Romney talking points this weekend, and Greggers has turned Meet the Press into Meet the Republicans, where he spent yesterday morning berating Harry Reid for not doing more to work with Republicans. There’s already howls of “Gingrich’s failed Bain commercials are immunizing Romney from populist attacks for the remainder of the election cycle”. Don’t get your hopes up that the media will do anything damaging to Romney.
Davis X. Machina
@agorabum: Yeah, but politics really isn’t about policies. It’s about me telling the world, and the people I know, how I feel about things. It’s a form of self-expression, in this case via my choice of
consumer productspolitics.Hell, If I could go down to town hall and register “Apple” or “Scion” instead of “Democrat” or “Republican”, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I just can’t decide which. Or would “Carhartt” be better? I probably couldn’t pull “No Labels” off…
Benjamin Franklin
@gaz:
Let me guess what the cat typed….
“John Wayne is that you? Is this me?”
Emma
@mclaren: Well, I agree to a point. However, I also remember watching Gore make a speech and when I read the news reports and listened to the tv news next day, I felt like I had slipped through (what I now know to be the Rift). Because what they were reporting was certainly not what I saw.
RalfW
I’m gonna be contrarian here and say that, though I voted for him and overall would very much have preferred Gore as President, that saying
gets me on my soapbox.
Here’s why: I think, had Gore been President on 9/12/2001, the GOP would have gone so ape-shit crazy that they would have torn this nation to shreds on the spot, 24 hours after the planes went in.
They already hated Clinton/Gore so badly that they impeached Clinton for a stained dress.
Imagine what they would have done to Gore for his “role” in “letting” 9/11 happen.
Of course this is all counter-factual stuff that can’t be gamed out. Maybe Gore & his admin would have paid enough attention to the memos pre-9/11 to have averted the attack, who knows.
But if Bin Laden had managed a major strike on the US that killed thousands and caused a financial panic even similar to what did happen, Gore would have been gored by the GOP and we would have seen outright sedition and possibly s coup.
So, uh, we’re f*cked either way.
The major media still sucks @ss for the Internet meme crap and for their utter failure to deal with the GOP stealing the 2000 election, all my above ranting notwithstanding.
lamh35
so it seems that Santorum may have actually won the Iowa caucuses after all. As of midday, the certified results have him over Mitt by 80 votes.
Funny, speaking of failed media, all of them were hopping on the Romney wins Iowa bandwagon, but when people pointed out that SAntorum may actually have won, all of a sudden, it’s not wow Santorum won the Iowa caucus after all, it’s more like well it doesn’t really matter who won it.
Really, really
ETA: @fIvethirtyeight
“Whether Santorum is declared victor in IA won’t matter much at this point. But Romney’s apparent win there affected media narrative.”
https://twitter.com/#!/fivethirtyeight/status/159087294693908482
lamh35
talkinga bout phoney Romney, enough with “America the Beautiful”!
Mitt Romney “Sings” America The Beautiful (VIDEO)
amk
@lamh35: Any polls out of SC lately, especially after the christofascists anointed lil ricky?
MaximusNYC
@Svensker:
Sounds like a classic case of good cop, bad cop.
Cat Lady
@lamh35:
Every Villager discussion of Mitt begins with “he won Iowa and New Hampshire for the first time in history” so they’ve got their narrative, and it’s The Narrative, and there is only The Narrative, forever and ever amen.
mothra
Testify, AngryDoug!!!!!
gaz
@Benjamin Franklin: No, but there was a bunch of stuff about jello biafra, and in the end, I was gonna snarkily say Nader is that you? – basically, it’s not important but it was gonna be a post about Nader’s over inflated sense of self importance.
I deleted most, but not all – and then Groucho decided he wanted some of teh attentionz… so yeah.
Mr Stagger Lee
@Baud:It’s money for the networks. Otherwise it is Alabama-LSU, BCS championship on one channel, and everyone is watching The Voice on another.(I think many don’t give a dilly ding dong anyway) A shame that the Obama Administration would not support an amendment that would eliminate Citizens United. The networks would lose a gold mine and the panic would really begin. TV advertising like in the movie Quiz Show, the villians.
El Cid
@RalfW: I believe that had Gore been in office it would have been far less likely that the 9/11/2001 attacks would have had their actual outcome.
That said, I have always believed and said that if somehow it had worked out the same way, there would have been mass rightwing organized mobs at the White House, perhaps even literally carrying pitchforks and torches, demanding Gore’s resignation / impeachment / worse for having allowed the largest ever foreign terrorist attack on our soil.
I dunno, though, if Gore had then chosen to pavementize the Gaza strip, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, he might have gotten a two year break.
srv
@RalfW: Not only would Gore have been gored on 9/11, he’d have been at the helm of the same financial meltdown in 2008.
Triassic Sands
If the media treat Romney fairly, it won’t go well for him — because he’s a complete phony. Gore may have been awkward, but he was nothing like Romney.
Candidates are free to take whatever positions they want, but they shouldn’t be free to do so without scrutiny. A fair look at Romney’s history will reveal a profoundly dishonest opportunist. He deserves to get raked over the coals for what he is, not for stuff mindless journalists invent.
I don’t think Gore would have been a very good president — in the context of our entire history. In the context of the last 12 years, he would have been a great president.
Raven
@srv: That implies that Gore would have done the same stupid shit Bush did that caused the meltdown. wrong
James Hare
That election was my first real experience of American “democracy.” I haven’t really ever gotten over it. I still figure it’s best to root for a bastard, because I’d rather have OUR bastard win than theirs.
Svensker
@MaximusNYC:
Perhaps, but the rest of his stay in the Italian prison was fine — he was treated well, ate what the guards ate, was allowed to exercise, get Red Cross packages, etc. He never told the interrogator anything except name, rank, serial #.
The contrast to the Bush/Cheney treatment of internees is complete.
RalfW
@mclaren:
Oh, and this. This is just about right. The fvcking voters actually liked Bush. Enough of them, or close to enough of them that the SCOTUS decision triggered a national “meh.”
RalfW
@srv: Well, seeing as how Gore would have been deposed some time in 2002 or 2003 at the latest, 2008’s melt down wouldn’t have been on him.
David Koch
@Triassic Sands:
Gore couldn’t hold Obama’s jock strap. Fucking Gore couldn’t even stay married, he was too busy getting happy endings at cheap massage parlors.
cmorenc
@KG:
Or, for that matter, having people on the ground paying attention to important details WITHIN the democratic party’s ability to control, such as the board of elections in Palm Beach County who made the plainly idiotic decision to craft the infamously, needlessly confusing “butterfly” ballot to be used by a demographic heavily skewed to reliably democratic, but easily confused geezers. Several thousand (I think six thousand something) of them in heavily Jewish precincts in Palm Beach County voted for Pat Buchanan, notorious anti-semite. That was DEMOCRATIC-controlled election board commissioners who designed and approved that ballot format, not Kathleen Harris, the notoriously partisan GOP Secretary of State.
FlipYrWhig
@srv: Nah, because Gore would have set up a commission to investigate what went wrong on 9/11 and found plenty of blame to go around, whereupon he would either refuse to run for re-election or immediately resign. Lieberman would run on the D line for ’04 as a quasi-incumbent who would clean up the mess left by Clinton and Gore. He’d probably win–not sure who’d go against him; Lieberman vs. McCain seems unbelievably pathetic.
But then Pres. Lieberman would preside over the financial collapse, to which he’d be rather easily and personally linked, but he’d gut it out to try for a second full term, so we’d get a Republican winner in ’08. Maybe Romney. Then that would be so horrible we’d get a Democrat in ’12. Hey, wonder what that Obama guy would be doing?
RalfW
@Emma: I listened to one of the Gore-Bush debates on the car radio (I’d been driving for about 10 hours and had to get angry to stay awake). I’m pretty sure it was the final one.
I felt like Gore somewhat narrowly “won” the debate. (airquotes because these debates are such hooey, as is the who won question).
Anyway, the entire Village declared Bush the winner. Because the craptastic swagger showed on TV, but if you – what? – actually listened to the words (yep, that’s radio!) Gore well out-answered Bush on substance. And that was deemed a much lesser criteria.
SiubhanDuinne
@Emma:
That happens to me a lot. Thus, I attempt to keep my TV viewing to a minimum.
Chris
@RalfW:
Funny, the same was said of the JFK/Nixon debate. That people who saw it on television thought Kennedy had won, but people who only listened to it on the radio thought the opposite.
amk
@FlipYrWhig: LOL.
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6: During those interminable weeks in late 2000, when we all learned about hanging chads and pregnant chads and Katherine Harris, I happened to be traveling across Florida (professionally) with a Canadian, for a week or ten days. Although, like many Canadians, he was quite knowledgeable* about US politics, he was just completely baffled, perplexed, confuzzled and befuddled over what was going on with the recounts, and the state and US Supremes, and all the rest of the circus. I was supposed to have these great insights to share with him, but I pretty much did a lot of shrugging and smacking my palm against my forehead and saying “shit if I know.” If only I had known the term “fustercluck” 11+ years ago.
*Old joke: Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada. Canadians are maliciously well-informed about the US.
Villago Delenda Est
@Svensker:
The deserting coward and the Dark Lord cribbed from Reinhard Heydrich’s play book.
Both deserve the same fate as Heydrich…or better yet, Mussolini.
SiubhanDuinne
@RalfW: Not unlike Kennedy-Nixon in 1960, except of course it worked in our favour that time.
Palli
@burnspbesq: @lamh35:
@95
Calling the winner before the count was the Florida election win Step #1 also.
2000 was a set of well organized complex set of plans in 4 different scenarios-florida and 3 backup states. Florida was the most foolproof and had the most capable “inside corruption” framework in place. But 4 years later the re-tabulation of Ohio presidential votes went almost unnoticed by the media- even, or especially, after a plane fell out if the sky.
Palli
@burnspbesq: @lamh35:
@95
Calling the winner before the count was the Florida election win Step #1 also.
2000 was a set of well organized complex set of plans in 4 different scenarioslorida and 3 backup states. Florida was the most foolproof and had the most capable “inside corruption” framework in place. But 4 years later the re-tabulation of Ohio presidential votes went almost unnoticed by the media- even, or especially, after a plane fell out if the sky.
Palli
@burnspbesq: @lamh35:
@95
Calling the winner before the count was the Florida election win Step #1 also.
2000 was a set of well organized complex set of plans in 4 different scenarios, Florida and 3 backup states. Florida was the most foolproof and had the most capable “inside corruption” framework in place.
But 4 years later the re-tabulation of Ohio presidential votes went almost unnoticed by the media- even, or especially, after a plane fell out if the sky.
SiubhanDuinne
@lamh35:
Sigh.. It’s always all about perception, isn’t it?
portlander
@David Koch:
And Al Gore said he invented the internet.
Or is context only for our heroes? Nader was simply repeated what a lot of people were saying: that Bush and Gore were running on the same platform; that their “debates” were mostly the 2 of them agreeing with one another.
People are entitled to their views but in my opinion Gore’s failure lies squarely with his campaign.
In sports, there are always going to be bad calls, so you have to play good enough that a bad call won’t cause you to lose. Gore didn’t do that; whether you want to blame Nader, Jeb Bush, the Supreme Court, or whatever, the fact remains that Gore had every reason to win but ran a terrible campaign and lost because of it.
The comparison to Romney is laughably inaccurate as Romney has very little reason to win, though is not running a terrible campaign.
hildebrand
I am late to the thread, and somebody may have raised this thought (I must admit that I have not waded through all the comments), but I am starting to wonder if some of the MSM and perhaps even more than a few Republicans don’t secretly (or not so secretly) want Obama to win. Not that they like the guy, or agree with what he is attempting to do, but because he makes a good ‘bad guy’ in their narrative. Limbaugh, Rove, and countless others wankers would not be able to raise the same kind of coin in this environment without a proper villain to fulminate against.
I know, I know, they had Bush for 8 years – but Bush inherited a surplus and had a terrific, patriotic cause (if you ignore the lovely little fact that we were attacked on his watch) – but the next President, whomever he may be, will neither have a booming economy nor a lovely little war that everyone thinks is swell, to distract the nation’s attention. They will actually have to do the rather unsavory work of governing in a shitty period – and who wants to do that? Right, they don’t. So, they cough up Romney, undercut him whenever they can, then blame him when he loses to the Kenyan-soshulist usurper – while they continue to rake in huge bucks blasting the corrupt Obama administration.
My god, it all makes perfect sense.
Anybody willing to lay odds that this little fever dream doesn’t have a good chance of becoming reality?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@portlander:
Actually, no, he didn’t.
Then Ralph Nader and “a lot of people” were, and probably still are, really fucking stupid.
sherparick
@FlipYrWhig: But that is so boring!!! If we can’t indulge in high school gossip how will the next 10 months be endurable on the press plane. Meanwhile, Romney has a lot of his truthy memes established in the press (such as that Obama was responsible for the job losses during the first five months of his administration when his policies, such as the stimulus, did not kick in until June 2009 – See Candy Crawley’s interview with David Axelrod on 15 Jan 2012).
portlander
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Um, that was my point, that people take sound bites out of context for the purpose of smearing people.
Are you saying that you believe Bush and Gore were running on substantially different platforms? Maybe you should go back and watch the 2nd Bush/Gore debate (and try not to vomit in your own mouth).
I should have said “bad calls and cheating” to make a better analogy to US elections.
But Romney will not make Gore’s mistakes: he’s not going to debate Obama and agree with him every 2 minutes. He’s not going to pick a so-called moderate republican for VP; he’ll pick someone who can pull in the evangelicals and the tea party types.
Yes I understand the argument being made is simply that both tried to campaign as different people than they actually were and people were able to pick up on that. That may be true but I question the value of the observation.
liberal
@Raven:
Huh? The meltdown was baked in the cake before Bush came along.
mclaren
@liberal:
And we can thank Bill Clinton and a Democrat-dominated congress for deep-sixing the Glass-Steagall act and all the other safeguards put in place since the 1930 Great Depression.
In fact, DougJ should be damn glad Al Gore didn’t win in 2000. If he had, he’d probably have been around when economy melted down, and can you imagine the Repubs’ reaction then?
The global economy had collapsed (the neocons would scream) because there hadn’t been enough tax cuts for the rich! Because unions were too greedy! Because government regulations had strangled business!
The holocaust of deregulation and union-busting and child-labor-law-elimination and minimum-wage-slashing and superrich marginal tax-cutting you’d see then would turn America into Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
mk3872
Be careful what you wish for with our back-stabbing holy-than-thou media in this country.
The MSM do NOT like Obama and will take every opportunity to point out his every flaw by simply saying, “the Romney camp says Obama is a dick. We asked: is he really a dick?”
I mean, Halperin already has called Obama a dick on the air for goodness sake.
portlander
@mclaren:
While I’m totally in support of not exonerating Clinton for his role in the deregulation of the financial sector and the subsequent meltdown, I also don’t think it’s fair to cast blame solely on him. Let’s not forget it was the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, 3 republicans.
General Stuck
@mk3872:
the msm are sheeple, that follow what they perceive as the prevailing public opinion of any president. Obama has maintained a solid favorability rating amongst voters, even when his job approval numbers were falling. I think it was because of his persistent efforts to reach out to republicans, even though they did not return the gestures. Playing politics is a matrix, and the pol that maps that out and maintains the appearance of good faith by touching all the bases, usually ends up the better for it, electorally. Nobody likes the republican field of challengers, and none more so than Mitt Romney. As long as the bottom doesn’t drop out of the economy, the press will likely go with the flow of public opinion. And Obama is hugging that 50 percent mark, amazingly well with an UE percent at 8.5
Triassic Sands
@David Koch:
I’ve never cared much for Gore, and my statement wasn’t a comment about Obama at all (your hypersensitivity may have read that into the statement, but there’s nothing I can do about that), but in fairness to Gore, he was awarded a Nobel prize that he genuinely deserved. I’d say that qualifies him to do more than hold someone’s jock strap.
The single greatest threat to humanity today is probably climate change (It’s either that or the Republican Party). Some believe that it’s the greatest threat ever. The fact that the world’s politicians have failed miserably to do their part can’t be blamed on Gore, who did everything he could to bring climate change to the attention of the entire world.
mclaren
@General Stuck:
Obama has a high personal favorability rating. The American people like the guy personally. They despise his policies.
The American people are pretty much like me and most of the folks I know — I like Obama personally, he’s a neat person, a wonderful writer, but his policies suck ass. Endless unwinnable wars, caving in to tax cuts for the rich, refusing to jail the Wall Street crooks, ordering the murder of a U.S. citizen without a trial or even charging him with a crime…bad bad bad ideas. Like Obama, hate his Bush’s-third-term policies.
mk3872
@General Stuck:
Let us not forget that St. Ronnie Reagan put the country through 10%+ unemployment through 1983 and still won in a landslide the following year.
mk3872
@mclaren: Nice cherry-picking, Libertardian.
46% saying that they approve of the job he’s doing, to you, equals “they hate his policies”? Brilliant!
xian
@mk3872: worse, it deliberately conflates the people who hate him for being a kenyomuslisoshulist and those who hate him for not being president norman thomas iii.
earlier, where it was claimed, ” Nader was simply repeated what a lot of people were saying: that Bush and Gore were running on the same platform; that their “debates” were mostly the 2 of them agreeing with one another” — that’s pretty ridiculous.
Sure, Bush pretended to be a moderate, but the disagreement over (to pick one key issue) the “lock box” proved prescient, as Bush did end up looting the social security surplus.
to me, back to the topic, Rommey is a weird combination of Gore *and* Kerry. flip-floppy, unlikable, wooden, etc.
FlipYrWhig
@mclaren: The notion that The American People give a cold, wet rat’s ass about the civil liberties of American-born terror suspects holed up in foreign countries, much less that they factor that in when deciding who to vote for, is, to put it mildly, far-fetched. Perhaps they should. But they don’t. Not even a little.
harlana
late as always, to this thread, but THANK YOU!
Samara Morgan
why do you keep linking Isqueef?
hes gone over to the Dumb Side. hes not coming back.
I think….the Romney is a messican meme is going to be a bigger problem with the lily white conservative base.
Samara Morgan
DougJ, didja know Romney’s dad is a
kenyanmexican citizen?this is a thousand kinds of awesome.
the GOP may choose to pimp Romney’s mexican heritage to try for latino/hispanic votes, but it will drive WECs away from him like a scalded cat.
i wunner what Daniel “League of the South” Larison will have to say about this.
Samara Morgan
DougJ, you are sympathetic to my position.
Race will dominate the next three presidential elections, and you know it.
In 2020 minorities are projected to command 34 to 36 percent of the electorate.
Why cant we discuss it?
Because its not POLITE?
Marc
@mclaren:
A “Democrat-dominated Congress”? In 1999? It was passed by Republicans on a more or less party-line vote.
But then, this is coming from the same person who says Obama’s policies are “Bush’s third term” and criticizes him for “Endless unwinnable wars” when he just ended two of them last year.
Marc
@xian: Yeah, I hear a Naderite trying to let himself off the hook for 2000-08. Not working.
tones
@burnspbesq:
With all due respect you are one hundred percent wrong.
Even with Nader, Gore still won the popular vote and had the most votes -he WON.
The supremes put in place by B’s father decided to stop the vote count in the state his brother was governor…
When the votes were eventually counted, GORE WON!
do you not remember that ?
mclaren
@mk3872:
Keep those lies coming, crackpot Obot. 51% of the American people saying they disapprove of Obama’s policies, to you, means they love what he’s doing?
You need to improve your lying skills, kook.
mclaren
@Marc:
Another fringe lunatic heard from.
If the Democrats had fought the repeal of Glass-Steagall as ferociously as the Republicans have fought Obama’s ACA, we’d never have had the global financial collapse of 2007.
Keep spewing disinformation to distract us from that fact, by all means, though — you’ve gotta earn those paychecks from Karl Rove somehow. Since the facts are against you, just keep blowing smoke up our asses.
But then, your comprehensively debunked claims are coming from the person who asserts that Obama has “ended” the Iraq conflict…even though the State Department says it still has a “small army” of contractors in the country. And even though Obama and company are now gearing up for another war — this time with Iran.
Keep vomiting out those lies in your failed and futile effort to distract us from the fact that Obama is doing exactly what Bush wanted to do. More war, bigger defense department budget, more tax cuts for the rich, more torture, more kidnapping and murdering American citizens without charging ’em with a crime, ad infinitum.
mclaren
@tones:
Of course burnspbesq is 100 percent wrong. He’s burnspbesq. What else do you expect to hear from that ignorant kook other than incessant claims that 2 + 2 = 5 and water burns and fire is wet?
The plain fact of the matter is that Nader wouldn’t have mattered one single god damn if almost exactly 50% of the American people didn’t love the Drunk-Driving C Student and eagerly vote for him as president. Burnspbesq gibbers and gabbles about “75,000 votes in Florida.” The state of Florida has a population of 18.5 million goddamn people. If the 2000 election swung on 75,000 votes out of 18.5 million, then the election was so goddamn close that the obvious responsibility for voting that ignorant sociopathic frat boy into the Oval Office belongs to the American people — not Ralph fucking Nader.
Like all lawyers, burnspbesq is blowing smoke up our asses in a frantic effort to obscure the real issue. Namely, that a huge number of voters (almost exactly half the electorate) in 2000 adored the Drunk-Driving C Student and when they saw Karl Rove’s commercials they wiped the Cheeto dust off their mouths and rushed out to vote for that worthless creepy thug as president. That’s the real problem, and everyone knows it.
Brandon
This whole thesis that the media is Goring Romney is bullshit and I don’t know why DougJ keeps peddling it. Also too, when Milbank references Romney’s “awkwardness”, I was surprised that it wasn’t obvious that he was attacking Romney’s religion. Ben Smith told me so.