bravesnumberone
Well-known member
Trump's gotta go...
2016 Presidential Primaries [ SUPER TUESDAY | 3-1-'16]
- Thread starter 57Brave
- Start date
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
He should, but he won't. We are seeing the seamy underside of the American populace and they seem to have a lot of pent-up frustration.
bravesnumberone
Well-known member
I say this as one of many people the Republican Party left by its continued progression to the far, far right. If they nominate him, they deserve to lose elections for the next 100 years.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
I think Trump will stick longer than Cain or Bachman. He may not survive to the end, but I still think he might go third-party.
weso1
<B>Clique Leader</B>
At this point I think you have to say that Trump is going to be in this thing till the end. I mean what can he do at this point that will knock him down? Hawk said it perfectly. He's pretty much offended everyone. Hell, he even called Iowans stupid and they're still voting for him. I think the thing that's keeping him up at the top is that he has everything that it takes to be president outside of the hilariously bad filter that makes him sound like a clown.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If Trump had a reasonable filter he'd win in a landslide.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If Trump had a reasonable filter he'd win in a landslide.
Runnin
Well-known member
Without the outrageous commentary he gets exposed too quickly. He knows nothing about govt or policy and thus can't speak intelligently about the position he's running for.
zitothebrave
Connoisseur of Minors
weso1
<B>Clique Leader</B>
I think that's unimportant though. There I said it.
57Brave
Well-known member
what?
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
It was an era of missed opportunities that went aground because Ventura had no base from which to work in the Legislature. He hired a great set of commissioners and then proceeded to not listen to any of them. He cut the legs out from underneath his team that presented his proposals to the Legislature numerous times with last-second changes of mind.
The state was flush with money (we're a high tax state and the economy was booming) and Ventura squandered a lot of money with one-time rebates and lower automobile license fees. He also bought down a billion dollars in school property tax levies, which sounds like a great idea until you realize that if there's a downturn in the economy (which there was), schools were then almost solely reliant on state aid. High property wealth school districts went to their voters to make up for the dwindling state aid, but funding inequities arose that are only now being remedied. It was just really haphazard, as were the results of most of his work. I guess his lasting legacy is he did promote the light rail projects around the Twin Cities and they have been successful. Other than that, he was living in a world of still photos and not realizing that live is a movie. The snapshots looked great, but there was very little contemplation about the future effects of his proposals.
The other thing is that he fought with the media constantly, which worked until the general population realized the Emperor had no clothes except for a boa. If he would have worked the Legislature as hard as he worked his image, some truly good things might have happened because the opportunity was there. I know a little about professional wrestling through a number of contacts and was actually part of a free lance team that was dreaming up new ideas for the late Verne Gagne to use in a re-design the old AWA to compete with the WWF. It's a really brutal business and the guys that make it in that sport can't simply be muscle-bound jerks. You have to make the customer either love you or hate you (or both). Jesse was an extremely successful wrestler (and an average athlete from a couple of friends of mine who grew up with him in South Minneapolis) and he had a je na sais quoi that translated easily to macro-politics. The thing in professional wrestling is that it's not a team sport and politics is of a sort. Jesse could promote himself, which he always had done successfully, but he was unable to build the bridges necessary to govern.
I fear the same would hold true with Trump, although he is running as a Republican and not as a representative of a rootless third party. That said, he's probably Karl Rove's worst nightmare because he is not of the establishment and could go any which way if elected.
Sure. I just don't buy into the tired notion that politicians need 'experience' (really, of any variety) in order to effectively lead/shape significant policy. In fact, I believe that is a concept that we need to dislodge ourselves from entirely. It's easy to understand why a swath of the electorate seems, especially now, to be completely disenchanted with the careerist type. They aren't bringing any real, impactful change to the masses.
This is not me touting Trump. I am disappointed with the way he's run his campaign -- can't argue with its utter effectiveness, but the pandering he has engaged in is almost unbearably tawdry.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
Don't know if I have really answered that. First thing is the state was flush with money so everyone was feeling pretty good. Jesse had a radio show and was constantly harping on both parties because they were in lobbyists' pockets and were only catering to their constituencies. That's a pretty ridiculous notion in Minnesota where we lobbyists have to register, report all of our expenditures, and cannot provide anything to legislators in terms of gifts, dinners, tickets, etc. But it was the Clinton era and Jesse was Rush with a different message. Instead of yammering at liberals, he yammered at everybody with a "follow the money" mantra.
I think Jesse ran for office thinking he'd lose, but it would promote his radio show and book deals. He ran on the Independence Party ticket and brought on perennial third-party candidate Dean Barkley (who basically founded Minnesota's Independence Party) to guide the overarching message. He also had a lot of help from former Congressman Tim Penney, who is pretty sharp.
The Republicans were united behind Norm Coleman, a former Democrat who switched parties and was later elected to the US Senate, but the Democrats were a bit fractured after a five-way primary that was won by "Skip" Humphrey, son of Hubert Humphrey. "Skip" is a decent guy, but his father used up the entire genetic stock of charisma and didn't pass any on to "Skip." Like I said to someone, "The apple didn't fall far from the tree, but it rolled quite a ways away." Jesse was in third place right after the primaries, but instead of fading away during the debates, he beat the crap out of both sides, concentrating heavily on Coleman. He climbed steadily and peaked at the right time. He threw some money together and hired Bill Hillsman, the advertising guy who helped engineer Paul Wellstone's stunning upset of Rudy Boschwitz in 1990 and Hillsman put together some really great ads. Here are links to a couple:
Jesse Action Figure: [video=youtube;TjU948M0ARw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjU948M0ARw[/video]
Jesse the Mind: [video=youtube;zSACk65D3pk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSACk65D3pk[/video]
After the ads hit, Jesse really caught fire. The vote was really fluid. I saw varying polls in the last week that had any of the guys winning. We have same-day voter registration and on election day, there were a ton of folks registering, meaning that they hadn't voted in a long time. Lots of young guys out to vote for Jesse. My elderly mother was an election judge back then and she lives in a fairly sparse area in which she knows just about everyone (she remains quite the busybody at 97), but even she was unfamiliar with a lot of young guys who she swore came "right out of the barn" to vote. Minnesota has a reputation as this ultra-liberal state and in some ways it is, but it has a fierce independent streak and that streak showed up consistently in the 1990s. It is difficult to know where Jesse's vote came from. There were some disaffected Democrats (the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party is painful in its overweening pretense--and I say that as an active DFLer), but it is interesting to note that the State House of Representatives flipped from DFL to Republican control along with Jesse's election. It's my guess that a lot of the guys that were bringing the barnyard smells into the Cannon Falls Township Hall to torment my mother and their brethren throughout the state pulled the Republican lever right after they pulled the lever for Jesse. Ruy Teixeira has written a lot about how the Democrats nationally have lost the white male vote and I think Ventura offered a lot of blue collar voters to find a middle ground where they were comfortable.
Independence Party platform? Platform? We don't need no stinkin' platform! Jesse ran as "not them" and "not their ideas." His public stance is pretty much standard old-school libertarian (some some notable departures--especially on things like mass transit) with a blue collar slant. Fiercely pro-choice. Pretty much anti-war. At one debate, Jesse said prostitution should be legal. Doesn't say much about guns one way or the other, but thinks hunters are wimps because the animals can't shoot back. Jesse makes a lot about his Navy Seal background (which has been disputed), but he used to wax about "until you've hunted man, you can't call yourself a hunter." As I referenced above, Jesse wanted to reduce car license fees and cut property taxes. Most of his platform related to things that personally p*ssed him off. He had several big cars and a pretty huge estate that paid a lot of property taxes. To characterize things, Jesse seemed to reach the new outer-ring suburban voter. Gen Xers. First or second time homeowners. People who felt the DFL had its head in the clouds and was only concerned about the urban core and didn't cotton to the Republican social issue platform. Folks who thought all you need is a pragmatic guy to wave his hand to produce pragmatic solutions.
In the end, no one could foresee the tidal wave of non-voters who pulled the lever for Ventura. Minnesota used to have a September primary and Humphrey couldn't pull things together after a five-way primary and Coleman was an easy foil for Jesse (Coleman also had a contested endorsement contest against the sitting Lieutenant Governor Joanne Benson. I always thought that if Benson had been the candidate, she probably would have been elected the first woman Governor in Minnesota because Jesse couldn't have jibed at her during the debates the same way he tweaked Coleman without looking like a bully.). With only seven weeks between the primary and the general elections, it can be very difficult for people to react to something unexpected, like Ventura's rise. There was no time for either Coleman or Humphrey to counter Jesse, not that either of them had the personal magnetism to accomplish what needed to be done. The bottom fell out for Humphrey, who ended up a distant third. Again, the five-way primary left the DFL party without a lot of resources for the general election campaign and the Humphrey name had lost its magic (and Humphrey the Elder had an awesome political machine). A lot of things came together to Jesse's benefit and his outsider status certainly helped.
Don't know if this readily translates to the Trump phenomenon except for the fact that it appears to be reaching the non-political and energizing them at a lowest common denominator level. Like Jesse, Trump is "saying the things others are afraid to say or at least say out loud." I think the edge on Trump's message is more harsh than what Jesse ladled out, but the landscape has changed dramatically and people weren't worried about things like terrorism in the 1990's so that is understandable. Jesse's basic message was "people aren't evil, just misled." Trump seems to have a more Manichean view of the world, which, again, is probably the way to go in a more security-conscious world. Both are really anti-establishment, but they have greatly different personal narratives so the anti-establishment messages aren't quite the same.
Runnin
Well-known member
Is this because of Obama's performance as POTUS with little experience? Because I remember a totally different line coming from Repubs 8 years ago.
Runnin
Well-known member
So many people don't vote. After all the 18 months of debates and attack ads, you still gotta get 'em to the polls.