this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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What the fuck is this shit? Motherfucker, I lived through these elections, and this is some boomer revisionist bull shit.
Al Gore lost because he couldn't differentiate himself from god-damned George W Bush. He was too centrist to encourage the left base to show up for him.
Kerry lost because he couldn't articulate his better vision for America, and was too centrist to encourage the left base to show up for him.
Hillary lost because she didn't even try to reach out to the left base. She was too centrist to beat Donald Fucking Trump.
Three ostensibly intelligent leaders who lost their elections to fucking morons because they thought that they didn't need to try very hard to reach out to progressive voters.
Any one of them would have been a better President than what we got, but the fact that they all lost means they did something wrong. It isn't the fault of the voters demanding better, it's the fault of the party failing to meet the demand.
I am fascinated to wonder who is upvoting this.
I mean, it’s true that the left base didn’t completely show up for him. Enough of them showed up that he won the popular vote and the electoral college, but if the vigorous activist left that was focused on WTO and GATT and other non electoral issues had been on the ground in the same way that Roger Stone’s machine was, they might have been able to stop Bush from stealing the election, and we might have had action on climate change back before it was too late, no global war on terror affecting hundreds of thousands of lives, no ISIS, no 2008 financial crash, and we might not have had all the failures to take US intelligence’s warnings seriously, that led to 9/11. Plus God knows what else actual forward progress.
Reframing “the US news media is so corrupted by propaganda that the average viewer can’t determine who is better between Gore and Bush, by a large enough margin to overcome a pretty blatant coup” as being all Gore’s fault somehow, is the most Lemmy-fake-leftist thing I’ve seen today, and I’ve seen someone praise the USSR’s justice system and someone else say that Biden shut down Trump’s insulin price cap.
“Too centrist”
Get the fuck out of here
You’re right about Hillary though, that part is true
The fact that Nader ran to his left and had decent success is a pretty good indicator that Gore was too close to the center to win.
But I mainly blame the design of the Florida ballots for Gore's loss.
There's also that minor matter of Republicans actively sabotaging the recounts by standing outside the counting office and chanting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
That doesn't make sense for a couple different reasons, but thinking how to explain that it is wrong actually led to me to realize that Hotelling's Law is a not insignificant part of the incentives at work in a FPTP system which is yet another reason not to use them.
(Basically, in short, whatever point Gore staked out on the little spectrum, Nader can gather some votes by picking a different point. Doesn't mean a damn thing about how good the point either person picked was or the relation between them. But yes, mathematical pressure on both "main" candidates to move to the center and similar to each other is absolutely a real thing and I hadn't fully realized that before, although it seems totally obvious in retrospect and like I should have realized it before this.)
You're right, "too close to the center to win" doesn't make sense. But Nader did run to Gore's left, and took votes from Gore that might have caused a different outcome.
I know because I got yelled at for it on the Internet for eight years.
(Though I still blame the stupid ballots.)
All the Democrats are too close to the center except for a handful of congress people. Honestly, I won't disagree with your earlier point there. But my point was that Gore out of all the Democratic candidates was pretty fuckin sensible in terms of seeing big problems and wanting to deal with them, instead of just having a big party for all the defense contractors and oil companies and Wall Street.
But yes, Nader was a factor, sure. Also: I actually know somebody that worked in politics for quite a while, and her take on the whole Florida debacle was very interesting to me -- basically that it was a failure of on-the-ground organizing by the Democrats; that they should have been able to pick up right away that people were at risk of getting confused by the ballots, and have someone at every polling station that could be able to give a little spiel (or cause the election workers to give a spiel) about how to mark your vote correctly. Like, it was rigged (on many different levels, including in my opinion deliberately making the ballot confusing in a way that would confuse a certain percent of Gore voters), but also every election is "rigged" somewhat, to whatever extent each side can get away with, and part of your job as a political organization is to watch close and be sharp and not let the other side get away with stuff.
IDK if I agree with her, but that was her take on it and she has a lot more firsthand experience than me.
Totally agree. He got lampooned for the "lockbox" but it was actually a decent idea. Regarding the ballots: There's a (paywalled) study from Stanford that claims to show that people accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan were a significant reason the election went the way it did. The ballot is pretty terrible
All this analysis would be fun if it weren't (a) so consequential and (b) continually showing our only hope dropping the ball.
"So like 50 assholes just worked hard on getting the guy they wanted, did some fairly basic shenanigans including showing up at an election office and throwing a fit?"
"Yeah. Is bullshit. And they changed the result, and looking back, it changed the whole world."
Press A: "Wow. I'm never getting involved in politics, that's corrupt as fuck."
Press B: "Holy shit. Can we make a bunch of people to go somewhere and throw a fit? Like, what did they do? And it worked, and it made a difference?" "Yeah like a huge one." "Holy shit..."
You young ones won't know this, but Gore had a very different persona as Congressman and VP. Note that the only reason Clinton, a notorious draft-dodger, picked Gore as his running-mate was because of Gore's reputation as the top Pentagon-hawk. As well, Gore led centrist wing of the party that wanted to eliminate welfare and implement austerity measures.
People who say Gore would have kept us out of Iraq, or not done all the other dumb shit Bush did, don't seem to recall that politician Gore was complete polar opposite of post-political Gore we know today.
Dude I don't really wanna play the game of "let's pull on this thread and see if a bunch of conservative-propaganda-worldview stuff pops out" again, I've done it like twice in the last 2 days and it sometimes takes a while
But (a) it's like a cat with a laser pointer (b) tbh it doesn't look like this particular thread is all that long
I mean everyone knows we all look down on people who didn't fight in the Vietnam War, and in general who don't do what the federal government wants them to do. Fuckin cowards, what was wrong with them! What do you think? Clinton should have gone over and shot a bunch of Vietnamese people, amirite fellow anti Iraq War person?
Perhaps should have put quotes around "notorious". I figure most here knew it was another just another media-generated controversy.
Yeah, completely fair. I see what you mean. I think I am impatient and short tempered after talking with a series of not very nice people yesterday and today.
Regardless of that I still think your main point is made up, though. Here and here are some contemporary stories about the pick -- he voted for the Iraq War 1, but that was seen as sort of a surprise given his father's antiwar reputation. His reputation at the time was as an environmentalist and technocrat. It's important to remember that the tolerance for austerity at home and war abroad was a lot greater in 1992 than it is today; it was a much different political landscape. Gore wasn't seen at the time as any kind of hawk in either respect that I'm aware of and rereading the stories from the time I don't see any kind of inkling that Clinton had him on to pander to pro-war people or anything.
Gore voting for Iraq I was hardly a surprise, as he championed it regularly on TV. He then chastised Bush I for ending the war too early.
In the Clinton Administration, he was among the staunchest hawks. He would give speeches calling for removing of Saddam ("finish the job"). You can probably find some of those speeches with Google...cover the name over and you'd think you were seeing something from Rumsfeld or Cheney.
Contrary to myth, Iraq II was not invented by a small group of neocons. It had full bipartisan backing in Congress, and there are some who were close to Gore who believe he would have also been in support.
Here’s a speech Gore gave about Iraq War 2. You don’t need to believe whether or not he would have been in support; you can go back to contemporary speeches and find out whether he would have been in support, and he wasn’t. As you pointed out, it had pretty freaking broad support, so that made him an outlier.
Idk what you mean about “among the staunchest hawks” in the Clinton administration. It’s not the VP’s job to do policy decisions and take part in the debate about what the president’s policy should be (at least not in public). If he was making pro war statements from 1992-2000 that’s a statement of what the Clinton administration’s policy was, not what Al Gore’s policy preferences were.
He was okay with war, in general, in ways that would make him an anomaly for a progressive Democrat today, but not at all at the time. (At the time, we were still doing our own Israel-in-Gaza slaughter and torture operations all over Central and South America with, as you pointed out, broad bipartisan support with 0 of this modern level of protest or debate about whether we should be doing it.) And like I said, he definitely wasn’t brought into the Clinton administration because he was some pro war guy. I honestly have no idea what you’re even talking about with that. Anyway, I showed you the contemporary articles about why people were saying he was brought in; you’re welcome to read them, or alternatively to think what you like about it if you’re committed to your way.
Man, I lived through it. Don't piss on my leg and call it rain. I followed Gore's campaign. I watched his debates. The man had splinters in his ass from riding fences. He picked Joe Lieberman as his running mate to prove how centrist he was.
Compared to modern Democrats, he's basically a communist, but 2000 was a heady time for progressives. We thought Bill Clinton was just the beginning, a transitional precursor to a new era of balanced budgets and human rights for all. But it was not to be.
Schrödinger's Left
Simultaneously stupid babies on the fringe who don't even warrant acknowledgement, AND the singular cause of every Democratic loss of the past 30 years - no adjustments to make, no lessons to learn, just blame the left and take 5 more steps right.
I mean... It's always Schrödinger's left. When we talk about "the left" it's always a constructed public. Whatever the speaker wants "the left" to encompass is in there. Like you talk to a conservative and "the left" encompasses a party like the Democrats, you talk to a democrat and Depending on the person they might consider themselves leftists or not depending. You talk to a Socialist and "the left" excludes the Democrats. The concept serves a purpose in each case. To create a body of condemnation, to create a nebulous scapegoat, to attempt to build (sometimes false) solidarity out of an incredibly fractured group, to establish an aspirational ingroup or out group... Or to self soothe that one's highly individualized take on politics is not alone.
It's a weakness in the flanks of the way we discuss these things. There's a holier than thou approach to claiming where on the political compass one sits and what is worthy of scorn. The Republican base doesn't seem to have that in the same measure which makes it more dangerous.
I don't think it's resolvable personally. Ditching the concept of claiming "the left" may be key to changing engagement styles to become less armchair criticism of a nebulous ill defined group... And more focused on actually tackling and pushing specific issues with more progressive non-partisan ship.
It's not that revisionist. I definitely remember "have a beer with him" being said.
In retrospect it was probably a phrase coined by the media to lure the lowest common denominator to GW. But it worked and it stuck.
Lin Manuel made a reference to this in "The election of 1800" in Hamilton:
I remember the "have a beer with him," too. But that wasn't why people voted for Bush instead of Gore. Conservatices voted for the conaervative candidate. Moderates split their vote because both sides the same. Progressives didn't vote, or voted for Nader, because they didn't have a candidate.
Surely some moderates voted for the guy they wanted to hang out, but that's not why Gore lost.
I think this election is a little different in that we have a known threat that is significantly worse than the alternative. It's not an exaggeration to say that Trump is a threat to democracy and to anyone that doesn't want to live under religious law as interpreted by the Republicans.
The other candidate is harm reduction presidentially personified. That is the best choice we actually have, and the consequences for disincentivizing left leaning or undecided voters is much worse than Bush, and that's saying something.
Vote against Christ flavored dictatorship, and encourage others to do the same. And not some impossible 3rd party bullshit.
If either third party gets even 5% this election, they qualify for federal funding and could have a greater influence in the future. Third party votes are ESSENTIAL when the establishment wins any other way.
If they couldn't get 5% in 2016, they aren't getting 5%.
Note also that Perot got >5% in 1996, but that did nothing for third party politics. The Reform party doesn't even have name recognition.
You want third parties to be viable? They need to start local and build a base from the ground up. They need to start having significant presence in state politics and legislatures, and we need to see them have a modest bloc of senators and representatives in Congress. Even if a third party did win the presidency, they'd be a complete lame duck with no Congressional support.
You should be asking yourself why third parties aren't doing this, and instead wasting money on presidential elections and conventions. The sad truth is that we don't have a third party because we have no serious third party contenders. None of them want to play the long game to actually win. They'd rather just grift donations.
I would agree with you if the stakes were not as dire as they are now. If any of those 5% of votes are taken from traditionally Democrat voters, you might get that 3rd party its federal funding, and you might just see them in the next presidential election, but you may not have the right to vote.
Republicans have stepped up their campaign against voting freedom, and they have a whole plan on how to seize control of our government and give dictator authority to their president. Project 2025 is going to irreparably harm us if it comes to fruition.
Try this when we are not so disastrously close to religious extremists seizing control.
Thats the trick to it, thats never not going to be the case.
The Bush's were tame compared to this shit, and Jr even thought God talked to him. McCain turned out to be a relatively decent human being, and it got him Republicancelled.
You could be right that we will never see a moderate Republican again in our lifetime, but I fail to see why doing ANYTHING that would help their campaigns is a good thing.
There's been a flood of these type of memes lately trying to voter shame.
Lol holy projection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVvCDSK5NsQ&t=2289s
Well ranted, and I don’t disagree but it’s simply the case that voters not showing up gave us the shitshow we now have. It would have been very different, and you can blame the candidates but the fact is none of them are Jesus or Batman or whothefuckever is going to be all things to everyone.
And, at this point, after 2016, i do not give a single fuck about it. Get to the polls vote Biden and bitch after we’ve saved this country. Everyone gets a full three-and-a-half years to promote whatever their answer is, and if they don’t get it done by then, or have any other useful purpose, time to shut up and get to saving us from Idiot Handmaid’s Dream Reich.
This tweet or whatever - It’s not an academic treatise. It’s making the point that we can’t sit back again and let cheating fascist billionaire sycophants run away with it again. LIKE WE DID. Didn’t like Al Gore? Don’t care. Kerry too “stiff” for you? Shut the fuck up, we’re fighting goddamned war criminals. Hilary too - whatever - for you? Well no shit, me too but i’m voting for her anyway.
Be precious later. WE DO NOT HAVE TIME RIGHT NOW.
Right, and you and I are in complete agreement. I agree with the urgency and the overall goal. The only thing I don't like about this tweet is that it blames the voters. It's like the people who blame consumers for shopping at Walmart, driving small local businesses into bankruptcy. Or, you could go back to the classic fable of the scorpion and the frog.
People need to be motivated to vote. For me, voting against Trump is reason enough to show up. For other people, that isn't enough. And if you lived through Trump's presidency, and that wasn't enough to motivate you to show up to vote, this tweet isn't going to be any more persuasive.
The problem is not that the voters suck. The problem is that most people cannot see the world through the eyes of another person. Most people, the vast majority, are not dialed into politics. Most people are annoyed at politics. They don't see a correlation between the people in charge and their personal quality of life.
Are they wrong? Ignorant? Out of touch? Apathetic? Maybe all of the above. But that's who they are. You have to meet voters where they are. And if the voters aren't showing up for you, then that isn't their fault, it's yours. The leaders must lead, or they aren't worth voting for.
I desperately want Biden to win. I do not want to live in Trump's America again. But if we have another 4 years of Trump, it's because Biden and the Democrats are bad at their jobs. If you blame the voters, you may as well blame the tides for rising or the wind for blowing.
I voted for Nader, but only because Gore won my home state and I was still naive enough to think the DNC would get the message. I voted for Kerry and Hillary, but I didn't expect either of them to win.
Mmmmi dunno that sounds helluva lot like ‘voters suck’.
I mean the DNC is shit at almost everything (most importantly social media and messaging). But, it’d be so great if we didn’t have to hand-feed every single goddamned person who’s choices are to be helped or be hurt by their own vote.
Voters suck. Voters always suck. That's part of the game. It's like complaining about how high the basketball hoop is.
So, voters suck but - we didn’t fool them enough? Or- didn’t, what, speak to them with a candidate of a different demographic makeup? Voters not sucking isn’t a fair request?
There are things that should be, and there are things that are. You can try to make the things that should be, but you must start with the things that are.
We can make voters better with education. We can encourage engagement, and oppose disenfranchisement, and pass legislation to promote participation, but none of that will change the fact that right now the voters suck. It is reasonable to work towards change, but it is unreasonable to expect them to change immediately and without effort. And while they suck, candidates and parties must work with the voters that are, instead of complaining about the voters that should be.