It is useful in political commentary to realize that not everyone cares about what I care about.
I overthink things.
I consider President Trump's efforts to use legal fictions and violence to stay in office to be dispositive. He crossed the line. He isn't just crude, divisive, and authoritarian. He committed the worst, most dangerous of crimes for a president. He connived to overthrow legitimate government. He attempted to corrupt democratic institutions.
Not everybody agrees. Some people cheer Trump and wish he had gotten away with it. Other people, perhaps a majority of GOP voters, just don't care very much. They think Trump was right, or at least not wrong in an important way. It was for a good cause, and no real harm would have been done if he had succeeded. I don't understand that attitude, but I observe it.
Here is a reality calibration for people like me: It's the economy, stupid. That is the big issue. It isn't Trump trying to overthrow the government. Here is the current Pew poll:
She had a Facebook page reiterating this. She thought I would consider it persuasive evidence that, unlike her, her opponent was part of a good-ol'-boy network of business interests. She thinks that makes her a superior candidate. I know from personal experience that County Commissioners have enormous influence in directing land development, with many hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. The donors aren't necessarily bad people or organizations. They are people with skin in the game, primarily in construction and land development. I wish candidates for County Commissioner stayed clear of that web of influencers and avoided campaign contributions from them. But I suspect most people don't care.
Knife River Materials, $1,000
Chamber of Commerce PAC, $5,000
Cow Creek Band of Indians, $2,000
J.B. Steel, $1,000
Burrill Resources, $1,000
Oregons for Affordable Housing $2,000
Sidney DeBoer, $5,000
Rogue Valley Realtors, $10,000
Chamber of Commerce PAC, another, $15,000
Allen Purdy, $2,000
Adroit Construction, $1,000
Precision Electrical Contractors, $1,000
A friend of Jeff Golden's campaign for state senate sends me similar lists of the contributions sent by out-of-state PACs to his opponent. She is horrified. Look at all the money slathered onto Jeff's opponent by out of state businesses! Expose it, she asks.
I suspect few people know or care. Democratic process is a low priority concern for most people, alas. They care about the economy. Money in politics has one, simple point where it affects votes in the Golden-Sparacino race. Voters cannot help but see all the ads and know that Sparacino is a spectacularly well-funded Republican. That's it. For better or worse, voters now know Randy Sparacino is a Republican. On election day we will see if a majority of voters want an angry Republican.
People who write political blogs overthink things. It's the economy, stupid. Democrats vote for Democrats; Republicans vote for Republicans. Sometimes marginal voters show up and sometimes they don't.
That pretty much explains it.
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15 comments:
The sad thing from my perspective is that Republicans are better than Democrats in managing the economy when in fact they are not.
Inflation and migration are worldwide problems. What Biden and a Democratic congress accomplished in spite of that includes passage of major economic bills, such as the massive infrastructure bill that most Republicans, including Cliff Bentz, voted against. It’s true that Democrats haven’t done a very good job of promoting their achievements, so what I hear people saying is: Biden sucks at messaging, so let’s replace Democrats with the Insurrection Party.
Before the obfuscators try to drown out what they don’t want to hear with silly song lyrics, allow me to point out how insane it would be to discard our republic because the president isn’t charismatic enough. If Trumplicans truly gave a rip about the economy, they’d be more concerned about climate change which is already wreaking havoc on it – but many don’t even believe in it because their cult leader says it’s a hoax, just like his election loss.
There is another subset of Republicans in addition to those who cheered Trump and wish he'd succeeded, and those who think it was for a good cause even if wrong, and would not have done too much harm had he succeeded. It is almost the biggest but easily the most influential group. Trump was wrong, dead wrong, but no long-term harm was done because he and his yokels could not have succeeded. Had Pence fled, or succumbed to pressure, the Supreme Court would have acted the next day and U.S. Marshals would have carried out its directives, backed up by military personnel if necessary.
That is the most important reality calibration for Democrats right now, especially since most Americans overall share that assessment. The 1/6 hearings were a souffle. Most Americans, period, also consider Joe Biden to be a debased liar and incompetent with no moral standing for any serious pronouncement he manages to disgorge intelligibly. Democratic elites including the legacy news media are almost completely deluded about their lack of credibility writ large, from COVID overreach to repugnant, rabble-rousing lies such as border agents "whipping" helpless migrants.
Democratic chickens are about to come home to roost. A real civil war--inside that party--is about to erupt.
I worked on Don Skundrick’s campaign for Jackson Co Commissioner in 2010, when Jeff Golden was the opposition candidate. Skundrick was a moderate, levelheaded and well liked person. After his election, he and fellow commissioners proposed making the office non-partisan as they are in almost the entirety of the state, but voters rejected that. Lifelong Democrat Al Densmore is now pretending to be an “independent” which is just a campaign ploy. (I expect him to be elected because he knows a lot of people.)
Golden’s Commissioner campaign platform rested on having Jackson County become self-sufficient by growing and producing 80% of its food supply.
I considered him a pie-in-the-sky nut then and now, but he’s hitched his wagon the the climate issue without regard for details. Timber unmanagement, which he is also closely aligned with, has helped create our wildfire industry, though, so there’s that. He also catered to the new-age Ashland left in opposing mandatory childhood (not Covid) vaccinations for public school attendance. There are different ways to be owned and they’re not all monetary.
Randy Sparacino doesn’t strike me as angry at all. But I think you are correct; this election will split on strict party lines, so it boils down to turnout.
Peter Peter Peter... from the moment I read your first sentence and then forced myself to read the first paragraph you have already destroyed any argument you're going to have in this post because you are immersing yourself into conspiracy theories, Trump tropes, and continuously perpetuating fearful narratives. What makes you think you're any different from a Qanon, or Maga Republican?? It is time for some serious self-reflection.
You need to understand that everything you're accusing the right of doing the left is absolutely doing. Joe Biden is extremely divisive. the Democrat/Republican(!! Yes) Elites is a globalist authoritarian cabal who has every intention of re-creating whole new monarchies, Reviving The Old monarchies and returning whole populations into serfdom. Klaus Schwab's own words "You will own nothing, and be happy"
What do you think the world economic forum is doing? It's so blatant, it's right on their web page you can read the conspiracy for yourself. Do you recall something about the world economic Forum wargaming pandemic responses a few months before 2020?
the big joke these days is,
"I need new conspiracy theories, cuz all my old ones came true"
It's pretty obvious to me that the only people that got away with anything in 2020 was Nancy Pelosi's elitist cabal.
Do you honestly think this documentation of Nancy Pelosi on January 6th, ...filmed by her daughter, is all just random and spontaneous?? you've got to be kidding me.
How much do we have to revive investigation into the burning of the Reichstag to understand that it was an inside job.
To this day there are Americans being held political prisoner(yes)( that is an irrefutable statement you cannot wiggle out of the fact that they are political prisoners. end of story) for marching and parading?? on their own property???
99.99% of every one of these political prisoners is innocent of any violence. Again this is an irrefutable statement nobody came armed, not even the proud boys or Oath keepers.
Are you so committed to the narrative that you still actually believe that any police were injured or killed??
Ashley Bobbitt was killed by an officer who had been reprimanded for insecure weaponry on several occasions. So much for gun control.
What you may not know is that Ashley Babbitt was trying to keep that door closed from the few violent, probably FBI installed antifa goons, from actually crashing in to the main hall.
Trump called for the use of the National Guard several days prior to January 6th and Nancy Pelosi vehemently denied that request.
why?
In the final analysis when I woke up on November 4th to see that the impossible happened, it was pretty clear something was wrong, because of one name Joe Biden.
Even when I was a Democrat, which I officially changed in 2015, even when I was a Democrat, I laughed Joe Biden off the presidential stage. For practically all of my life Joe Biden was a joke.
My political life started as a Jimmy Carter Democrat ...at the age of six.
Why is it really suspect for the 2020 election to have been anything less than highly manipulated? One name: Joe Biden.
By the way I was one of 32 00 people in the entire state of Oregon to write in a presidential candidate in 2016 I was so pissed that I become Republican and they give me Donald Trump?? I had given all my support to Ted Cruz I wrote in Ted Cruz in 2016.
Like a majority of conservative Republicans not just Republicans conservatives, true conservatives were behind Ted Cruz, and over the course of four years realized that Donald Trump was the person we were looking for.
One last thing, did you really just bypass the Time magazine article in either March or April 2021? You heard of Zucker bucks? That was a clear and blatant flaunting of how an election was manipulated and stolen
sorry kittens, truth hurts
We can only agree to disagree.
Now I'm sure there will be more cuz now I'm going to read the second paragraph and on...
At Mike Steely are you really going to make me break out the Steely Dan?
"...Asia, when all my dime dancing is through, I Run To You....."
Again yes Mike Steely the climate change policy is wreaking disastrous havoc on our economy and it has nothing at all to do with the natural processes of the Earth
I totally agree with LD that there is no way that the “insurrection” could have succeeded. That’s what most people think, which is why the January 6 hearings never turned into the blockbuster that the Democrats hoped it would.
There are many ways to express political thought, including metaphorically and poetically (e.g song lyrics). Doing so does not constitute “obfuscation.“
The old categories of left versus right seem to be breaking down in our politics, replaced by a new tension between elitism and populism. So say many smart columnists, and I agree with them. This new tension pits those with college degrees against those who do not have them. I have always been an outlier politically, including currently being a PhD with populist sympathies.
Charisma is important, because that’s how the laws of physics of democratic politics work. That might not be true in a better world, but we don’t live there.
I get Michael Trigoboff's point, but wonder how he would square that with the likes of Harvard or Yale educated Republican senators who wear the populist mantle (Cruz, Hawley, Cotton, etc), and the millionaire commentator elites at Fox News who purposefully stoke class tensions with their spin and lies about wokeness, crime, etc. I tend to think that 40% of the country has been brainwashed by the right-wing media ecosystem into thinking that Democrats are the cause of all their problems. How does a trust funder of inherited wealth like Tucker Carlson get away with pretending to be for the common man? It's because it's profitable and makes him a celebrity.
It must be comforting to delude oneself into imagining that our system of checks and balances will protect us from coup attempts like Trump’s, but these things happen incrementally. A little reality orientation:
Election deniers dominate the Republican Party and Trump remains its leader. They’re putting people in charge of elections who are committed to getting the results they want regardless of the vote, just as they claim Trump won regardless of the facts. According to a CBS review, over half the GOP midterm candidates are election deniers.
Not all that long ago, it would have been unimaginable that Republicans, much less the nation, would be led by such an ignoranus, or that his party would so cravenly aid and abet his coup attempt. We’d be idiots to put anything past these people.
In response to Anonymous:
Maybe some of them are sincerely populist (like me, with my PhD). Others, like Cruz, slide into it opportunistically, lubricated by their inherent oiliness.
Well known populists include Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, George Wallace and, of course, Trump. It would be interesting to know what it is that attracts people to those who bring out the worst in us.
Major Strasse: "What is your Nationality Monsieur Rick?"
Rick Blaine: "...I'm a Drunkard."
Chief Inspector Renault: "That makes Monsieur Rick a Citizen of the World!"
- Casablanca (the greatest film of all time)
Don't forget I like quoting films too. I mean, we haven't even gotten to Monty Python yet! I have, on the other hand, quoted Woody Allen's Bananas several times but it just so happens those are the posts that Peter gives me a strike on so they don't get posted. ..., ...and never for an instant think that anything I quote from has no relevance to the conversation. Because of course, there's nothing more globalist than being a drunkard.
Well known populists include Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, George Wallace and, of course, Trump. It would be interesting to know what it is that attracts people to those who bring out the worst in us.
And on the left we have Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. It’s good to stay away from the extremes of both the right and the left.
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