2016 Presidential Race

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To be quite honest, even if half of the accusations leveled against Hillary were true, I would still take her over the Donald at this point.
 
lindy said:
In Crazy vs corrupted, we all lose.
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I agreed...but...as far as I'm concerned they are all corrupt, Hillary and her Hubby just get called on it more because they have been under a focused microscope for many years. Not to mention that this has been going on for so long that I genuinely believe that both of them believe that they are above the law so they do not even try as hard to hide their 'shit' anymore.
 
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lindy said:
Seriously, why? I mean that in all sincerity because I don't understand how Americans can look past the corruption; both moral and political.
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For starters, I don't think that most of the allegations against her stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Clinton has been involved in legitimate scandals, and probably gotten away with a few, but I think that more than a few of them lack substance. Believe me, I'm not excusing her wrongdoing, but I acknowledge that there is literally a cottage industry dedicated to throwing mud at the Clintons. This creates a kind of political environment where any notion of impropriety is prima facie seen as wrongdoing until the Clintons overwhelmingly exonerate themselves. I think that this has primed a lot of voters to be suspicious of Hillary even when there's no proof of malfeasance.
Frontline recently released an excellent film called The Choice that illustrates a lot of what I'm talking about.

Secondly, her opponent is Donald Trump. I'm done being fair to the guy. He fucking sucks. He's got such a tenuous grasp on the truth that he makes Richard Nixon look honest. Like, Hillary lies. We know that much. But it takes effort and investigation to uncover her lies and half-truths, just like it does with any politician. Donald Trump lies about things he said an hour prior in front of millions of people. He lies about his twitter posts. He lies about things that are so easily verifiable that I can't help but think that he lives in some sort of weird reality-distortion field where his lies become truths. Tony Schwartz, Trump's ghostwriter for "The Art of the Deal", recently gave an excellent interview to the New Yorker about the nearly 18 months he spent with Donald while working on the book. It's an incredible read and does a lot to confirm what many in the media are saying right now. This particular quote perfectly illustrates Trump's relationship with the truth:

After hearing Trump’s discussions about business on the phone, Schwartz asked him brief follow-up questions. He then tried to amplify the material he got from Trump by calling others involved in the deals. But their accounts often directly conflicted with Trump’s. “Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz said. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about money—“how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy.” Trump bragged that he paid only eight million dollars for Mar-a-Lago, but omitted that he bought a nearby strip of beach for a record sum. After gossip columns reported, erroneously, that Prince Charles was considering buying several apartments in Trump Tower, Trump implied that he had no idea where the rumor had started. (“It certainly didn’t hurt us,” he says, in “The Art of the Deal.”) Wayne Barrett, a reporter for theVillage Voice, later revealed that Trump himself had planted the story with journalists. Schwartz also suspected that Trump engaged in such media tricks, and asked him about a story making the rounds—that Trump often called up news outlets using a pseudonym. Trump didn’t deny it. As Schwartz recalls, he smirked and said, “You like that, do you?”

Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”

When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary Clinton that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a white-supremacist Web site. Campaign staffers took the image down, but two days later Trump angrily defended it, insisting that there was no anti-Semitic implication. Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts—not an ideal quality in a head of state.
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You really should read the entire thing. It's a doozy.

The guy has the temperament of a toddler and the intellectual capacity of one as well. It's very clear that he doesn't listen to his advisers. This article on his debate prep is one of many that gives anecdotes about his unwillingness to be receptive to suggestion. I think that these quotes in particular are very telling:

There were early efforts to run a more standard form of general election debate-prep camp, led by Roger Ailes, the ousted Fox News chief, at Mr. Trump’s golf course in Bedminster, N.J. But Mr. Trump found it hard to focus during those meetings, according to multiple people briefed on the process who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. That left Mr. Ailes, who at the time was deeply distracted by his removal from Fox and the news media reports surrounding it, discussing his own problems as well as recounting political war stories, according to two people present for the sessions.

...

The team had primed Mr. Trump to look for roughly a dozen key phrases and expressions Mrs. Clinton uses when she is uncertain or uncomfortable, but he did not seem to pay attention during the practice sessions, one aide said, and failed to home in on her vulnerabilities during the debate.

“It clearly looked like he ran out of gas after 30 minutes, and that came through loud and clear,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who has not supported Mr. Trump.
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This bit alone is troublesome if only for the fact that it pokes holes in the idea that Trump could be a decent president as long as he surrounds himself with good people. It appears that, even when he surrounds himself with excellent campaign advisers, he still won't listen to what they have to say. What, then, will he do when his Secretary of Defense tells him that nuking ISIS would be a really, really bad idea? Pout? Throw a twitter tantrum? Leave it to Mike Pence? Look, even through the veil of partisanship I can always see when a candidate has good ideas and executive qualities. Donald Trump does not seem to have any. He has, like, two good ideas and about three hundred really bad ones. He has run an incompetent campaign that cycled through campaign managers like he cycled through wives. His much-touted "business acumen" is complete bullshit, and honestly I feel really bad that the Republican party has to support him. He's a combination of your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, the really pathetic former football player at your 10 year reunion, and a human embodiment of a YouTube comment section rolled into one. Look, after 2012 it seemed like the GOP was primed for a major overhaul of their platform - one that would be more inclusive of younger people, hispanics, and homosexuals. They were ready for immigration reform, criminal justice reform, and a whole host of other progressive reforms.

Then Trump went and blew it all up with his bullshit. He exposed a very ugly side of American conservatism that we thought we had put to bed a long time ago. The GOP is going to suffer not just in presidential races, but downticket races for the next 5-10 years because of this crap. I'm not sure if that's going to foster further rightward creep in their platform, or if Priebus is just going to dust off the 2012 election autopsy and continue on with that. Hopefully they'll go with the latter. Shit man, I suspect that many liberals would've gladly voted for a Rubio, or a Kasich, or even goddamn Jeb Bush instead of Hillary Clinton. Instead, pissed off conservatives nominated a former reality TV star as their candidate. Like, what the fuck were they thinking?

Anyway, I've gotten way off topic here, but I hope I've answered your question.
 
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@Deathy McDeath good stuff man! Appreciate the post and will digest it.

(There's no way I could ever vote for her simply because of the harm she has inflicted on the IC.)
 
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Deathy McDeath said:
Then Trump went and blew it all up with his bullshit. He exposed a very ugly side of American conservatism that we thought we had put to bed a long time ago. The GOP is going to suffer not just in presidential races, but downticket races for the next 5-10 years because of this crap. I'm not sure if that's going to foster further rightward creep in their platform, or if Priebus is just going to dust off the 2012 election autopsy and continue on with that. Hopefully they'll go with the latter. Shit man, I suspect that many liberals would've gladly voted for a Rubio, or a Kasich, or even goddamn Jeb Bush instead of Hillary Clinton. Instead, pissed off conservatives nominated a former reality TV star as their candidate. Like, what the fuck were they thinking?
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I agree with much of your post, except this. I've made no secret of my disdain for both candidates, but the notion that Trump exists because of the extreme right is a bit off. I think it is one factor, but perhaps secondary to everyone's dissatisfaction with our political state and HRC's nomination on the Dem. side. Couple that with the "We have to support one of them or our vote's a waste" mentality and you have the emergence of DT. He's horrible for the Repub. party, horrible for everything except himself and his cronies, but his rise is due to a lot of factors and I think a major percentage are with him because of their dissatisfaction with the process. Once he was the closest thing to a lock for the nomination Republicans flocked to him out of a grudging party loyalty. If your spouse is a (insert description here) you still by them in public because they are your spouse...that's where I think both parties are right now.
 
amlove21 said:
Well, I mean, Trump supporters seem to be absolutely fine with Trump having multiple affairs and then, pretending to be someone else, gave an interview about said infidelity.

So, I guess we all find corruptions to "look past" if we try hard enough, yea?
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I honestly don't think the majority of voters give of shit of who he's banged.

I can only hope people will vote based on their "nearest threat" and by that I mean jobs, income stability, and personal security, which enables the others.

No economy has ever improved by raising taxes. National security does not increase by identifying individual groups and creating special categories for them (to include race, gender, or business class).

Even if we take HALF of Clinton's scandals, we're talking 15 years worth of shady shit and all the while unable to highlight how she's improved the lives of the groups she claims to champion.

The majority of Americans believe our Government serves their own self interests...so how in hell could anyone vote for an incumbent or a political insider?

Let's clean the slate and give a new person, with zero experience, and a completely different ideology than we've had before in the White House...just like we did in 2008.

Freefalling said:
I agree with much of your post, except this. I've made no secret of my disdain for both candidates, but the notion that Trump exists because of the extreme right is a bit off. I think it is one factor, but perhaps secondary to everyone's dissatisfaction with our political state and HRC's nomination on the Dem. side. Couple that with the "We have to support one of them or our vote's a waste" mentality and you have the emergence of DT. He's horrible for the Repub. party, horrible for everything except himself and his cronies, but his rise is due to a lot of factors and I think a major percentage are with him because of their dissatisfaction with the process. Once he was the closest thing to a lock for the nomination Republicans flocked to him out of a grudging party loyalty. If your spouse is a (insert description here) you still by them in public because they are your spouse...that's where I think both parties are right now.
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I find it fucking hilarious that the left highlights the fact the ultra-conservative (alt-right if you will) back and support a Republican candidate. Who in hell do they think the Occupy camp and other socialist causes will vote for?

Extremists on both sides are a fact.

I'm not a fan of Trump at all but I LOVE the fiscal policy and individual freedom ideology of the Republican Party while completely despising the "your earnings are mine to spend" and "just go with the flow" horseshit from the Democrats.

I can endure four years of an idiot at 1600 Penn Ave but I cannot a Liberal Court. The DOJ is corrupt enough for me.
 
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lindy said:
The majority of Americans believe our Government serves their own self interests...so how in hell could anyone vote for an incumbent or a political insider?

Let's clean the slate and give a new person, with zero experience, and a completely different ideology than we've had before in the White House...just like we did in 2008.
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This is something I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, and think it warrants its own discussion. That is, could a true outsider (which I don't count Obama as since he had a tenure in the Illinois State Senate, as well as the US Senate) be an effective president? The office was originally envisioned as a purely executive (that is, to say, managerial) function in article II of the constitution, but suffice it to say the office has grown beyond the scope of that. As it stands now, the Presidency is most definitely a political office, and we've had mostly career politicians in that office in the modern era, with Eisenhower being the notable exception.

That beggars a few questions: what does it take to be an effective politician? It's hard to argue that you can be an effective politician at the national level with just a set of good ideas and some charm. You need connections, both in and out of government, the ability to raise funds, an understanding of the political game, and a strong political cachet. I would argue that a modern president really can't function strictly as an executive and still fulfill their campaign promises. A modern president not only has to write law (to be introduced in congress), but influence bills and resolutions being considered by congress. That requires either a lot of favors from existing congressional representatives, or the ability to promise/browbeat legislators into accepting your ideas (ala LBJ and the Civil Rights Act). From this we can see that just having a bunch of good ideas for the country isn't the only factor in being an effective president.

Can an outsider affect upcoming legislation when they have no favors to call in and uncertain promises to make? That's debatable. I think that one of the reasons that Obama encountered so much congressional opposition in his first term is that while he was versed in political gamesmanship from his time in the Illinois senate and US senate, he didn't have those established relationships with legislators that would've allowed him to push through significant legislation (such as the ACA) without the level of opposition that we saw. Had Hillary won (or any experienced Democrat for that matter), and introduced the ACA in the exact same form, I'm confident that it probably would've gone through much more smoothly. Would it have avoided the government shutdown of 2013, which was largely predicated on opposition to the ACA? That's also debatable. After all, guys like Ted Cruz were almost total political neophytes at the time of the shutdown, so it's possible that presidential influence would not have been sufficient to sway them. However, it makes for some interesting 'What if?' thinking.

It also begs the normative question: should the presidency return to a purely executive function? Strict constructionists think so, as do the libertarians, and even some democrats. To be honest, I'm not sure where I stand on this, and I've used up all of my posting words for the day. @lindy I'm pretty sure we know where you stand on this. Why don't you lay out your case for a true outsider president?
 
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