Heads up for John Edwards fans: He'll be on Hardball tonight...

..something tweety has criticized himself. Might be a good discussion.

nt

..for the next nine nights.

Edwards should be great. I only wish they were playing them all back to back instead of having one a week. It would be great to be able to compare them in a setting like the ones they would face when its the Dem-Repug Presidential Debates.

...the best hope of his party, but they'll never vote for him in New England and the Midwest because of the whole southern thing. Those people will nominate Kerry or Dean (probably Dean), who cannot win in the South and therefore cannot be elected to the office. This feels like 1984 all over again, where we all knew Mondale was a dead duck but he ran anyway because the party base loved him.

The party's gotta change. That's all there is to it.

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

...a party like what Perot had in mind, where you take the best of both parties in the middle and create one huge, substantial party that's viable for the long term.

I know you don't want to hear this, but the Democrats aren't viable long term. Reagan changed that. On the day the Soviet Union fell, the fate of the left in this country was sealed. It's like the final scene from "Remember The Titans", after the team won the championship and Boone's white coaching assistant runs over and apologizes for second guessing his boss' judgment. That's exactly what we have here and it isn't pretty.

My Democratic party would look a hell of a lot like the one from the late Fifties. Had I been alive during the 1960 election...yeah, I'd have voted for Jack Kennedy but NEVER for LBJ in 1964. After that, I've watched the party nominate turd after turd, knowing that most of them were flat out dead on arrival as candidates. Carter was and is a great man but couldn't work with people - I'd paint houses with him today but I'd never vote for him again. We seemed to get serious with Clinton but then he let us down.

I'm a registered Independent but you and I know there are so many problems facing the country over the next generation that won't be solved by Republicans. It isn't in their DNA to fix Medicare or Social Security - they'd rather get rid of it. Yes, financially that makes sense but there's a group of people out there who don't have the business savvy of even the average college graduate and need some kind of safety net after working with their hands for 30-40 years. My in-laws are in that group of people and the Republicans will NEVER take care of them! I can't stand Al Franken but he said the same thing on CSPAN over the weekend. His mother-in-law is basically destitute and genuinely needs help - she's one of many.

This is gonna sound stupid but what I really want is to have 1971 back. Why 1971? NE Ohio and the rest of the Rust Belt was still a growth area and there were plenty of jobs around. General Motors still made a good car, people bought them, drove them and were happy. We didn't import the world from China. We used a lot of foreign oil but Texas and California were still big oil states. You could have a small business and not worry about Wal-Mart or Target coming to town and destroying what you built up over forty years.

THAT is what I want.

Are we really the same nation that fought a war on two fronts and won them both? Are we also the same nation that landed a man on the moon not thirty years later?

If so - if we can do all that - why can't we build Chevies and Fords to be Honda killers and export them to the world? For high margins, why can't we build Cadillacs to kill Lexuses?

The truth is, someone doesn't want us to and we need to find out what the hell's going on.

Anyhow, that's what I'm about...........more later.

he's very obviously southern.

If I could be forgiven for stereotyping (having spent 40 years there), in general, midwesterners don't like being ignored by the "coastal" people or being presumed to be stupid or unsophisticated. They don't like BS or in-your-face behavior. They respect people who have made their own successes and think most people are crazy to pay extra to go to snooty private schools when they could spend much less money and get an excellent education at a state school. So, I think Edwards has an EXCELLENT chance to win them over.

...the chance you say he has - if he gets out of New Hampshire and Iowa. I'm betting that he won't, because people in the Northeast and upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, the Dakotas) want a "real" liberal who promises the world, paid for by Republicans.

I'm from NE Ohio - lived there thirty years, graduated from a state school after going part time for almost six years. My wife and I are the first in our families to attend college. My dad was a high school dropout who cleaned himself up, married another blue collar girl, put on a suit and sold life insurance and real estate for 30 years. He's retired and still doing it. My father-in-law worked in factories, abused his body and eventually smoked and drank himself to death. Welcome to Blue Collar America.

We had to pay our way, and it sucked. To this day, I don't know how we did it. We lived with the parents during college, had three part time jobs because no one likes to hire a college kid, worked every weekend ALL weekend and had a social life composed of fellow employees from the mall or other lab geeks from the University. That's how I learned UNIX. I had a VM/CMS user account before my wife finished high school. We were playing with Usenet and Banyan Vines (WOW, that brings back memories) when Reagan was still in the White House. I lived it, met someone else who also lived her work, married her and now we're making more money than anyone in our working class families' backgrounds ever made - and angry as hell about Uncle Sam giving it to people who never worked half as hard.

This is what the Reform Party was originally about: Middle America. Perot was a perfect fit but was not to be.

God, I wish someone would hear us.

The one who told the Cato Institute they should love him? The one whom the DLC loves? I don't get why people don't realize that Edwards is the second most progressive guy running.

...serious about winning, you should concentrate on the southern states - not who's the most progressive.

I like Dean. I enjoy listening to him and I'd give anything to sit at the bar for an hour and drink with him. He's an elitist (raised on Park Avenue, has an Ivy League background) but he's smart as a whip and tolerates no fools. I like that but the Democratic leadership doesn't like it, and southerners hate it - ESPECIALLY from a Yankee. Let's get the South to secede and THEN run Dean/Clark - he'll win. Without it, he loses. That's a fact.

Lieberman should get out. I've seen more anti-Lieberman posts than anti-Bush posts, which is incredible. He has no hope of igniting support in his party and may want to consider switching.

Gephardt's ship sailed ten years ago. He's a solid guy but too old and too close to labor, which means he can't win the South. Bye, bye, Dick.

Kerry? Yeah, sure. He says one thing one day and another thing the next day. Methinks Theresa is behind this. Bush would eat him alive outside of New England. I don't know if he can even win Pennsylvania. They elected Rendell and he's an old fashioned 1950s style Democrat from Philly. Ed Koch says Kerry will be the nominee and Bush will beat him with a lead pipe. He's probably right.

Kucinich? I was in junior high when 'ol Dennis and George Forbes dragged Cleveland into bankruptcy. That region's economy has never been the same since.

Graham had a chance but I don't think we're hearing the truth about his health. The man doesn't look good, and he's too old to compete with Bush. He should never have gotten in.

Clark: Maybe next time. It's so late, and he's so far behind in fundraising and he's so inexperienced...I just don't see him beating Bush's $300+M warchest. He waited too damn long.

Moseley-Braun, Sharpton, et al: Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.

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Who would I vote for TOMORROW? Bob Kerrey of Nebraska: scary smart, foreign policy guru, left a leg in Vietnam and probably runs sprints better at 65 than I do at 37. He gets all the chicks, too - lucky bastard!