Questions you want answered (P&C Edition)

What's generally thought of as the primary reason for Bush Sr. losing to Clinton? I was barely paying attention to politics at that time so all I remember are arguments of Bush pulling out of Iraq too quickly, Quayle being his VP and Bush generally just not having a awe-inspiring personality. I'd like the insights of some people who were actually plugged into politics at the time because I keep seeing references to how capable Bush Sr. was and how he may have been the last semi-moderate Republican to make it onto the national stage.

Kehama wrote:

What's generally thought of as the primary reason for Bush Sr. losing to Clinton? I was barely paying attention to politics at that time so all I remember are arguments of Bush pulling out of Iraq too quickly, Quayle being his VP and Bush generally just not having a awe-inspiring personality. I'd like the insights of some people who were actually plugged into politics at the time because I keep seeing references to how capable Bush Sr. was and how he may have been the last semi-moderate Republican to make it onto the national stage.

In short? Perot pulled a whole lot of white male voters away from Bush.

Tanglebones wrote:

In short? Perot pulled a whole lot of white male voters away from Bush.

True, but that was only possible because of "read my lips, no new taxes."

I can't believe I forgot about Perot's numbers in that election. I also don't think I connected the fact, at the time, that Perot was going to draw heavily from Republicans as all I remember were reports that he was drawing votes from both sides of the ticket. I even liked Perot back then just because of Dana Carvey's SNL skits. Though Clinton won some points with his Arsenio Hall appearance where he played the sax with the house band.

"It's the economy, stupid!"

As I recall, Clinton pulled a lot of moderate Republicans who were disenchanted with the economic status quo, and many Republicans went for Perot instead of Bush, due to the "Read My Lips" promise that was broken. But apparently that point is under dispute among political scientists, as he is also claimed to have pulled a lot of Democrats. Still, I can't see a third-party candidate getting 19% of the vote as anything good for a Republican, since Independents trend Republican as I understand it.

Well in that too, looking back 4 years, Dukakis as much lost the 88 election as Bush won it. Bush and the republican party in general were not popular. But Bush eventually won on a shrug as Dukakis floundered. Dukakis left the DNC polling in the high 60's. It is a lot like how in the AL Central, the team leading just slides into 2nd place in August.

Eventually though Bush was seen as another 4 bad years of Reagan, and people replaced him.

What's generally thought of as the primary reason for Bush Sr. losing to Clinton?

Well, at the time, I was barely past the 'Get a Brain, Morans' stage in political awareness, but the media story was mostly that it was the economy. Whether that was true, I don't know, but that's what they claimed.

edit: the original dude spelled 'brain' correctly, he just misspelled 'morons'.

KingGorilla wrote:

Eventually though Bush was seen as another 4 bad years of Reagan, and people replaced him.

I'm still a bit surprised at the Lincoln/Washington level of mythologizing that has taken place around Reagan. I know people like to credit him with winning the Cold War and reuniting Germany with his "tear down this wall!" speech but wasn't it more of a situation where the US just happened to have deeper pockets than Russia and eventually they collapsed under their own weight and corruption while we just kept trucking along accruing more and more debt? I mean, Reagan sold the whole "trickle down economics" snake-oil, blew up the deficit with military spending and really laid the tracks for the religious right to take over the Republican party, didn't he? So, aside from the whole cult of personality, what is Reagan's great legacy that makes him worthy of such reverence?

And yeah, I know I'm asking a bit much about recent politicians but I'm still trying to get a perspective on political events in my lifetime that I largely ignored while they were going on.

Kehama wrote:
KingGorilla wrote:

Eventually though Bush was seen as another 4 bad years of Reagan, and people replaced him.

I'm still a bit surprised at the Lincoln/Washington level of mythologizing that has taken place around Reagan. I know people like to credit him with winning the Cold War and reuniting Germany with his "tear down this wall!" speech but wasn't it more of a situation where the US just happened to have deeper pockets than Russia and eventually they collapsed under their own weight and corruption while we just kept trucking along accruing more and more debt?

Yeah, but insane military spending totes won't bankrupt us like it did the Russians because bootstraps?

Well in that too, looking back 4 years, Dukakis as much lost the 88 election as Bush won it. Bush and the republican party in general were not popular. But Bush eventually won on a shrug as Dukakis floundered. Dukakis left the DNC polling in the high 60's. It is a lot like how in the AL Central, the team leading just slides into 2nd place in August.

To the contrary, that was the first election that featured what we'd regard as using modern tactics of character assassination. Dukakis was not incompetent, but he ran into a buzzsaw set up by Lee Atwater, Larry McCarthy and the other RNC operatives who had a real commitment to a more aggressive style of politics. They used rumor, deliberately false advertising and coordinated media campaigns to just run roughshod over the more conventional Democratic campaign team. That style has become the norm since then; it was unusual and not really seen on the national scene in the decades preceding that election.

Carter was BAD. He had a defeatist attitude and basically gave Americans the impression that the good times were over and would never return. They had to invent the misery index to capture the economic malaise. Carter told us that our standard of living was going to go down. Gasoline lines, high inflation, etc. Our international standing was at an all time low. Mainstream Books were being written about the fall of democracy because the communists were winning. We couldn't understand why we had to wear bracelets with hostages' names on them. The memory of Nixon was fresh. Government was broken.

Reagan said the we didn't have to go down that way and the economy dramatically improved and our attitude improved. Instead of a Mister Rogers foreign policy, we had a John Wayne foreign policy. A lot of it was psychology. Reagan did the exact opposite of Carter with dramatically better results. The startling contrast propelled Reagan to almost mythical proportions among Republicans. He became the Republican's JFK.

Reagan's generation had been through much worse times, and he restored the nation's fight. He promised that our best days were not behind us and he was right.

Election night 1984 was a coronation. It was an amazing landslide which I may never see again in my lifetime.

I became politically aware at the end of the Carter administration. I remember my family suffering under Carter and the prosperity under Reagan. Quite a dramatic difference, one I have not seen since.

Reagan's first term was simply an amazing series of events.

Bush suffered from the economy. He had sky high approval ratings that crashed with the economy in the summer and fall of 1992. Fiscal conservatives voted for Ross Perot because a 4 trillion debt was untenable.

1992 - 4 trillion dollar debt, now we rack up a trillion a year, still can't believe how badly this country has been mismanaged.

Of presidents in my lifetime, I rank Reagan first and Clinton a close second. Those two guys were real leaders, both more moderate than they were given credit for and truly compromised for the good of the country.

Simply put, Dukakis reminded people of Carter , weak on foreign policy. Times were good, Bush was experienced, why rock the boat?

Personally, I remember my family working hard to keep going under Carter reassured that someone honest and realistic was trying to move us forward as a nation, and then watching Reagan cheerfully bust unions and ending up on food stamps midway through his administration and feeling incredibly hopeless. Clearly, experiences and reactions can vary quite a bit.

Greg wrote:

Carter was BAD. He had a defeatist attitude and basically gave Americans the impression that the good times were over and would never return. They had to invent the misery index to capture the economic malaise. Carter told us that our standard of living was going to go down.

You might want to look at some economic metrics. Average wages and average household incomes have stagnated at their 1970s levels, so Carter was actually right.

The problem was that Carter treated American voters like they were adults and told them that they needed to nut up to address the problems that faced us as a nation, like energy independence. They didn't like that and wanted to believe the fairy tales that Uncle Reagan told them. So 30 years on we have Romney making energy independence part of his platform...something that could (should) have been addressed a long time ago.

Jury-rigged isn't remotely racist in orgin. Nor is Jerry-built.

Carter was right; our standard of living has not improved much overall since 1973 and the policies put in place under and after Reagan are largely to blame, because they shifted focus away from the middle class and put an emphasis on what GHW Bush called "Voodoo economics". Also, don't forget, Reagan seriously violated the law, and only escaped a bipartisan impeachment by confessing it and opening up the leaders of the operation to prosecution.

In short, the economic benefits that Reagan brought in were based on a massive increase in government spending, on the military in his case, and tax reductions based on the idea that reducing taxes would rev the engine of the economy. That turned into a new recession. It's good that your family benefited, but I lived through that too, and my family economy was definitely not improved in the early 90's (or even during the 80's).

Reagan's biggest gift to us was optimism. His greatest failure was lying to Congress and running a rogue operation trading arms to Iran to fund a secret war in Nicaragua. His greatest domestic failure, and one the Republicans have not yet given up on despite the damage, was to fall for the Laffer Curve and the now proven false promises of prosperity from financial deregulation. Until we stop insisting that tax cuts and deregulation can cure every economic ill - what policy repeated can fix every situation? - we'll still tally up the damage done by the GOP's shift in the 80's and early 90's. Policy is destiny.

I think that in the time period after Carter, only GHW and Clinton really served us well.

What's the position on finding black face amusing these days? Or using it in games for custom characters? I'm not black, but I grew up with films where white actors browned up to look like people like me. And I've often found it funny, because it's so f*cking stupid.

The idea that they couldn't find brown actors, that they put on terrible accents, that the audience was, somehow, supposed to believe they weren't white and so on. While recognising that that kind of culture was partially possible because of terrible attitudes to race (and economics), there's still something amusing about an upper-class Englishman walking about in warpaint pretending to be an mysterious vizir.

Edit

But thaats not to say I find all of it amusing; it can still creep me the f*ck out too.

1Dgaf wrote:

What's the position on finding black face amusing these days? Or using it in games for custom characters? I'm not black, but I grew up with films where white actors browned up to look like people like me. And I've often found it funny, because it's so f*cking stupid.

The idea that they couldn't find brown actors, that they put on terrible accents, that the audience was, somehow, supposed to believe they weren't white and so on. While recognising that that kind of culture was partially possible because of terrible attitudes to race (and economics), there's still something amusing about an upper-class Englishman walking about in warpaint pretending to be an mysterious vizir.

Black face has a very different history in the US. It's not amusing.

Lately there have been a lot of meta-jokes about the fact that it's not amusing (SNL skit I just watched, It's Always Sunny, etc), which is kind of way of laughing at the ridiculousness while still acknowledging it's offensiveness.

Edit: I realized that "It's not amusing" might have come off harsh or judgmental which was not my intent.

How widely accepted is it that Fox News is about as Fair and Balanced as a pair of crooked scales? I know there have been studies that show it, and it's taken as a fact by liberals, but do conservatives / Republicans also acknowledge this?

The reason I ask is because my wife and I had a discussion about something political, and she mentioned something from Fox news, and how they were not Republican. I said something to the effect of 'They might as well be' and she got quite offended (once again, for those who don't know, she's Republican and I'm, well, European, so very much Not Republican. Oddly, our marriage works quite well except for when we discuss politics, so I try to avoid that subject. Sadly, since she's quite rabidly pro-Romney - what with also being a Mormon - it is unavoidable sometimes).

I don't in any way want to criticize anyone else's relationships but, for my part, I've never had a relationship last long after it became clear we weren't on the same page, politically. I'm always a little amazed that other people manage just fine. It's a complete dealbreaker for me.

Maq wrote:

I don't in any way want to criticize anyone else's relationships but, for my part, I've never had a relationship last long after it became clear we weren't on the same page, politically. I'm always a little amazed that other people manage just fine. It's a complete dealbreaker for me.

I think if she actually 'lived' Republican / conservative, it would probably be for me too. As it is, she's a Republican the same way she is a Mormon - it doesn't affect her life or outlook much, except in very specific circumstances, like elections. For example, she is totally unopposed to gay marriage which both Mormons and the Republican Party are quite against.

SixteenBlue wrote:

Edit: I realized that "It's not amusing" might have come off harsh or judgmental which was not my intent.

I don't think it sounded like that. It's just your opinion.

Rallick wrote:

I know there have been studies that show it, and it's taken as a fact by liberals, but do conservatives / Republicans also acknowledge this?

Some might acknowledge. Overall, no.

Quintin_Stone wrote:
Rallick wrote:

I know there have been studies that show it, and it's taken as a fact by liberals, but do conservatives / Republicans also acknowledge this?

Some might acknowledge. Overall, no.

Then why not? Do Democrats have the same hangups when it comes to acknowledging liberal bias in news agencies?

Rallick wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Rallick wrote:

I know there have been studies that show it, and it's taken as a fact by liberals, but do conservatives / Republicans also acknowledge this?

Some might acknowledge. Overall, no.

Then why not? Do Democrats have the same hangups when it comes to acknowledging liberal bias in news agencies?

Not really, nope. We're pretty clear that MSNBC is liberally biased (at least the editorial parts, like Rachel Maddow's show). The trick with Fox is that it defines itself as mainstream/unbiased, and everything else as out of touch with reality. People who only get their news from it will see objective, largely unbiased news (say, BBC World, or NY Times reporting) as part of a vast left wing conspiracy. It encourages & reinforces an us vs. them mentality in which Fox is the only clear-eyed truth source in a world of dangerous radicals.

Rallick wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Rallick wrote:

I know there have been studies that show it, and it's taken as a fact by liberals, but do conservatives / Republicans also acknowledge this?

Some might acknowledge. Overall, no.

Then why not? Do Democrats have the same hangups when it comes to acknowledging liberal bias in news agencies?

As a whole? Dunno. Myself and my wife can easily acknowledge that MSNBC is pretty biased themselves, but they don't get nearly the ratings or media attention concerning their bias.

Rallick wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:
Rallick wrote:

I know there have been studies that show it, and it's taken as a fact by liberals, but do conservatives / Republicans also acknowledge this?

Some might acknowledge. Overall, no.

Then why not? Do Democrats have the same hangups when it comes to acknowledging liberal bias in news agencies?

Sometimes, definitely. But I'd judge not quite on the same scale.

Around Alabama at least, FOX news is typically seen as the go-to source for information. Whenever I go into a business that has a TV on, and it's on a news station, it's almost always set to FOX. CNN, NPR and MSNBC are typically described as being insanely liberal to the point that you shouldn't trust a single shred of news that comes through those outlets.

Of course I also just saw that at the state level in Alabama there are only 2 Democrats in elected positions and there's a good chance they'll lose on Tuesday so we may very well see every single elected state official being a Republican. Democrats are still have the majority at the county level but their fairly locked out at the state level. As a local professor of politics stated, if that occurs that means the democratic process in the state is horribly broken. So yeah, FOX is working just fine around these parts.