Mark my words, John McCain is going to destroy the Republican Party

I really didn't think McCain had a reason to get into the race this time around. I didn't even give him a thought, and now he may barely be the better choice come election day.

If Hilary is up against McCain, I know I won't be voting for Hilary, but if it is Obama I will need to know a little more.

 

Name recognition. Barack Obama is still not very well known among your average Joe American who pays little attention to politics but still votes. Some of these people don't make their decision until October!

As has been shown in the Democratic primaries the more people get to know Obama the more they like him.

You talk about moderates being put off by Obama's "liberal voting record" how about moderates being put off by the fact that McCain wants to STAY IN IRAQ FOR 100 YEARS. I say Obama runs one commercial of him making that statement over and over again and the race is over. Are you forgetting about how unpopular the Iraq war is?

I'd also like to add that Obama would be very wise to run some negative ads about McCain's LIES on Iraq. This should puncture any illusion that McCain is a "straight talker." He is anything but a straight talker. He is a liar.

Plus you have to understand that McCain has no support from the base of the Republican party, these are the people that do the dirty work in the elections, while Obama will be getting a huge amount of support from the Democratic faithful, McCain will be getting next to no support from the Republican faithful.

Do you really think a $32 to $7 million fund raising advantage is not significant? I mean, seriously.

This will not be anywhere near as close as the current polls may show.

Obama will defeat McCain in a landslide. I'd be willing to bet a large portion of money on this. In fact, please point me to a website where I can place a bet right now.

 

People who think McCain will win the general are greatly underestimating the importance of this. Especially if Obama is the nominee as they won't be able to rally people on the "Anyone but Hillary" thing.

George W. Bush won* the last 2 elections primarily on the backs of these evangelical voters, without their full support McCain will be deep in the hole from the get go.

They tend to have very high voter turn out from those groups which makes them particularly important for the Republicans.

Now I do think that if McCain chooses Huckabee (or another candidate that the Religious Right likes) as VP he may be able to fool these folks into voting for him. We'll see.

 

Try Intrade.com. If you are right, you stand to win a good deal of money.

For every "share" of Obama you buy now at $34.80, you will collect $100 when hell freezes over.

 

Yep. All of the conservatives are playing tough now, but will have little choice when the election battle gets feverish.

The #1 thing going for McCain will be just how much ordinary Republicans hate Hillary Clinton.

 

This little piece in the WSJ reminded me so much of AGS/guru-seo:

Marinating in 'Decline'
February 5, 2008; Page A16 The Wall St. Journal

In 1788, Massachusetts playwright Mercy Otis Warren took one look at the (unratified) U.S. Constitution and declared that "we shall soon see this country rushing into the extremes of confusion and violence." This, roughly, is the origin of American declinism -- and it's been downhill ever since.

A couple centuries later, an international relations theorist at Yale named Paul Kennedy sought to explain the decline of great powers in terms of a ratio between military commitments and economic resources. The Reagan military buildup and the deficits that went with it, he warned, had brought the United States to the point of "imperial overstretch." Not quite. Within a few years, the Soviet Union collapsed, Europe and Japan (with no military burdens to speak of) entered a long period of economic stagnation, and the U.S. consolidated its position as the world's only true superpower.

Declinism is again in vogue. "America's unipolar moment has inspired diplomatic and financial countermovements to block American bullying and construct an alternate world order," writes Parag Khanna in a recent New York Times Magazine cover story titled, cheerfully, "Who Shrank the Superpower?" In Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Fred Kaplan observes that "the United States can no longer take obeisance for granted." Mr. Kaplan's new book, "Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power," sounds just a bit derivative of Nancy Soderberg's "The Superpower Myth" (2005), Roger Burbach's "Imperial Overstretch" (2004) and Charles Kupchan's "The End of the American Era" (2003).

American "decline" is the foreign-policy equivalent of homelessness: The media only take note of it when a Republican is in the White House. Broadly speaking, declinists divide between those who merely accept America's supposed diminishment as a fact of life, and those who celebrate it as long overdue. As for the causes of decline, however, they tend to agree: declining (relative) economic muscle, due in large part to the rise of China; an overextended military bogged down needlessly in Iraq and endlessly in Afghanistan; the declining value of America's "brand" on account of Bush administration policies on detention, pre-emption, terrorism, global warming -- you name it.

Yet each of these assumptions collapses on a moment's inspection. In his 2006 book "Ãœberpower," German writer Josef Joffe makes the following back-of-the-envelope calculation: "Assume that the Chinese economy keeps growing indefinitely at a rate of seven percent, the average of the past decade (for which history knows of no example). . . . At that rate, China's GDP would double every decade, reaching parity with today's United States ($12 trillion) in thirty years. But the U.S. economy is not frozen into immobility. By then, the United States, growing at its long-term rate of 2.5 percent, would stand at $25 trillion."

Now take military expenditures. Yesterday, the administration released its budget proposal for 2009, which includes $515.4 billion for the regular defense budget. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this would be the largest defense appropriation since World War II. Yet it amounts to about 4% of GDP, as compared to 14% during the Korean War, 9.5% during the Vietnam War and 6% in the Reagan administration. Throw in the Iraq and Afghanistan supplementals, and total projected defense spending is still only 4.5% of GDP -- an easily afforded sum even by Prof. Kennedy's terms.

Finally there is the issue of our allegedly squandered prestige in the world. There is no doubt America's "popularity," as measured by various global opinion surveys, has fallen in recent years. What's striking, however, is how little of this has mattered in terms of the domestic political choices of other countries or the consequences for the U.S.

In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War, nearly every government that joined President Bush's "coalition of the willing" -- Australia, Great Britain, Denmark and Japan -- was returned to power. France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder, the war's two most vocal opponents, were cashiered for two candidates who campaigned explicitly on a pro-American agenda. The same happened in South Korea, where the unapologetically anti-American President Roh Moo-hyun has been replaced by the unapologetically pro-American Lee Myung-bak. Italy's equally unapologetic pro-American Silvio Berlusconi seems set to return to office after a brief holiday.

None of this is to say that perceptions about America play a decisive role in the politics of most other countries. It is to say that anti-Americanism, like illegal immigration, is fool's gold politics. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel were not installed in office principally to mend relations with Washington. But to the extent that both seek to liberalize their economies, or strengthen NATO, or take a responsible position vis-a-vis Iran, it brings them closer to Washington's way of thinking.

Meanwhile, McDonald's -- the icon of everything anti-Americans detest about the U.S. -- is doing a booming business overseas even as sales in the U.S. flatlined last year. Another icon, Boeing, is having no trouble booking orders (meeting them is another matter) for its new 787 Dreamliner to such customers as Spain's AirEuropa and Bahrain's Gulf Air. The quintessentially American film, "National Treasure," has earned nearly half its gross revenue -- about $160 million -- in foreign ticket sales since its release in late December. So much for America's loss of "soft power."

Happily for Mr. Kaplan, I look forward to receiving his forthcoming book. I'll put it right up there on the shelf with another favorite: "19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots." I'm guessing it will fetch a price on eBay.​

You kids can fantasize all you want about the decline and fall of the United States of America, but it ain't close to happening.

 

That article is a perfect fit for you will. Who owns the wsj now? None other then our favorite neocon and yours Good ole Rupp. Like i said before
people like you who know abolsutely nothing about foreign policy and opinions coming in from other countries can be either fooled very easily or can fool others very easily. You will of course listen to an article from someone who is completely biased then listen to the voice of the masses worldwide.

Now for a more unbiased view and international polling data i take you here for this video.

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/


Doctor Steven Kull, director of program on international policy attitudes at the university of maryland, Dr kulls articles regularly appear in harpers, and teh washington post among others.
He also provides briefings for the US Congress, the state department, NATO, THE UN, and the EC.
He is someone i would listen to rather then the biased ruppert murdock , a well known neocon lol.
What a joke. Willie, next time try bringing some unbiased world opinion buddy.
DR(which ruppie boy isnt)Kull clearly states that in his world polling data that the USA has never been so low in the internation polls and it has nothing to do with jealousy or envy. He clearly says that the united states isnt living up to the principles that it is trying to promote in the world. Now this good doctor has hit the nail right on the head.
This was even easier than gtech and it didnt take more than 5 minutes .

Pay specific attention to 3:08 of the video where Dr. Kull clearly states what he believes his going on and why the internation polls of international views on america are so low. Duhhhh, when getting views from the international community, would u take the opinions of a well known biased neocon or a professional poller like DR Kull.
Slam dunk
The previos post has just been debunked.

 

I'm sure that Hitler and Mussolini both decried American interventionism.

I wonder why bad people who are doing bad things don't like Pax Americana?

 

Great post friend...

 

Ya, they get their 'news' from the same place you do. fox anyone??

 

What do you mean? Butcher Saddam was a good pal of ours. Osama the terrorist was our boy in Afghanistan. The Saudi Princes name themselves after the Bush family. Musharaff overthrew a democratically elected moderate government, and he is our ally.

Diem in Vietnam. The Shah of Iran. Mubarak in Egypt.

The list goes on and on.

 

If we had unlimited resources, we could aim for immediate perfection. As we don't, you are making a silly argument.

Yes, we use bad people to fight worse people. duh. It's a useful strategy. It saves American lives and money while still contributing to the overall cause of freedom. It provides the most optimal usage of limited resources.

Let me ask you a question. If you're hungry, and you only have $2, do you not eat? Or, do you compromise and eat something that may be less wonderful that what you would eat if you had unlimited resources?

In your own daily life, you probably compromise. We all do. Scarcity is the most basic principle underlying all economic theory.

It's only when you try to think about issues larger than your own miserable existence that you fail to understand the nature of scarcity, of economics, of resource limitations, of compromise. When we start talking politics, you wander off into fantasy land.

Listen kid, politics aren't fantasy. Politics is about real people. Real living people. Real living breathing people who want to stay living and breathing. This is serious business. If you are going to post, you should at least give some serious thought to the sensibility of your post before pressing <SEND REPLY>.

 

You ducked the question.

Do you honestly believe that McCain's significant lead is due to "massive fraud", or were you just running your mouth without thinking?

Please show us this "fraud" of which only you are aware so that criminal charges can be brought against John.

We're all waiting for you to turn rhetoric into reality.

 

If I am hungry, and only have $2, I don't buy poison for dinner.

Ah, so by supporting Saddam et al, we were helping freedom. That's a new one. We support dictators, war criminals, and human rights abusers, because there is a net good to doing so. Brilliant Will. A lesser mind might just buy your position.

It's SUBMIT REPLY, but hey, in this sea of irrational thought and disinformation, who is really paying attention anyways?

You might be happy living on your knees, but I'd rather die on my feet. The notion that you have to give up freedom to survive is weak and regressive.

You should be ashamed of yourself for promoting such a view in public.

 

In the 1980's Iran was the bigger danger than Iraq. Oh my without provocation they set up the killing of 241 US marines based in Lebanon without provocation.

The effort in Afghanistan helped ultimately to knock the USSR out of existance.

Who knows what the long term consequences are going to be?

By fighting to a stalemate in Korea and ultimately keeping forces there and protection there we kept South Korea from becoming part of the then Chinese Communist domain.

What a great nation, a free powerful successful industrial powerhouse South Korea has become and an ally. Very good result. Also costly, long term, etc.

Who knows down the line

You make your best choices at the time and see what the consequences are going forward. That is the real world.

I agree with Will in that perspective.

Now I also think we should be working to get out of Iraq for a full full package of reasons...that would be better for the US. But not to pull out in one fell swoop and immediately and with advance warning.


Also, McCain is winning with big numbers and a big difference between his results and those of competitors. Its way way way to big for fraud. Its irresponsable to claim fraud at the differences between aggregate McCain results and those of the competition.

McCain is winning despite the moaning of the furthest Right. He is picking up big crowds that tend toward the middle. you know the people without big endless flapping mouths.

He isn't my favorite guy....but he is persistant, he's been fortunate, his competition has been surprisingly weak in the eyes of the public....and he is winning fairly.

I'd give him credit.

 

Great post earl!

 

Hah LOL....going forward....I won't see this phrase from this author too often

the world is strange.

 

Going forward, it is going to be a very strange world.

Who will win this election? Richard Nixon (Hillary), Jimmy Carter (Barack), or Lyndon Johnson (John)?

It's the personalities of three of the worst Presidents of the last century, come back to haunt us.

If Nixon or Carter wins, it will be very interesting to be back in the opposition party after such a long time.

If Johnson wins... oh my... that will be entertaining. We'll see a welcome respite from party politics. There will be a much stronger focus on individual issues, with proponents and opponents of each issue coming from both parties.

 

how true that is....but you left someone off....lately all the talk of a rebirth of "Camelot"...I think Barack supporters are delusional that they are getting JFK back.

 

That is a wierd one to me......come on....Richard Nixon=GWBush; Isn't Hillary sort of a non sexually manic = of Bill?
Barack=Jimmy Carter? LOL---you must think he is a wimpy pussy. geez
McCain = Johnson......how'd you come up with that?