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Official 2012 Presidential Election Night Thread

The levels of racial division in the USA are scary.

But not really new. If the GOP is sensible and decent, they'll stop going all-in on brinksmanship and the southern strategy. Because it's not going to work anymore. What a bummer that you have to have something besides white males to win an election.
 
Yeah, so I've lost my faith in America.

What we have here is a change in society. When the constitution was originally written, everyone in the country had to pretty much stand on there own two feet or die of hunger. Most everyone had either a farm or a manufacturing thing and the ratio of employee to employer wasn't very high. Back then most every vote was equal because everyone knew how to work. Now we live in the world of giant corporations where a handful of people have tons of assets but they employ hundreds of uneducated minions, all of which have the same equal vote as their doctorate wielding bosses. This means that elections are being decided by people who don't even have a high school diploma rather then people with over eight years of college education. (Yes I realize that people back in early America didn't have an education either, but they still had a much higher work ethic than dude working the counter at Walmart)

And women couldn't vote. And black people weren't considered people. And Americans were in the middle of a 200+ year war dedicated to destroy an entire race of people that happened to actually be there first. But other than that? Spotless.
 
I don't think I'm proclaiming any wild positions here, and I've been shooting from the hip. I'm just going to copy/paste something I wrote earlier and re-dedicate myself to shutting up and moving on.

Whether you're stoked or bummed about the election, please STFU and let's focus on trying to get something done. The gridlock in Washington is reflected in the electorate, let's try to have a real conversation instead of digging in heals and shouting. PLEASE.
 
Lets see where we will be if Obama keeps us going "forward" for the next 4 years:

-Obama will add another 5-6 trillion to the deficit

-Gas prices will be around $6 dollars a gallon

-Healthcare costs will go higher than most people's Mortgage per month

-Unemployment will be around 9%


YES WE CAN!!!

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Obama won! Woots! There are so many racists down here where I live. I felt like the only one in the entire town that was rooting for Obama. If I had a dollar for every time I heard something like "I don't want that n****r in office again", I'd be able to buy at least three or four cases of beer.
 
Unfortunately some of what I'm seeing in this thread and others (and I want to say that this does not apply to all posters, but a few) is a continued rejection of objective reality. A significant part of the mode of the right-wing the last four years has been to deny that Obama was a legitimately elected leader. This isn't the first time we've seen this strategy: it was also a dominant theme during the Clinton administration with impeachment proceedings, insistence that Clinton didn't "really win" the election because he didn't obtain an absolute majority in the 92 or 96 elections, and a tendency to actually shut down the federal government in an effort to push the GOP agenda on the democratic administration. The insistence that government led by the left is not legitimate government is a 20-year running problem.

We saw this throughout the campaign as well with various posters and right-wing media figures engaging in a lengthy war on facts, repeatedly balking at those who had done the best and most scientifically sound analysis of polls. Apparently the Romney campaign was so confident of victory because they had their own model called Orca (because it was bigger and more expansive than anything the Dems had access to) that was predicting Romney victory even as late as Tuesday evening. It's been an ongoing problem with respect to climate science and, to a lesser extent, evolution.

This is the period of time where it's time to acknowledge that those are not sustainable strategies moving forward and that, shocker, elections won by left-leaning politicians are just as valid as elections won by right-leaning politicians. For our part I think the left can stop engaging in out-of-hand rejection of some right ideas. I'm on record as saying that I agree with Romney's suggestion of effectively stapling green cards to all PhDs in hard sciences worldwide. To date, I've not heard a single liberal argument against this idea. Let's do it. Throw the GOP a couple easy ones, give Romney credit for suggesting it, and maybe everyone will be just plain nicer. I'm pretty sure Newt Gingrich and Neil DeGrasse Tyson could agree on the expansion of NASA going forward. There's some common ground to be mined. Let's pray to god that 2013 is better than 2011.
 
But not really new. If the GOP is sensible and decent, they'll stop going all-in on brinksmanship and the southern strategy. Because it's not going to work anymore. What a bummer that you have to have something besides white males to win an election.

That's exactly what terrifies me. This idea that GOP figure they can just completely write off the black and even Latino vote as lost, and subsequently ignore that segment of the population. Did Romney even campaign in majority black areas?
 
This is the period of time where it's time to acknowledge that those are not sustainable strategies moving forward and that, shocker, elections won by left-leaning politicians are just as valid as elections won by right-leaning politicians. For our part I think the left can stop engaging in out-of-hand rejection of some right ideas. I'm on record as saying that I agree with Romney's suggestion of effectively stapling green cards to all PhDs in hard sciences worldwide. To date, I've not heard a single liberal argument against this idea. Let's do it. Throw the GOP a couple easy ones, give Romney credit for suggesting it, and maybe everyone will be just plain nicer. I'm pretty sure Newt Gingrich and Neil DeGrasse Tyson could agree on the expansion of NASA going forward. There's some common ground to be mined. Let's pray to god that 2013 is better than 2011.

Yes.
 
But not really new. If the GOP is sensible and decent, they'll stop going all-in on brinksmanship and the southern strategy. Because it's not going to work anymore. What a bummer that you have to have something besides white males to win an election.


Romney won 60+% of the white vote, and close to 70% of the white males, and got curb stomped in the electoral college. If that doesn't convince the GOP that it's time to broaden the base then I don't know what will.

FWIW there is a legit argument that gays and lesbians won the election for Obama. Exit polls indicate that for the question "Are you Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual?" those who answered yes voted for Obama at a 76% rate. Those who answered no split the candidates evenly at 49% a piece. Turns out demonizing that social group for decades may have had some real consequences.
 
That's exactly what terrifies me. This idea that GOP figure they can just completely write off the black and even Latino vote as lost, and subsequently ignore that segment of the population. Did Romney even campaign in majority black areas?

He went to the NAACP.
 
That's exactly what terrifies me. This idea that GOP figure they can just completely write off the black and even Latino vote as lost, and subsequently ignore that segment of the population. Did Romney even campaign in majority black areas?

He did some, and it did nothing. That's a battle he couldn't really win, but latinos were fully in-play (Obama did precious little [even nothing] with immigration reform which is the banner issue). He was forced to take a lot of unsavory positions in the primary that had disaster potential if he changed (see the fallout of the 'etch-a-sketch' comment, and how that could be fully exploited), and ran on a ticket that featured a louder-than-usual pro-life (beyond reason as the electorate saw it) issue with candidates that had no tact.

This is larger than Romney. Who the GOP is targeting used to work and if it will again, it won't for long. That's a good thing. The GOP has proven resourceful enough to extend their relevance, but coming to the table hasn't been one of them. If they're smart, they'll see that going unilateral to almost every demographic in the country is not a winning strategy. For starters.
 
I do fundamentally believe that while diversity (of everything, including competing philosophies) can make the path harder, it makes our collective ideas stronger. Balance should be strived for in all things.
 
Care to cite a real study to support this post in the classic Beantown tradition?

Its called life....

Gas prices have doubled in 4 years...

Healthcare costs have increased at record rates..

Obama added a record amount
to the defecit..

Unemployment hasn't gone down...

Is anything Im saying untrue? No.

So if Obama repeats the last four years than that will be Par for the course.
 
So if Obama repeats the last four years than that will be Par for the course.

Kinda like Hayward doubled his PPG during the second season, so we should naturally expect him to double it this season too? 25PPG, give or take? Also par for the course?
 
He did some, and it did nothing. That's a battle he couldn't really win,.

Well, that's true. Much like Obama couldn't really hope for any significant Mormon support. But the wooing of the Latinos was bungled from the start. As I said, it's all hubris. Assuming one can win with just the white, straight vote.
 
Romney won 60+% of the white vote, and close to 70% of the white males, and got curb stomped in the electoral college. If that doesn't convince the GOP that it's time to broaden the base then I don't know what will.

FWIW there is a legit argument that gays and lesbians won the election for Obama. Exit polls indicate that for the question "Are you Gay, Lesbian, or Bisexual?" those who answered yes voted for Obama at a 76% rate. Those who answered no split the candidates evenly at 49% a piece. Turns out demonizing that social group for decades may have had some real consequences.

Don't you think Obama's "evolving position" (conveniently reached in an election year) played a factor in that as well?
 
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