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Our view on the american election

I'm sure I read somewhere though that McCain had voted with Bush 95% of the time in the last 4 years, and 100% with him in 2008. I should try and find that article again.
 
it's almost like back in the Kennedy years..with regards to Obama..(with how important THIS election is)
I pray he wins.
He is a bright, insightful, very good candidate with a wife that is elegant and extremely bright.
2 draling daughters...and a good choice he made for his VP.
Pecae
 
In today's Age, republished from the Guardian. I bolded a part that I thought deserved emphasis.

The great divide of US politics
Linda Grant
September 8, 2008

A PHOTOSHOPPED picture of Sarah Palin has been doing the rounds for the past few days; it shows her in a stars-and-stripes bikini toting a rifle — patriotism, hunting and cheesecake combined in one image.

Soft porn for rednecks. Expect to see it pinned to the wall in every service station in Texas and tacked to the dash of every long-haul truck.

But this cartoon-like depiction of Palin smothers what we need to understand about why she appeals to American voters and why elections have been so deadlocked for the past decade, as if there were two Americas doomed to lived on the same land mass under the same government, like hopelessly incompatible spouses.

A new novel, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, published in the US last week, tells a fictionalised and thinly veiled story of Laura Bush, from small-town girl in the 1950s Midwest to school librarian to Republican bride to president's wife.

What you learn from the novel is that, like it or not, the American heartland is not so much a political ideology but an actual place with people living in it. Small-town Americans have values, and a lot of those values are good ones: neighbourliness, family life, a knowledge of the land and what grows in it. The other America they see on TV seems without ethics — crime, violence, drug addiction, pornography and prostitution — and they don't want any part of it.

So clear is the divide between big-city and small-town America that one American friend said to me: "These whitebread Republicans are like children — someone has to tell them what to do and what to think, they're incapable of independent ideas."

The conviction by the left that the right is stupid is one of the defining and least attractive characteristics of contemporary politics. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is too dim to get your point is not itself a particularly brainy way to win others over to the essential correctness of your views. But it is true that to small-town Republicans the world is not a complicated place, because they have seen so little of it.

I asked a sophisticated and well-travelled Republican why he voted the way he did. He described growing up "dirt poor" in a small town in northern California where joining the military was your sole ticket out; where the people in his family who depended on welfare stayed where they were and the ones who worked their fingers to the bone managed to make a better life for themselves. For him, joining the army led directly to an education. In fact, it led all the way to Princeton. But how, I asked him, could someone as intelligent as he is believe that George Bush was anything but a cretin?

Because, he explained, people in small towns don't trust intellectuals, particularly ones who appear to be sneering at them for their supposed stupidity. They admire a plain-speaking man. They always assumed Bush was a regular guy who could keep his thoughts concise.

So America is stuck. Two countries, irreconcilable, who never meet each other and don't want to. Who distrust each other at best, despise each other at worst. And who have no understanding of the other.

Reading Sittenfeld's thinly disguised account of Laura Bush and her upbringing, it was possible to see that the modest lives of her Midwestern characters both had dignity and made sense. But I only have to meet them in a novel, which I can snap shut as soon as I've finished it. Were I an east coast Democrat, which is the only kind of American I can ever imagine being, I would have no objection to small-town Republicans — to their church-going and their hunting rifles and their flag-decked porches and their meatloaf with gravy. I could admire their intimacy with the wide prairie and the vast sky.

The problem is that when they're running the whole country, they want to take away abortion rights, drill for oil in Alaska (a Palin policy), ignore climate change and start unwinnable wars. With the small-town Republican mindset in charge, the rest of America and the rest of the world is forced to live by small-town values, which aren't much help when you're trying to decide what, if anything, can be done about Iranian nuclear ambitions or, more humbly, workplace date rape.

Can America survive another photo-finish election which the Republicans win, or will it be out-and-out war between the red and the blue states? Perhaps only small-town America itself can prevent it, such as the dental nurse who asked how the mother of five kids, one with Down syndrome, could hold down a full-time job, one step from running the United States. Sarah Palin, bad mom. That might finish her.

GUARDIAN
Click to expand...

The Age
 
so the choices are a democratic yes man that has good catch phrases, or a right wing god fearing war hero, who chose a female george bush as vp

jesus
 
I will be happy when it's over with. I kept up for a while with what was going on, and then one day I just went, ah fuck off.

Fyi I hope Obama wins.
 
I'm thinking McCain will win.
He's ahead in the polls.
I think America is still quite heavily laden with racist over-tones.
Yes, Obama is black..
But he's also half white.
This is what is confusing.
 
A truly terrible (corrupt?) electoral system.

Hard to believe that the Republicans can win again, but then it was mind-boggling that Bush won twice, in the first place. But then, who are we to judge after electing little johnnie so many times?

Hoptis: That's a great point you highlighted and it is definitely a problem for the left, but how could any intelligent person not think the christian fundies are idiots?
 
^^

Good point.
See... I think sometimes voters vote with their gut instinct at the polling booth.
I reckon for many it's a spur of the moment decision as well.
Also, although unfortunate, in America the down and outs don't vote - bettering the Republicans chances as the party more allied with the rich, upper class and educated. It will be interesting to see how many people vote for Barack Obama, but my gut tells me he will loose by a long shot.
The pulse of America just isn't there.. it's not like them to vote in an unexperienced, young black man..
I may be totally wrong though.
Obama probably has more popularity Internationally then he does at home. I think Obama made a big mistake going on "rock-star" tours of European cities.
 
endlesseulogy said:
The pulse of America just isn't there.. it's not like them to vote in an unexperienced, young black man..
Click to expand...

That, and he isn't a "war hero" who was savagely tortured by the Viet Cong. Oh what a maverick this McCain fella is.

:!
 
If McCain wins Americans can be expecting a lot more frozen foods :

mccain.small.gif
 
Is it possible that the "black" voters will come out in force whereas in previous years they have been ambivalent?

Is there enough black people in the States?
 
quiet roar said:
Hoptis: That's a great point you highlighted and it is definitely a problem for the left, but how could any intelligent person not think the christian fundies are idiots?
Click to expand...

Exactly. I'm sorry, but if someone thinks the world was created 6000 years ago and that dinosaur bones were planted by magic fairies, I am going to take a dim view of their intelligence.
 
I would like to see Obama win.

But I bet you there are a lot of scared white people out there just wondering what he is going to do if he gets power... Pay back time!

200px-Klan-sheet-music.jpg
 
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MazDan said:
Is it possible that the "black" voters will come out in force whereas in previous years they have been ambivalent?

Is there enough black people in the States?
Click to expand...


Nope, blacks don't really make much of the population. Hispanics are actually predicted to be the majority in later years.
 
Just a question that someone can probably answer - are people in jail allowed to vote in the US?
 
Apparently there is some confusion about the law, but it seems at least some people who are in jail but haven't been charged yet can vote

"The differences between jail and prison and between probation and parole are the key factors in a December, 2006, California appeals court ruling that restores the voting rights of as many as 100,000 people in county jails on probation.

The appeals court has ruled that any person who is not either in a state prison or on parole following a state prison commitment has the right to vote. A person serving time in a county jail as a condition of probation is once again eligible to vote."

http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/index.php/
 
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