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The Next President

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I kinda view the Green Party vote this way. It sounds like I'm joking, but I'm not. I voted for Cynthia McKinney in 2008 because of my disillusion with politics.

 

Yeah that is part of why I am considering voting Green, I want to vote for a presidential candidate, just not either of the major party ones. I also think the two party system is fundamentally flawed so supporting a third party candidate fits with that.

 

Probably going to write myself in for every single candidate race on my ballot.

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I've seen some liberals (exclusively on twitter) profess conflates supporting Hillary with murder.

 

This is 100% my belief.  Clinton will do all the murderous things she shouldn't do before she does the inclusive, progressive things she needs to do.  And people twist themselves to support this.  I have been revolted to read reporters/writers I've respected say basically: "Maybe poor people DO need to die if they make her health policies look bad," and "Maybe Ukraine DOES need a bloodier civil war to make her look tough against Putin."  At that point, it really is a vote for murder.

 

 

Is it possible to cast a "blank" vote in the US? As in, a vote that is for none of the available candidates but which still counts toward the total voter count? 

 

Yes, this is possible.  As far as I know, though, blank votes in national elections haven't been part of anything significant.

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That's a very dangerous line of thinking to follow. Whether we like it or not, plenty of Americans are going to vote for Trump for president. If he wins, that too will lead to deaths. Calling him a murderer implies that the people who voted for him have some responsibility for his actions. What would we do with those voters then? Where does this thinking get us to?

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This is 100% my belief. Clinton will do all the murderous things she shouldn't do before she does the inclusive, progressive things she needs to do. And people twist themselves to support this. I have been revolted to read reporters/writers I've respected say basically: "Maybe poor people DO need to die if they make her health policies look bad," and "Maybe Ukraine DOES need a bloodier civil war to make her look tough against Putin." At that point, it really is a vote for murder.

Could you link a few respected journalists saying, effectively, these things? Absent the specific examples, I basically cannot imagine what this means.

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This is 100% my belief.  Clinton will do all the murderous things she shouldn't do before she does the inclusive, progressive things she needs to do.  And people twist themselves to support this.  I have been revolted to read reporters/writers I've respected say basically: "Maybe poor people DO need to die if they make her health policies look bad," and "Maybe Ukraine DOES need a bloodier civil war to make her look tough against Putin."  At that point, it really is a vote for murder.

I'm having trouble following what you're saying. Are you saying you believe this to be the case, or journalists are saying this is the case, or journalists are suggesting that those things are positive outcomes for her?

 

It's gross but true that world events benefit people's agendas. It's different to say that people interpolate political outcomes before those things might happen, and different still to suggest the people who would benefit from tragedy are secretly influencing or hoping for those things.

 

I'm also not sure what evidence there is to suggest Clinton would definitely would do hawkish things specifically before doing socially progressive things. I may be ignorant to that!

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On 2016-06-10 at 8:53 PM, clyde said:

What would be the point in voting with a blank ballot?

 

Like Cordeos said it is in effect a protest vote. Here in Sweden these kinds of votes are common enough that voting for the "Donald Duck Party" is a concept I heard about long before I was allowed to vote myself. Nowadays however, people seemed to prefer to vote for the discontention parties instead.

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What would we do with those voters then?

 

Love them.

 

 

Could you link a few respected journalists saying, effectively, these things? Absent the specific examples, I basically cannot imagine what this means.

 

I'll try to find a good example when I get back because the only person I can think of off the top of my head is John Aravosis who I basically never heard of before and might have always been awful.

 

A good counterexample is Vanaman when he tweets about Obama and Biden, because it's both "They did something cool." and "They did something not cool." and that's fine.

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I think for the left to really get what it wants, it has to acknowledge that the president isn't the person who's going to do it. For decades, Republicans have built a really impressive operation that has put a lot of conservatives in power across less-visible offices that can be effectively secured for a lot less money than it takes to mount a successful presidential campaign. That kind of focus is what the left badly needs, in my opinion. No president is going to be able to enact sweeping legislative change. The system simply isn't designed to allow that; if anything, it was designed NOT to allow that. The president is a steward, not a legislator. Frankly I think it's kind of amazing that Obama managed to even get something as big as the ACA through, and that's still only a small part of what's needed to really overhaul health care in this country. But I don't even really expect something on that scale to happen again any time soon, in terms of what's coming from the president's administration. I don't understand why anyone thinks Sanders individually would be able to enact broad social and political change as president. For that to happen the left also needs more representatives, more senators, more judges, and so on. When people use their one individual presidential candidate not getting picked as an excuse to disengage from politics, to me I just read that as misconstruing what the president actually does. Between the power of veto, and the power to appoint supreme court justices, and the authority as commander in chief, then president has a lot of very important power, but none of it is legislative.

 

This is pretty much how I feel about things. My considerations for President mostly come down to my perception of how the candidate plans to conduct foreign policy, where the President has very broad powers. I am not a fan of Clinton's hawkishness, but the more I looked into Bernie Sander's record, I saw someone who very much fit into that 90s Democratic mold of believing in using military force to intervene in conflicts because of moral concerns. But Sanders seems not particularly interested in foreign policy in general, which is worrisome since there is a very loud, influential, and powerful component of government, lobbyists, and other interest groups that beat the war drum loudly, and I worry someone who is generally disinterested in foreign affairs is generally more likely to acquiesce to these demands, and thus more likely to engage in fool hardy military adventures. So ultimately I ended up going with the devil I knew because they both looked like bad choices to me.

 

Arguments about domestic policy rarely matter for Presidential elections. In 2008 Clinton and Obama got into huge arguments about healthcare, but ultimately the ACA ended up looking like what Clinton was proposing because you end up passing whatever is possible if you care about passing legislation at all.

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In that particular argument, I think I would prefer experience and Hawkishness rather than either idealism or disinterest. 

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In that particular argument, I think I would prefer experience and Hawkishness rather than either idealism or disinterest.

I hate to say it, but you can say that because you have no chance whatsoever of being at a wedding targeted by a hawk's drone strike. Millions of people who aren't in that situation would probably you rather chance inexperience.

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I think it's probably safe to say drone strikes are going to remain an important part of US counter-terrorism strategy for the foreseeable future, regardless of who is president, including Bernie (who himself has explicitly stated as such). So I think comparisons between "idealism" and "inexperience" and "experience" are basically meaningless when it comes to expectations of that changing.

 

I also think Hillary Clinton being painted as the hawk to end all hawks has become more of a meme than any real foreign policy analysis. I'm not saying she's a dove, but she's also not some kind of crazy warmonger. In her tenure as Secretary of State she exhibited a wide variety of foreign policy strategies.

 

And overall, as I indicated before, I believe that anyone stepping into a commanding position in US foreign policy (or, really, the foreign policy of any major international power with significant involvement in world affairs) is going to have a significant share of their decisions heavily influenced by the momentum of all the decisions that have come before them, regardless of what they have the freedom to claim while running for president. What I mainly want is for a president not to make things worse through ineptitude, and to make things better where safely possible. I trust Clinton to work towards those aims as competently as anyone else would, certainly infinitely more than someone like Trump.

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I hate to say it, but you can say that because you have no chance whatsoever of being at a wedding targeted by a hawk's drone strike. Millions of people who aren't in that situation would probably you rather chance inexperience.

I agree with you, but this seems like a bad reason to be against Clinton specifically, because my impression is that Sanders is no better than her along these lines, unless we just give him the benefit of the doubt because he's said very little about anything except how rich people are ruining the country. From what I can tell, he's said that he would still blow people up with drones, and unless you think that our current policy is to specifically target weddings for shits and giggles, I'm having trouble seeing how his wedding targeting proclivities would differ from Obama's and Clinton's. And certainly any of them compared to Trump along these lines seems like a win for the Democrat.

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I agree with you, but this seems like a bad reason to be against Clinton specifically, because my impression is that Sanders is no better than her along these lines, unless we just give him the benefit of the doubt because he's said very little about anything except how rich people are ruining the country. From what I can tell, he's said that he would still blow people up with drones, and unless you think that our current policy is to specifically target weddings for shits and giggles, I'm having trouble seeing how his wedding targeting proclivities would differ from Obama's and Clinton's. And certainly any of them compared to Trump along these lines seems like a win for the Democrat.

I know that Sanders isn't likely to be radically different, but only one candidate currently has a record of hawkish actions, completely with a proudly-stated friendship and mentorship with fuckin' Kissinger. When I say that I support Sanders, people have told me to look at actions before words, so I'm doing that here, where suddenly it's unfair.

I also agree that Clinton's warmongering has been overstated, but it's equally important not to underrate the consequences of Clinton's pet projects. News sources have been unanimous that Clinton spearheaded the "lead from behind" coalition that bombed Libya to cinders and left it a warring patchwork of radicals and slavers. Obama is generally agreed to have been reluctant to intervene in order to prevent the humanitarian crisis, but Clinton is on the record as pushing hard and ultimately creating the humanitarian crisis that she sought to avert. Events have proven that she had no plan for peacekeeping or reconstruction, even less than the Republican agendas in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the country is still a wasteland for it. I don't think that history will rank Clinton's bombing of Libya any lower than Kissinger's bombing campaign that brought the Khmer Rouge to power (http://www.salon.com/2016/02/12/henry_kissingers_mad_and_illegal_bombing_what_you_need_to_know_about_his_real_history_and_why_the_sandersclinton_exchange_matters/). And that's not to discount the actions of the State Department elsewhere, in Honduras and Mexico. I feel that it's dangerous to present all of the "tough" decisions that Clinton made as unavoidable and all military actions as roughly equivalent in impact.

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I know that Sanders isn't likely to be radically different, but only one candidate currently has a record of hawkish actions, completely with a proudly-stated friendship and mentorship with fuckin' Kissinger. When I say that I support Sanders, people have told me to look at actions before words, so I'm doing that here, where suddenly it's unfair.

Well, I never said to look at actions before words. I think words are helpful too. In Sanders's case the words don't strike me as super different fron Clinton, at least not in any sort of dispositive sense.

I guess mostly I'm just saying that I haven't seen anything from Sanders that suggests he'd be much better than Clinton, aside from the more or less rhetorical point that he doesn't like Kissinger whereas she does. He doesn't have a record of hawkish actions because he doesn't have a record of giving a shit about much of anything outside the borders of the United States. His info page on international relations focuses more on how much the wars have cost America than on what they've cost Iraq and Afghanistan, and aside from Israel he's got nothing to say about anything else. There just isn't much for me to go on.

Maybe Sanders would be International Relations Jesus or something if he were at the helm, but this strikes me as closer to wishful thinking than anything else. That doesn't mean it's false - sometimes wishful thinking is true - but the etiology of the belief is what I'm interested in, and given that Sanders has literally said he's fine with (for instance) drone strikes, I just don't really know.

I do think that maybe Clinton is more hawkish, but how much of that comes from being in a position where being hawkish gets stuff done is a little up in the air. Sanders has had nothing to gain from being hawkish, but if he were president looking at a situation and thinking about what ought to be done, I just really have no idea what he'd say. To the extent that he makes decisions based on what's best for the USA, I'd prefer Clinton, I think, because honestly I care more about what happens in the rest of the world. But really I just feel like I'm speculating. Who really knows?

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Hillary's hawkishness is the part of her that is most worrying to me, more specifically in the type of hawk she is.  Yes she has favored military intervention in the past, but the type of intervention she has lobbied and voted for in almost all those cases is in the form of airpower, and I feel like this might be the most important aspect of the presidential office in light of the AUMF.  Here we have a candidate who is more than willing to use airstrikes, drones, missiles and the like and will be doing it in an environment where virtually none of those actions are going to be contested or even questioned by a congress of any description.  This combined with her past and current tendencies to want to sell munitions to particularly violent regimes like Saudi Arabia, her entire foreign policy seems certain to exacerbate the problems of the past.

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I think it's probably safe to say drone strikes are going to remain an important part of US counter-terrorism strategy for the foreseeable future, regardless of who is president, including Bernie (who himself has explicitly stated as such). So I think comparisons between "idealism" and "inexperience" and "experience" are basically meaningless when it comes to expectations of that changing.

 

I also think Hillary Clinton being painted as the hawk to end all hawks has become more of a meme than any real foreign policy analysis. I'm not saying she's a dove, but she's also not some kind of crazy warmonger. In her tenure as Secretary of State she exhibited a wide variety of foreign policy strategies.

 

And overall, as I indicated before, I believe that anyone stepping into a commanding position in US foreign policy (or, really, the foreign policy of any major international power with significant involvement in world affairs) is going to have a significant share of their decisions heavily influenced by the momentum of all the decisions that have come before them, regardless of what they have the freedom to claim while running for president. What I mainly want is for a president not to make things worse through ineptitude, and to make things better where safely possible. I trust Clinton to work towards those aims as competently as anyone else would, certainly infinitely more than someone like Trump.

Its really sad considering drones are a totally ineffective strategy for counter terrorism:

"In January 2010, I lent my vehicle to my nephew, Salimullah, to drive to Deegan for an oil change and to have one of the tires checked. Rumours had surfaced that drones were targeting particular vehicles, and tracking particular phone signals. The sky was clear and there were drones circling overhead. As Salimullah conversed with the mechanic, a second vehicle pulled up next to mine. There were four men inside, just local chromite miners. A missile destroyed both vehicles, killed all four men, and seriously injured Salimullah, who spent the next 31 days in hospital."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list-this-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-hunted-by-drones-a6980141.html

 

"4. Terrorists cannot defeat us; we can only defeat ourselves."

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/24/monsters-of-our-own-imaginings-brussels-bombings-islamic-state/

"in both Yemen and Syria. And the Islamic State also continues to gain ground in both countries. Meanwhile, in Libya, it’s “utter chaos,” former U.N. advisor Dirk Vandewalle told the Times: The Islamic State and al Qaeda-linked groups are vying for power, and a recent U.S. drone strike against al Qaeda operative Mokhtar Belmokhtar “shows that we’re still relying on ad hoc measures.” In Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, it’s the same story. The United States continues to rely heavily on airstrikes and targeted killings, while terrorist groups continue to cause mayhem and gain adherents."

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/24/u-s-counterterrorism-strategy-is-the-definition-of-insanity/

I recently finished Thieves of State a fantastic book that points the finger at corrupt and inept governance as a main cause of terrorism. You can kill as many of them as you want, but if you do nothing to resolve the source of the issue you will murder civilians at a rate of 10 to 1 for no reason.

 

Can anyone honestly argue that that US is winning in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Pakistan?

 

But lets keep voting for the status quo, I'm sure it will be fine.

 

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But lets keep voting for the status quo, I'm sure it will be fine.

 

 

I'm not advocating for this strategy, but there is going to be a president no matter what, and I will vote for the one that I think will be the best of the options available. 

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I'm not advocating for this strategy, but there is going to be a president no matter what, and I will vote for the one that I think will be the best of the options available. 

 

Pretty much. If it comes down to "More of the same" and Donald Trump, I will pick more of the same any day.

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But lets keep voting for the status quo, I'm sure it will be fine.

 

Hillary Clinton is a vote for the status quo in some ways, but not in all ways.

 

She's a proponent of prioritizing rehabilitation and treatment for low-level and nonviolent drug offenses and end the school-to-prison pipeline, which would strongly impact the strength of the carceral state and prevent thousands of lives from being ruined, which, when combined with her multi-pronged approach to labor (15% tax credit to companies that engage in profit sharing with their employees, stronger unions, raise the minimum wage, stronger overtime rules, stronger protections against misclassification, etc) would provide a substantial economic stimulus and provides a robust and clear pathway out of poverty for people who the system currently works against.

 

She's a proponent of Dodd-Frank, which is working as intended. She wants to remove all former banking executives from the boards of regional Federal Reserve Banks, which would include people like the president of the Minneapolis regional Federal Reserve Bank, Neel Kashkari.

 

(Find out more about Hillary Clinton's platforms on her web site -- it's very well thought out and difficult to compress into a sound byte, not to mention woefully underreported.)

 

As foreign policy goes, and as a strong critic of foreign policy, I think it's important to look at the choices people make in the context in which they are made. A politician is more than a sum of their policy; they are a fully realized human being who makes complex decisions based on a variety of factors, and on the advice of people they trust, to try and make the world a better place. Drone strikes are a terrible force, misguided in purpose and in action, but no viable candidate opposes them so opposing any candidate based on their support of drone strikes is just inane.

 

I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton, but picking out drone strikes as your definition of the status quo when Bernie Sanders has said that he would use drone strikes in his counterterrorism strategy means that there never was a candidate who was good enough.

 

To quote a line I've seen associated with a very good article, Hillary Clinton's campaign was never going to be easy, but did it have to be this hard?

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Pretty much. If it comes down to "More of the same" and Donald Trump, I will pick more of the same any day.

 

I will begrudgingly vote HRC this November because I can't image a world where the most powerful nation on earth is run by Donald Trump. It's an absolutely terrifying thing that this is a possibility. 

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(Find out more about Hillary Clinton's platforms on her web site -- it's very well thought out and difficult to compress into a sound byte, not to mention woefully underreported.)

 

I've read her site a few times and parsed per points, and there is a lot to like in there, with reservations.  There are a number of conflicts between those positions and her previous votes in the senate, but rather than enumerate those (I'm tired of the her record is crap vs. rationalizing argument) I think her platform is an expansion of the status quo.  I say expansion because in all her implementations it's almost as though she's taken the current structures as necessary or inevitable, and it's tough to say if the tweaks she is suggesting truly represent a difference in kind.  If you read the portion on campaign finance reform as an example, her plan isn't to remove the money from politics, it's simply to make it more transparent and metered.  The actual implementation of this is infinitely gameable (as in billionaires just have to jump through more hoops but will ultimately retain the same amount of influence) and many of her other policy proposals fall into this same vein.  She doesn't want to get rid of mandatory minimum sentences, just cut them in half, which doesn't change the problem that sentencing decisions are taken out of the judges hands, and end up having to hand down sentences they don't like because of the mandatory minimum.  She isn't advocating for a remedy that reaches the route problem, for example eliminating prison sentences for simple possession, she's just interested in tweaking the knobs to make these things less prominent or perhaps different in function, but ultimately unchanged in purpose.

 

I may vote for Clinton in the end, although at the moment I'm thinking I'll most likely choose either Gary Johnson (Libertarian candidate) and Jill Stein (Green party candidate).  Now I doubt either of those two will be able to take even a state, and will at best be a distant third to Trump or Clinton, but those two candidates more so than the others represent my personal opinions regarding how the country should operate.  Then again I live in California, so I won't be that upset when Clinton inevitably wins the state.

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Realistically speaking, anyone who is the same party as the incumbent and who is likely to get elected president is probably going to be reasonably described as an "expansion of the status quo" - you just don't get very much differentiation between people in the same party until you start getting to the fringes, aka the people who aren't going to get the party nomination if it's already in good enough shape to have produced the existing president (something the GOP can't really say).

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Like Cordeos said it is in effect a protest vote. Here in Sweden these kinds of votes are common enough that voting for the "Donald Duck Party" is a concept that was a concept I heard about long before I was allowed to vote myself. Nowadays however, people seemed to prefer to vote for the discontention parties instead.

We have the Donald Duck party in Finland as well and it gets usually more votes than some major candidates in elections.

Now a not so serious question. If Hillary wins, that means Bill returns to the White House. What will be his title since he is the (former) president of USA but he will also be "the first lady" of the USA?

How are former presidents usually called in USA? In Finland they are usually still called presidents or in some cases former presidents. America's Bill question is special since he used to be the president and would now then be the husband of the president.

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We have the Donald Duck party in Finland as well and it gets usually more votes than some major candidates in elections.

Now a not so serious question. If Hillary wins, that means Bill returns to the White House. What will be his title since he is the (former) president of USA but he will also be "the first lady" of the USA?

How are former presidents usually called in USA? In Finland they are usually still called presidents or in some cases former presidents. America's Bill question is special since he used to be the president and would now then be the husband of the president.

They are usually called Mr President. Hillary is often referred to as Madam Secretary even though she is no longer Secretary of State. There have been a few presidents who have gone to Congress, the Senate or the Supreme Court after their terms, I don't know if you go with their highest title or most recent in that case.

My guess is Bill will go with First Gentleman because having people still call him Mr. President would be disrespectful to his wife IMO. After she is out of office he will probably go back to it.

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