kcar wrote:
He was a cruel man, but fair.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Inspired by the Piranha Brothers' "The Operation".... , no doubt.

 kcar wrote:
Tell me about it. I was already active in Libertarian politics so I'm already on those lists, but they're pretty good about heeding requests to shut off traffic. My wife, on the other hand, volunteered for the first Obama campaign and they never give us a moment's peace in an election year. Somehow they can't take "Stop calling me!" for an answer.

Maybe if we use the stop-or-I'll-donate trick on them...

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Wouldn't surprise me if the telemarketer got a nice cut from every donation—hence the commitment. Be careful about donating money to even legit campaigns, lazy8: once you donate to a candidate, your name gets put on a list that similar candidates will use over and over again. Members of my family get inundated with begging letters and the like. 

 kcar wrote:
These telemarketers seem pretty committed. One tried to argue with me--wanted to know what I had against Trump. I told her it was a LONG list and I didn't have time for all of it. 

My wife told me I could be more generous than $10 a call, but we gotta eat too. 

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Well ain't you got all the fun! 

Maybe that PAC has some affiliation with Trump University...hand-picked telemarketers/cons and such. 

 Lazy8 wrote:
...and another ten bucks. Might get expensive being in the As in the phone book.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
I knew I wasn't getting it all but couldn't dredge it up.

Trump’s Empire: A Maze of Debts and Opaque Ties

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:
It came from even farther back.

It was a reaction to the populist movement that drafted George McGovern and caused the biggest electoral college landslide loss they had ever seen. After the 1968 convention/riot they had a committee redraw the rules to limit the power of party insiders. The chair of that committee? George McGovern.

His subsequent shellacking caused an "I told you so" reaction that (in stages) created the superdelegates.

Since that movement is likely to succeed this time (success being defined as winning the presidency) maybe the oscillations will damp out now and they'll settle on superdelegates as a viable compromise between the smoke-filled room and the chanting mob.

 buddy wrote: 
Great post. Thank you. Bernie's supporters and others rail against the Democratic party's use of superdelegates, but Hillary easily beat Sanders in the number of popular votes. Most pollers stated throughout the primary season that Bernie's coalition was not broad enough to win the nomination. Bernie's level of success was a sign of an unusually high level of anger at the political establishment and Clinton's consistently high level of negative ratings. 

As for Obama, I agree with you entirely. I'm sure some on this thread will hate this opinion, but I think he's been a great President and will be judged so by historians. He hasn't done enough on global warming and the Arab Spring has not entirely worked out in the West's favor but those two issues are bigger and longer-lasting than any administration. The American economy has too much income inequality and faces the prospect of long-term sluggish growth, but Presidents generally have a limited power to improve the economy and practical solutions to either problem are not clear. 

 Steely_D wrote:  

A lot of people ran for President in '12, including Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson. so it's not as if the GOP decided to give Barack a layup in '12. It was far, far from clear that Obama was going to win a second term, even though the economy was improving fitfully by November '12. His popularity had been sliding for the latter part of his first term in part because people felt that he'd spent too much time pushing the ACA through and not enough time on job creation. Job creation didn't really pick up until after the election although IIRC there were signs in the fall of '12 that things were picking up. Romney was actually a pretty good candidate and could have won if he had been consistently more conservative on issues, had let voters get to know him and had countered the Democrats' depiction of him as a rich, out-out-of touch and heartless businessman. 

I don't know who you were thinking of "anyone good" in the GOP to run against Obama in '12. Jeb Bush would not have had a ghost of a chance: the stench of his brother's second term was still in everyone's nostrils and Jeb as President would have smelled too much like a dynasty. Paul Ryan wasn't well known enough to run back then (he could be a serious threat in '20). 

Even more Republicans ran in '16 and the party should have been able to do better than it's doing now against Hillary, the bête noire and rallying red flag of conservatives. You write about wanting to see a bona fide conservative intellectual, buddy, but I wonder whether Huntsman or Romney would fit the bill for you. As it is, I don't know if that's what the party needs right now. The blue-collar conservatives have split from the party of the rich conservatives and I don't know who could re-unite the two groups. The GOP needs someone like Bill Clinton who can point to a new direction for the party while uniting them with the force of his personality (and the party would need someone even more charismatic, someone like Reagan). 

Right now the only drama for this Fall seems to center on the fate of Republicans in Congress: will the GOP hold onto the Senate and how many seats will it lose in the House? The RNC can't really abandon Trump or divert money from his campaign to Republicans in Congress, though, because right now it depends on Trump for money: 

Donald Trump, With Bare-Bones Campaign, Relies on G.O.P. for Vital Tasks

Although he has opened new offices in Ohio and Florida in recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s field efforts rely primarily on roughly 500 Republican National Committee organizers scattered across 11 swing states.

...

But it also highlights the bind in which Republican leaders find themselves as Mr. Trump’s struggles threaten to undermine the party’s Senate and House candidates in November: As dependent as Mr. Trump is on their organization, the party is now deeply dependent on Mr. Trump’s surging base of small donors to finance it.

...

Some Republicans believe that with the fall campaign weeks away, the party should focus its money and efforts down ballot to protect Republicans’ congressional base. That would mean quietly ignoring Mr. Trump’s call this month for a 50-state field operation and instead emphasizing congressional districts and swing states that are also Senate and House battlegrounds.

“They can’t do anything publicly — you can’t rebuke your nominee,” said Liam P. Donovan, a former aide to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “But you could allocate resources to places where it helps up and down the ballot.”

The difficulty, though, is that as November approaches, the Republican National Committee is more reliant on Mr. Trump for cash than on other recent nominees. Millions of dollars are coming in through a small-donor-focused committee operated jointly with the R.N.C., which is splitting a share of the proceeds with Mr. Trump. Over half the money raised by the Trump campaign and the R.N.C. combined in July came from donors giving less than $200, far more than for any recent Republican nominee. (That figure does not include additional small donations raised by a joint fund-raising committee that Mr. Trump’s campaign treasurer controls, which is not required to file disclosures until October.)

 buddy wrote: 
Well, I was about to chime in with my predictable "what about Huntsman" but then I read this and I have to step back a bit...

Jon Huntsman Jr. endorses Trump

 buddy wrote: 
True dat - I was contending that if the GOP had put up a good candidate (Huntsman?) then it might've been easy to rally against Hillary by demonizing her.
But they couldn't come up with anyone that would do it.

I wonder if that's like last time: "Don't put up anyone good against Obama, since he's likely to get a second term and we shouldn't waste the effort." 
They're doing the same now, but it seems like a hostile takeover instead of a real strategy.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
hey scott i was being a bit sarcastic

hyman roth and i both agree that debbie is small potatoes

 buddy wrote: 
Excellent - exactly how it appears to me too. "The ends justify the means" seems to be an acceptable philosophy to most.

 miamizsun wrote: 
To be clear, it's my understanding that this super delegate system was implemented when Ted Kennedy made an upstart run at Jimmy Carter. The Party thought that intra-party strife led to them losing the election, so they wanted more stability, less tension, going into the convention. As bad as Debbie is, we cannot blame her for the superdelegate surprise.

 buddy wrote: 
Agree. All the Dems/Greens/Libertarians did was stand still (Clinton/Stein/Johnson are hardly innovative choices) and the GOP became useless to most Americans.
Without a GOP to turn to, the Dems will win handily.

Think: if the GOP could only have gotten their act together and had one reasonable candidate that they agreed to support, who would elect Hillary?

So, whom should we thank for her ascendancy? Republicans. 

 Steely_D wrote: 
i'm not sure what people thought the "unwinding" of the gop (or the dems) would look like

did folks expect the corruption to roll over and go away quietly?

======================================================

in a brilliant evil genius move the dems running the show executed a textbook play by immediately stacking the super delegates against their threat

sanders was effectively marginalized and then pimped out to recruit support

checkmate

the gop got caught napping with their pants down and lost control to the actual voters

i would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when they realized this

i'm surprised no one was tarred and feathered

i'd bet this woke up a lot of powerful politicians (and their handlers)

if the big ballers/shot callers in the parties don't lock this up properly then they risk having the voters choose a candidate 

 bokey wrote: 
I see it as: the GOP can't get their act together. The party is over and so the Dems can do whatever they want - as chaotic as that is.
To counter that, there would need to be a strong opponent (GOP or Green or Libertarian or whatever) candidate - which the GOP couldn't provide this time around because they have been all dysfunctional.