I am a life time democrat but I actually find Hiliary Clinton to be even worse than Donald Trump. I base that on what I perceive as the chances of either getting us into a large war.
The US has such a large military budget that it acts like a war magnet. If there isn't a war once a decade there could be talk of reducing spending which would be harmful to all those special interests funding campaigns. So, basically an anti-war candidate is unelectable because they wouldn't get big money behind them. There are always anti-war candidates at the start, but they never make it to the final two because you need the right funding mix to get there.
Hey that's how the voting system to elect a president is supposed to work. More than two "real" candidates ends up wasting votes. If we have two liberal and one conservative president and the a voting split like this: 1. liberal 25%, 2. liberal %35 and conservative 40%
The conservative will win even though 60% voted liberal. You don't have this problem if there are only two choices.
Pew has released research on the most narcissistic presidents of the United States. Some pretty widely-celebrated leaders are at the top of the narcissism charts [1].
In actuality, your statement in addition to Pew's research is unfounded and extremely fuzzy. Where do you and others get off on deriving a person's social leadership capabilities with their individual psychological leanings?
Funny to see FDR right near the top of the list, because it has always been a surprisingly unpopular view of his presidency that his Trump-like ability to manipulate the media to his advantage (his fireside chats and his rather quotable speeches) led to the American peoples' renewed confidence in the markets even though it took WWII to truly end the economic hardships more than a decade later. If do wish to wholly agree that narcissism does not make good social leadership, we must then question and re-align the most widely-held views of the 20th century in the US.
WTF are you talking about? Can you point to any modern political leaders who are not narcissists? And if you can find any who are genuinely not narcissistic, they're surely sociopathic.
It's nearly impossible to get anywhere in politics without one or both of these qualities. And people like you happily elect them. ("People like you" being a voter in a democratic republic. If you vote, you're most likely guilty of helping to elect narcissistic and/or sociopathic people to power. There's probably almost no one on this message forum who isn't guilty of this.)
I'm not sure how much weight that has. Forget what people say to/in public settings and look at their current & previous actions.
If Trump were not in presidential race and putting on public face, how do you think he would treat TTiP based on his lifetime actions?
I think he would support & exploit it every way he could, & i think thats what he will do in reality regardless of what he states publicly but that's just me.
Never trust what politicians say if all their actions run contrary.
As transient as his positions on social issues seem to be, his public statements on "free trade" appear to have been eerily consistent. Here is him talking in 1988, and if you substituted "China" for "Japan", it could be a speech from yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPs17_AkTI
No idea whether this is consistent with his actions, though.
>I'm not sure how much weight that has.
>think he would support & exploit it every way he could
I'm not going to claim to know Trump's ambitions but you're dismissing the source and countering with "that has no weight...I think..."?
The article yesterday about the uninformed vs the misinformed mentioned this: in a time where we are overwhelmed with information, people dismiss things that don't agree with their preconceived notions as "baseless", while seeking "news" that supports their biases. It's a problem.
I was really trying to stay out of debating the US presidential race (again, not american not my business, do not even know all the people up for election).
So I was trying to generally say 'Don't trust what politicians say, look at what they do'. That's it. I should have used somebody other than Trump as example, it was just a contrived example.
side note - I saw cruise/cruse/cruze (ted) introduce his running mate recently. She started singing some song.. I don't know either of them or their politics but it was the weirdest, most awkward creepy thing I've seen politicians on tv do.
It was seriously creepy and weird. That can't be hard to beat.
Since you're not American, where are you from? If it's Europe, this is pretty bad:
>side note - I saw cruise/cruse/cruze (ted) introduce his running mate recently.
"Cruise" is either a kind of ship or a reference to a nutty but highly successful actor. I don't know what "cruse" is. "Cruze" is a car by Chevrolet, an American company, and probably not a model sold in Europe.
"Cruz", however, is Lyin' Ted's name, and it's a pretty common Spanish surname as I understand. Spain is in Europe, and assuming you're European, as most non-US posters are, probably not that far from you. (And if you're not European, the main other likely region would be Latin America, where it's completely preposterous that you wouldn't be familiar with that common surname.)
He puts a large enough emphasis on it and garners enough support from it. I doubt he's going to do a 180 if elected.
It's not quite like George Bush's offhand "we will not do nation building" or Obama's offhand "this will be the most transparent administration ever". The unfairness of US trade deals is fairly central to his campaign and his support base of working class whites in hollowed out ex-industrial America.
"TPP is going to be worse... we can't let it happen... if I am president first day - boom - it's over... you know what it is 5,000 pages... that none of our people even read..."
And shutting down GB. Which goes to say it doesn't matter if they seem "nice" or not, they can still let you down - the important thing is how tied to the establishment they are.
Are you kidding? It's quite likely she'll be elected. Her unfavorability rating from polls is very high, but Trump's is even higher. I'm not sure how Cruz's compared, but it's way up there too. The only guy who has a low unfavorability rating is Bernie, and it looks pretty certain that he's not getting the nomination nor running as an independent.
What's going to happen with this election is anyone's guess IMO. It could be Trump vs. Clinton, in which case Clinton will likely win (lower unfavorability). Or it could be Cruz vs. Clinton, which again probably favors Clinton (IMO, Cruz is far more dangerous than Trump, but that's my opinion). Or, we could get a brokered GOP convention and Kasich could get the nomination, and in a Kasich vs. Clinton fight, Kasich will likely win. Or, Kasich could get the nomination, Trump could run as an independent splitting the ticket, and who knows who'll win, though likely it'll again be Hillary because Trump/Kasich will split the GOP voters. Or Bernie could change his mind and run as an independent since the DNC has screwed him over so much, making a 3-way or 4-way race with a completely unpredictable outcome (though it might end up with the House of Representatives making the decision).
I'm not kidding. Unfavourability ratings don't decide elections (look at some historical ratings of previous presidents).
Trump and Clinton have been tied in national polls recently (there was even an outlier showing +3 Trump) and this is before he has started attacking her and before any debates. She's going down.
> The votes are almost entirely in right now, and Sanders would need a miracle.
Its pretty unlikely that either candidate will have a sufficient number of pledged delegates. Hillary seems far ahead because of early statements of support from superdelegates, made at a time when her support numbers (both overall and within the party) were much higher, and here unfavorable ratings with the general election electorate much lower, when no one could imagine any other Democratic candidate garnering anywhere close to as much support through the primary and caucus process, and before she was roundly out fundraised by Sanders.
Now, while the media coverage of delegate counts has largely treated these superdelegate statements of support as equivalent to pledged delegates awarded through the primary and caucus process, they are not.
Of course, I was actually talking about winning the presidency. I'm not arguing about her actual chances, nor whether I want her to win--simply stating that she's a big favorite to win it in the markets.
62% on predictit, where people are estimating with their money.
