re: #168 reine.de.tout

I think it’ll be a cold day in hell if that happens.

The politicians are going to play games, publicly. They want that fringe vote; the middle votes are pretty much settled. So they will try to court those fringes. What we don’t always know is what goes on in private between members of the different parties. I suspect it’s often quite different that the public rhetoric we hear.

What is true is that:
1. We will elect a President every 4 years, and some people will be supportive of that President’s domestic policies, others will oppose them.
2. If there is a world crisis, our government officials will more often than not do what it is they need to do, even if it doesn’t match up with their campaign rhetoric.
3. The World As We Know It Will Not End.

Now, I voted for McCain and the Palin idiot. But when the election was over, well, that was that. But among many who were here at the time, I saw absolute raw, naked fear - true fear - at the election result. I was taken aback by the depth of it.

But the predictions of disaster have not come to pass - there’s plenty I don’t like, but our lives go on pretty much as they always have. I think the hyper-partisans on both sides are quite often the ones we see posting posting at blogs, etc. Most of the rest of us just go about doing what we’ve always done.

Taking your comments backwards (I’m Jewish, I go right to left and down to up), I, too, voted for McCain/Palin, but believe we only have one President at a time, who is entitled to praise when he gets it right and criticism when he gets it wrong.

With respect to the issue of extremes vs. moderation in politics, I don’t agree that the middle is settled. On the contrary, it is the extremes within each party that are settled and the middle which is largely apathetic and does not vote in primaries. (Hell, we barely get 60% turnout in the main presidential election). This creates a difficult paradox for those running for president, in that they must navigate a primary process in which they need to attract the votes of the left or right wing of their party (depending on whether they are Dem or Rep), without pissing off the much more vast middle on which they must depend to get elected in the general election. The last candidate who really did that well was Bill Clinton, although he benefitted from the fact that most of the Dems who might have given him a run for his money were too chickens—- to run when they saw GHW Bush’s poll numbers after Iraq I. To some extent, President Obama also succeeded in the transition between primary liberal and general election moderate, but there were other factors, chiefly a general and strong anti-Bush and anti-war sentiment and a severe economic meltdown that almost couldn’t have been timed better if it was intentional, which played a huge role in his election.