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In recent times, Truman beat Dewey by only a bit, but folks were voting for and not against at the time. Eisenhower defeated Stevenson primarily because he was a winning war general of enormous fame, and Stevenson wasn't. The problem with Ike after he got to office was a) his health (too many cigarettes for too many years) and then those pesky heart attacks, and b) he had been a general after all, and generals give orders and soldiers follow them. He never figured out how Washington operated in respect to this. On the upside, he kept the Russians guessing because he was just crazy enough to drop one on them and they knew it, and he did recall how the German Reichautobahn system was able to ferry troops and material quickly and double as landing strips.

You young folks won't remember or know this, but as much as you hate Carter now, it seems that everyone voted for him because after the Nixon-Agnew-Ford debacle, the nation was looking for a simple person with simple untainted values, and they found him in Georgia. He won by 57 electoral votes over Ford. His luck at timing was about as keen as that of Hoover.

"I'm not comparing Romney to Reagan, just that the GOP race and the general mood of the voters then and now are similar."

It's good that you don't compare Romney to Reagan. I lived in California when Reagan was governor so I got to see a whole lot more of him at a very different angle than y'all who only saw the presidential side. Romney is head and shoulders smarter, more intelligent, than Reagan but lacks the earthiness and fireside manner. Who was it on SNL who said with the phoney accent that "It is better to look good than to feel good." This also applies to the POTUS.

Slowplay wrote:

gdanaher wrote:Finally, I can sign up my two dogs to vote, sign those cards and get them registered, and then send a request that at the time of the election we will all be out of town and need to vote using an absentee ballot. They will send it out to us all and we can vote by mail. No picture ID involved at all, and anyone in the world can do it.

Yes, we get it - you're against the voter ID law.

Not entirely. I want a way to prevent aliens and ineligible felons from voting. The system that our legislature created was short sighted, ill conceived, and unworkable. There must be a means by which every potential voter is vetted to the extent needed to assure that they are breathing citizens with voter privileges. No more 'vote early, vote often'. But it can not be done at the expense of a minority of our citizens who are unable to jump through the current DPS hoops.

As to voter ID, the only documentation I've ever needed to show for a drivers license was a social security card, which isn't supposed to be used for id purposes, to prove I didn't owe any child support. They didn't want to see my US passport, or the identification that would show I served in a foreign nation or anything. But they have a picture of me. And it seems that non-citizens (I'd say aliens but I don't want to offend anyone) can get a license with a little effort and stamina, so it is no proof of anything. Then the issue gets to the elderly. My MIL is 86 and actually still drives so she has a picture ID. Not everyone at that age is ambulatory but if they are still breathing, they still have constitutional rights to vote. The local DPS office issues numbers when you come through the door and it can take a couple of hours to get called. Elderly folks just wanting an ID card shouldn't have to wait that long, likely pay a fee for it (poll tax is unconstitutional), just so they can vote. Nextly, not every community has a DPS office that issues ID cards. The last number I saw had the list of counties WITHOUT an office at 81, which is to say that if you live in one of these counties you are going to have to travel some distance for an ID card just to exercise your right to vote. I can see why the courts have struck this down. The fix would be to create and man mobile DPS offices that could work out of a bus and cruise the state, community to community, and get everyone photographed. Finally, I can sign up my two dogs to vote, sign those cards and get them registered, and then send a request that at the time of the election we will all be out of town and need to vote using an absentee ballot. They will send it out to us all and we can vote by mail. No picture ID involved at all, and anyone in the world can do it. Why, you don't even need a voter card--there are places you can do it on line via the state government sites. And you can thank the Texas Legislature for that screwup.

fishman wrote:Voter ID sure would help. If people just look at what he's done, and hasn't done, and vote accordingly it would be a GOP landslide.Once the GOP has a nomination I think Obama will be attacked with facts and HIS failed policy's.

What ever happened to the good old days, when folks voted FOR someone instead of AGAINST someone. I can think of more than a couple POTUSs that probably shouldn't have been elected and wound up stinking up the joint. Guys like Gingrich who are full of hate are particularly troubling. Need to have candidates who can spell out what they will do and how they will do it in detail. Those seem to be quite rare these days, as are 'statesmen'.

You'd think that after shooting yourself in the foot you'd discover the discomfort and not do it again, but those folks at the top of the heap just keep repeating bad behavior. I was talking to a bunch of guys the other evening--essentially a bull session-- and nearly everyone was of the same mind in regard to the latest women's health disaster. The Republicans are taking a do or die stand on this matter and are munging abortion with birth control with women's health, and we know what that means. The end result of our discussion was that they can't seem to figure out how the governor can just come up with 30 million bucks when he can't fund the existing programs nor education nor DPS, nor transportation under the last budget, and has the state park system asking for donations. Then too, these guys have wives, and some of them have mothers, and the women are, well, irritated at the sorry approach the Republian heirarchy has taken toward women's health issues. There's a way to split out abortion from everything else, but my goodness, if the Republicans want to win an election they are going to need the female vote, and 5 months before the general election is not the best time to alienate the voters. Most folks seem to get it better than the candidates know. Unemployment is slowly getting better, fuel prices are a global supply and demand issue due in part to the Indian and Chinese economies, and folks want women to have decent prenatal care because if they don't, the result often is a child with huge, expensive, problems. Pay me now or pay me later. The Republican party folks have been listening to the wrong mouths, and the result will be a defeat in November.

Political attitudes of the nation generally resemble a bell curve, just like the one your college stat teachers taught you about with respect in IQ, test grades, job performance, and a lot of other things. For anyone to win, Democrat or Republican, they are going to have to inspire those folks in the middle to turn out, support their candidate, and vote. The Republicans, meaning the viable Republican presidential candidates, have all made an effort to court the extreme end of the party--the Tea Party folks, and those who think that the Tea Party is too liberal. They have spent their capital on fudging birth control at the expense of female health, they have given lip service to balancing the budget but not one of them has offered a useful plan to do so. (perhaps Paul, but then, what are the chances?) They blamed the current president on high unemployment even though the economy was in the crapper a year before the last election yet shun the possibility that the administration could have anything at all to do with the recovery. They have spun wheels attempting in several states to mandate that voters must have state issued photo identification, even though there is often no way to guarantee that said photo ID belongs to a citizen, leaving the elderly without a franchise. Abscentee voting was totally overlooked by the Texas legislature. The end result is that they are losing a large percentage of female voters who can see through the shallow rhetoric into the sexist attitude that it is, and dumping any chance at the Hispanic vote if it ever existed to begin with. The offended may not vote Democratic though many will. Most will stay home, not wanting to offend the party by switching. The red states will stay red, the blue states will stay blue, and because of their arrogance, the swing states will vote blue because Republicans have made life under a Republican administration too scary not to vote it down. Not a single Republican candidate currently inspires excitement to the extent that the populace would turn out on a snowy day in unprecedented numbers to vote for them. And the party has played with scare tactics it would seem--Obamacare as we all know it. But they don't offer any hard numbers to explain why it is evil---just talk about those evil Democrats. The folks in the middle, in the center of that bell curve are catching on to the crap and want to know the facts.Then they can make their own educated decisions, rather than relying upon the talking heads with red and blue hats.