Who Are You Voting For?

It's well reported the excuses her office manufactured to make it seem less criminal that she abused her position to try to fire her brother, that doesn't make it any less criminal unfortunately, and certainly doesn't explain her background with radical right wing fringe groups, or her dealings with now infamous and indicted Senator Ted Stevens.

Just ask, and I'll keep you up to date. Latest Gallup poll has Obama in the lead still: http://www.gallup.com/poll/109996/Ga...McCain-43.aspx No surprise there. Nobody wants a repeat of the catastrophe that has been the last 8 years. Don't know where you're getting your stats from. I'd imageine from the same place that told you McCain was ever "leading". Palin as the VP was a desperate choice for obvious reasons. McCain was trailing in the polls then as he is now, there were far more qualified and experienced candidates for him to choose from, and most of the remaining undecided voters were Hillary supporters on the fence. Clearly, he chose her to pander to that base, not for criteria or reasons that considered to any length qualification standards or ability.

Let's see some evidence. Or even a rebuttal to the abuses of power the state trooper committed, which include tasering his own son, threatening her father's life, and using his gun to shoot a rodent. And you say he was wrongfully dismissed? Did you even know any of this? Did you know that she's been so cooperative that they haven't even had to issue subpoenas?

Her administration does seem to have given mixed signals as to who knew what, and when, but all signs point to the trooper violating any standard of ethical conduct on more than one occasion.

Take your condescension somewhere else; I check Gallup every day, along with Rasmussen, and usually Zogby, too.

I'm not sure why you think today's Gallup poll is relevant when discussing whether or not McCain made the choice out of desperation, because last I checked the Republican nominee can't see into the future. You'd need a poll from the time period just before he made the choice. See below.

Uh, how about Gallup, the same organization you just cited? A day before he informed Palin she was the choice, they had McCain down by a grand total of...1. Yeah, Obama sure had this thing locked up...

Reuters/Zogby had McCain leading as of the 20th. I didn't believe it, but the idea that this race hasn't been neck-and-neck for virtually the entire month of August is easily rebutted. Obama has a lead outside of the margin of error now, but then again, he just held a convention. And a convention that produced an historically small bump in the polls, at that.

Right, because Hillary supporters are largely made up of pro-life evangelicals, right? Sorry, this line of thinking doesn't make any sense, and some of the liberals on this very site have already said as much. Campaigns conduct internal polling on these sorts of things all the time, and no one reasonably believes (or believed) that they were going to win over large swaths of liberal Clinton supporters with the Palin choice. This is sheer speculation, and it just doesn't add up. If you want to say he was trying to rally the conservative base, it's still speculation, but that, at least, is plausible.

As for the polls: you can believe what you like, but the organization you cite doesn't even agree with you. Try reading the releases and analysis attached to those polls, and you'll see they regard it as close. A 6-point lead with a 2-point margin of error immediately after the Democratic convention is statistically insignificant. Here's a quote from the poll you linked to, but apparently chose not to read:

"A review of last week's tracking during the Democratic convention shows that Obama did not begin to show major gains until the tracking averages reported on Thursday, covering the first three nights of the Denver convention. So it is possible that any potential McCain convention bounce may not be evident for a few days."

Maybe it's neck and neck, or maybe Obama has a modest lead. We don't really know yet. Either way, it's quite obvious that you're narrowing in on whatever data tells you what you want to hear.

That said, I'll likely be moving these posts into The 2008 Election Thread a bit later, as it'd be better if we didn't clog up Bobby's poll with arguments.

I wanted McCain to pick someone who had had harsh criticizes about his policies/ideas/etc. during the primaries. Romney would have been an excellent choice, and he knows economics extremely well, too. It wasn't necessarily his picking Palin that turned me off, but him just not picking Romney.

For Videodrome and Yoda: Gallup polls are extremely unreliable polling methods for Presidential elections. For one, summer polls are generally much different from fall; above all, it's a national poll. Since we don't elect a President based on a national popular vote the poll is pretty much useless.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

For the record, Palin disagrees with McCain about ANWR, and has been quite blunt about it.

Agreed; I'm simply countering the notion that McCain was making a desperate choice in response to slipping poll numbers. Polls of battleground states are a better barometer of how tight the race is...of course, they show it pretty tight, too.

The funny thing is, though, she has a lot of contradicting quotes. Such as "open it up" and "don't drill." So yes, I'd rather he had picked a candidate that didn't argue with themselves.

When did she say not to drill there?

And if you don't like candidates that don't argue with themselves, then you better be voting for a third party. I can fake a debate transcript using Obama's shifting public statements.

Excuse me, you are correct. I misread a quote.

No sweat. For a second there I thought I'd lost my mind.

I do love how Palin has had a few positive things to say about Obama, including his energy policy in regards to Alaska. I find that quite amusing.

I was just in Alaska and saw (but didn't actually meet) Sarah Palin. All I can say is that most everybody who worked in or visited Safeway at that time seemed to love her. I was still halfway trying to decide if she really was the Governor, but she certainly was.

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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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And how exactly does that exonerate her of being involved, again?

I never made any claims about Palin's brother's behavior, I merely stated it's illegal for her or her office staff to be involved in his firing. Whether or not Palin's contrived stories about him hold water in the end is irrelevant, it's at least a charge of misconduct to abuse her position to have a state trooper fired. You seem to be trying to ignore that glaring fact, and using their unsubstantiated allegations about this guy as some kind of red herring.

You're talking about the Zogby report of the 5 point lead McCain managed for all of a few days out of the entire race? That was a short lived spike coming on the heels of McCain's smear campaign, hurling grade school barbs and erroneous accusations in living rooms across the nation. Americans aren't easily fleeced however, (Bush made sure of that when he betrayed public trust and conspired to doctor WMD reports for an excuse to wage war on Iraq) and Obama was back in his regular lead as per usual only a few days later.

Let's call a spade a spade, and at least assume we have some grasp over the obvious here. Everyone knew McCain was sinking like the Titanic before he chose Palin. He chose Palin to lure ambivalent Hillary supporters because they are the 8% voters remaining that make a difference, evangelical and pro-life or not. He would have to assume they didn't immediately jump on board with Obama for reasons he could control by choosing Palin as VP. It's not like he's going to go get Nancy Pelosi. He took what he had, job qualifications weren't the least of his concern, He's "tokenizing" her. She's his "rockstar" by virtue of being female. That's all this guy has left.

ABC reports here:

"Palin's selection will help McCain appeal to female voters -- particularly disaffected supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remain skeptical of Sen. Barack Obama."
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Conve...5686244&page=1

Your own conservative Fox News reported:

"McCain Targets Frustrated Clinton Supporters"
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/06...ive-for-unity/

If you think McCain isn't targeting Hillary supporters, you might want to tell him that, because I don't think he got that memo:


So it wouldn't be like he lost ground or only caught up by a point, but instead they must be even or Obama is barely leading. lulz That's quite an assumption you're drawing from Reuters "possible". So you're holding your breath on the outside chance that McCain magically might have narrowed the gap, despite him showing patterns of losing the entire race? lol I'm glad I'm not you..

Look, the last 8 years have been nothing short of an absolute disaster. The Bush legacy has become a byword for all that is bad about politics in general, not just the GOP. Bush burned the public on his contrived and unilateral war, he burned himself in the sense that he was duped by a few rock throwers resorting to hijacking a plane into spending $800 billion we don't have for front row seats to a civil war (and all of the idiot alarmists with childlike compulsions to see explosions went hook line and sinker), the Halliburton KBR agenda to let his lobbyist buddies profit from the war on private contracts billed to US taxpayers is everyone's news, his entire cabinet has been fired, "resigned", or tried in front of the Senate Judiciary committee amid scrutiny, scandal and speculation, and Bush now has the dubious distinction of being the biggest loser president all-time with the lowest job approval in American history. 8 years of that..

Do you honestly, in the breadth of all of your collective wisdom and ability to reason, think that America is going to elect McCain, and risk another 4 years of that ****?

The part I don't get is how ANY of Hillary's supporters buy into "Pro-Life" and/or are "Evangelical". I would have thought that amounted to 0%.

Looks like you didn't read my post.

I missed the "or not", is that what you're implying? I've voted for more "radicals" than you could possibly imagine, at least since I could vote, beginning in 1976. Please explain, but only if you can.

I guess I shouldn't be so amused that I need to spell this out. Though, I thought that short novel in my last post explained it thoroughly. I'll do my best to simplify it here:

If they' weren't automatically in Obama's camp after Hillary dropped, then it's foolish to assume they must be influenced by conservative values (eg: Evangelical, Pro-Life). It's safer to conclude the few remaining Hillary supporters on the fence, not with Obama, would sooner vote McCain with his token woman Palin, for sake of being a woman, than they would for a more liberal slant.

Hope that helps clear things up.

It clears your opinion up but it makes no sense whatsoever. Would you vote for a man as a Prez over a Woman as a vice-prez? Of course you would! Do you actually understand women at all? Do you think that they are actually all that much more-emotional and less-committed to their pre-nominee views? If women believed in pro-Choice and "Anti-Evangelical" (if there is such a thing) before Hillary got flown, they sure as hell still believe in it afterwards. You seem to be acting like women are somehow "weaker" than men when it comes to their convictions, and from my own experience, you couldn't be more wrong.

You keep missing the point. You're erroneously assuming those undecided Hillary supporters must be dyed in the wool Democrats, and not simply just disenchanted neo-cons, centrist feminists, or merely indifferent bystanders. I'm not "acting" like anything, and certainly not as you characterized. I'm a liberal progressive, a staunch advocate of women's rights. You seem to be confusing me with intolerant conservatives with regards to women. I think they can do whatever they want, I don't live in the bible belt where the pervading opinion is women belong in kitchens. I'm saying the remaining 8% aren't very "convicted" to a particular side at all, or else they'd already be there. McCain is making a play for the conservatives that jumped ship on Bush and went to vote on the blue ticket for Hillary and now feel stranded, or non-partisan feminists, women that want to see women in power, regardless of religion.

That is a bit insulting and untrue, I do all the cooking around here.

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I'm going to shut up now because this "argument'' is totally irrelevant to the presidential argument. I'm sorry if you think I'm wrong (I'm still WAY more radical than you could ever wish for in your life), but if you ever post something which others agree with, please let me know.

Then where in the hell is my dinner?!?

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