The setup:
"Experience" this... your majesty
Smug, smarmy Hillary gets kicked to the curb...
A pair of stunning upset victories in Iowa last night sent the race for the White House into disarray. Illinois Democrat Barack Obama toppled Hillary Clinton, the former first lady and New York senator. It was an historic triumph for the first black American to emerge as a leading candidate for one of the two main parties.
Republican Mike Huckabee, the folksy Baptist from Arkansas, surged to an upset win, toppling the establishment front-runner Mitt Romney.
And the smackdown:
Hillary came in 3rd, but she still got almost twice as many votes as Huckabee
Huckabee won Iowa with nearly 36,000 votes.
Hillary lost Iowa, and came in 3rd, with 29% of the vote. A projected 220,000 people turned out to vote in the Democratic caucuses, meaning Hillary got 29% of those voters, or an estimated 63,800 - nearly twice the number of votes that Huckabee got. (Actually, the Des Moines Register's latest numbers show Hillary getting just over 67,000 votes, so I was right.)
So our 3rd place candidate beat their first place candidate by almost a factor of two. Not sure what it means, but it's funny as hell.
Of course, appreciating the above would have required a solid grasp of stuff like percentages and fractions, so I'm sure you'll understand why it sailed right over Neo's head.
WHAT HE SAID. Exactly.
24 comments:
Since Clinton and Huckabee were not running in the same race, your point is moot. It seems, though, that Democrat voters in Iowa are less lethargic than their Republican counterparts.
Since Clinton and Huckabee were not running in the same race, your point is moot.
Wait for it ... wait for it ... wait for it ...
It seems, though, that Democrat voters in Iowa are less lethargic than their Republican counterparts.
Ding, ding, ding!!! From utter cluelessness to actual awareness in two short sentences. A new record.
"Of course, appreciating the above would have required a solid grasp of stuff like percentages and fractions, so I'm sure you'll understand why it sailed right over Neo's head."
All of which comes in very handy when one decides to compare apples to oranges, doesn't it? Comparing Clinton's numbers to any but those of her opponents is stupid. Read this part slowly: Huckabee ran in a different race, so he was not one of Clinton's opponents. See?
I thought you were some kind of tech or science guy?
Besides, the point was that Clinton got smacked by the voters in Iowa.
It seems that fergie doesn't get it.
Who wrote this--
It seems, though, that Democrat voters in Iowa are less lethargic than their Republican counterparts.
Oh wait--that was fergus.
And what did he write? A comparison between the two races.
So fergie compared the democratic race with the republican race...
With me so far, fergie?
Read this part sloooowly...
You compared the races.
so you may say that Hillary got 'smacked', but, by your very comparison, all republican candidates got 'more smacked'.
Why does Fergus bother? Is it just to ruin everyone's fun?
Fuck off, ya misery. Go and high-five Cacademia.
*ahem*...I'm pleased that Hillary lost (as much as I care, which isn't much), but I suspect for reasons more noble than Cacademia's raging misogyny.
Who cares whether Clinton or Romney got smacked down by voters in Iowa?
These are overwhelmingly white, predominately rural, middle and lower middle class, over 50% self-identified evangelical voters who have to stand up, walk across a room and show everyone - friends and strangers - who they support which subjects them to a certain amount of peer pressure. And the Iowa caucus doesn't pick winners through majority vote anyway. It's a complicated system based on the voting history of a county which itself can be decided based on a coin toss.
That doesn't reflect America's demographics, which are much more urban and multicultural or how voting works, which last time I checked, was still secret ballot, so of course the results will be skewed. This caucus has got to be the most unrepresentative waste of time and energy that the American system exhibits.
Obama is from the state next door and Huckabee is also middle America. Quelle surprise that they would win. So what? It's not like the Iowa caucus has a great track record or picking the nominee or the president.
I'd say that I'd have to partly agree with Fergus in that there is no real comparison between the Dem and Repub caucus goers in Iowa. The Dem caucusing process is very different than the Repub one and isn't really reflective of the primary voting process in general. One thing that you can take away from Iowa is that the Dems are charged-up (their caucus turn-out was double 2004) and it would seem that their poised to dominate this election cycle.
I believe that Huckabee shouldn't get too excited since he'll face a very different voting crowd in New Hampshire. Also, I believe that it would be monumentally myopic to conclude anything about Clinton's campaign from the Iowa results. She’s an incredibly smart and savvy campaigner and those who have underestimated the Clinton's in the past have tended to end up with egg on their collective faces.
And why might Republican voters be lethargic.. Hmm..
Could it possibly be the ill advised, high school bully , damn the Constitution policies that their 'duly elected' leader has erected over the last seven years?
Could it be the utter disregard for conservative ideals and Us Law by the Republican party? Could it be the unfathomably high deficit created by their team? Or maybe the thousands of lives and untold billions they've pissed away on delusions of having a 51st state in the middle east?
Or is it merely that the realize the writing is on the wall and all that unconstitutional power grabbing they boys have done has amounted to squat more than just handing Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama the right to determine what the definition of torture is for the US government along with the ability to break into the houses at night and disappear them into legal limbo.
Nah, most likely its the fact that people aren't going to easily forget all of the above and are even less likely to forgive the party that tried to turn the United States into their own personal theocratic playground.
With luck no new Republicans will come into power in the next hundred years or so.
I don't know how Americans put up with the process...the endless campaigning, the primaries, the primaries, the primaries and then the elections themselves, with unfathomable voting lists and ballots and...whatnot. Not to mention just how stupid the media is in reporting on the whole thing.
Seriously, it's crazy-making. How do you put up with it? Or is "50% voter turn-out" the answer to that question?
Sorry, if that sounds smug. I was just talking to someone about American politics and we both decided that we have enough shit going in our politics without this added distraction.
Sparky, my dim-witted friend, it seems you are in desperate need of reading comprehension classes. CC called the other guy stupid for saying that Clinton got "kicked to the curb" and then tried to back up his point by going off on a tangent and comparing her totals to Huckabee, who wasn't in her race. All I did was point that out.
They have adult education where you live, don't they?
"Fuck off, ya misery."
Tiggy, I'm disappointed. You can do better than that, can't you?
I'm too tired to do better than that. You know perfectly well what this blog is about: the cathartic experience that comes with dismissing stupid wingnuts out-of-hand.
Ti-Guy said...
Seriously, it's crazy-making. How do you put up with it? Or is "50% voter turn-out" the answer to that question?
Actually, a lot of countries have been experiencing declining voter turnout rates for the last several decades. I believe that Canada hovers at around the 60-65% range.
I think that we here in the states have been seeing a slight reverse of the trend in the last couple of election cycles where we almost reached 60%! The funny thing was that that was considered a "big" turn out and polling stations were complaining about needing to stay open longer to accommodate all voters. I guess we'd gotten used to low turnout rates and weren't ready for it.
I've never discounted voter apathy as being the biggest reason. The problem is usually the electorate doesn't know what the hell it wants. On one hand they'll complain that politics are "too negative" and that's what turned them off. On the other they'll say that it's too boring and the candidates are "all the same".
To be honest, I really don't think the media plays as large a role as everyone gives them credit for. The vast majority of voters don't watch news programs and their only real exposure to politics is during election cycles when political ads interrupt their American Idol programming. I think that basically voters vote on either a single issue (ex. "I think Bush is doing a terrible job, but he's against abortion so I'm voting for him") or name recognition (ex. "Oh Clinton, I liked her husband so I'm voting for her").
Here's something I was wondering about last night... If Obama wins the Democrats' nomination, would it substantially increase black voter turnout? I wonder of the impact might be rather profound. I'm thinking it would. And if people start to get a sense as the election approaches that this is happening, might there be a mobilization, on the "other side", of people who are bothered by the notion that black voters will turn out en masse to vote for Obama simply because he's black? Is the racial divide still great enough that we could actually see this happen, and if so, to what extent might it cross party lines?
Am I nuts?
The same sort of thing could happen with Hillary, I suppose, but I don't expect that it would have as great an impact because lots of conservative women probably wouldn't trust a woman to run the country anyway.
"You know perfectly well what this blog is about: the cathartic experience that comes with dismissing stupid wingnuts out-of-hand."
Nicely done, Ti-guy: succinct, yet it says it all. I think that you may have just earned yourself a spot on the masthead here.
Counter-Coulter:
I believe that Canada hovers at around the 60-65% range.
Yeah, but this is Canada. No one cares what happens here, not foreigners, anyway.
Fergus:
Nicely done, Ti-guy: succinct, yet it says it all. I think that you may have just earned yourself a spot on the masthead here.
Nice try, but you're not going to convince me that anything is improved by examining wingnut issues more critically and soberly. When you do, you get drawn into the vortex of stupidity and irrationality and well, who needs that?
By the way, I'm still trying to figure out Hillary's health care plan. In few more decades, I might actually grasp it.
Shorter fergusrush: "Given the almost 6800 posts that have appeared here at CC HQ, if I work really, really, really hard, I can find the occasional one that I can misunderstand and subsequently misinterpret, at which point I can feel smugly superior provided I completely ignore the other 99.98% of those posts whose end result is to hand me my imbecilic ass on a plate."
Careful there, CC - Fergus might get his panties in a bunch and then refer to you as "Tootsie". Actually, he probably won't. It loses that super-duper sexist slant when applied to a man.
Keep repeating that laughable bullshit to yourself, CC. You may even get yourself to believe it one day.
And don't fear, Tootsie, I'll keep that little name for you alone.
*yawn*
Bye, ferg ... go be a dumbass on someone else's blog.
My hero ...
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