In reply to: This is why I think that he will flame out. posted by EricCartman
I agree that identifying a centrist to run is difficult to do. I wish that Mark Cuban didn't go insane, and that Petraeus didn't go all in. Then, we might have a viable ticket.
He seems to be a bit unhinged at times. We already have that in Trump, we don’t need more of it.
Like always, I could be wrong here.
He got criticized that the policy he was sticking up for was "DEI on paper" instead of "DEI in practice", but mostly by hairpullers. I thought his intentions and the substance were valid.
I do agree that he's wading into more online squabbles; I don't think there's any question he's gearing up to get into politics, which is why he sold the Mavs.
All rich people lose some sense of reality over time, but man, we can do a lot worse in our national leadership than him.
I used to read his blog a long time ago. He usually had reasonable takes on issues, and I do like that he is trying to help society with his "cost-plus" Rx company.
His twitter fight was on my mind, so I might have a bad read here.
Bill Ackman is promoting Dean Philips on X. It will be interesting to see if Philips is able to gain some traction here, since he is the only alternative to Biden that doesn't seem insane.
something that many folks in his world have stopped speaking up for. Personally I think it was an important viewpoint as I said in that thread when a person of color fails it is because of DEI but when a white male fails the company just made a bad choice. Plenty of DEI hires add value to their companies and we dont hear about it. As Cuban said when done as check the box it is not beneficial when done with purpose it can be.
We've done it twice with resounding, unimaginable failure (Hoover and Trump).
The presidency is the most important political job on the planet.
Give me the best politician possible, preferably with the word Governor on their resume. Whether there's a D or an R after their name, I couldn't care less anymore. But no thanks on the business person. They're guaranteed to fail because they lack the requisite skillset(EDIT: And no, business politics don't count because they're a completely different animal).
From the end of WWII:
Top tier: Reagan, Truman, and Clinton
Mid range: Ike, JFK, LBJ, Bush 41, Obama
Needs improvement: Nixon, Ford, Carter, W, Trump
Biden is too soon to rank.
Look around, the people that run for office these days are clowns. The serious ones leave, and new clowns take their place. I’m open to a governor in 2024 from either party. But all that I see is two old dudes yelling at clouds. Until a better option appears, I’ll continue to hope for better alternatives regardless of their background.
Also, Hoover got boned by the Fed. He was helpless to prevent the Great Depression. And the Fed would have made FDR a bottom tier president too, if he had only served two terms.
And in some ways made the Depression worse despite good intentions. A lot of it had to do with Hoover’s intransigence and some really bad decisions, such as signing the Smoot-Hawley Act into law.
He didn't understand how government worked. He had zero leadership skills.
He thought business was going to bail him out. I also don't think he supported Smoot. I think he just packed the balls to veto it.
And to EC's post, I think Trump is below need improvement. Though you could argue that by outsourcing all legislation to McConnell things got done. But like Hoover, he didn't know how government worked and outside riling up his base he zero leadership skills.
Back to Hoover, Coolidge almost predicted exactly exactly how the depression played out. With his lowest predicted marks for Hoover.
He didn’t understand how government worked. And as a businessman, he thought he knew better.
He was a benevolent, non-charismatic, Constitution-respecting, boring Trump.
Ross Perot would have been just as bad.
The federal reserve couldn't afford to cut interest rates unless it could get off the gold standard. We also needed to tolerate deficit spending, which Hoover was against.
Hoover was dealt a bad hand, but he needed to do more than he did. Maybe if he played his hand perfectly he still loses but he wasn't some helpless victim.
sorry. … We won’t do it again.”
—Ben Bernanke, November 8, 2002, in a speech given at “A Conference to Honor Milton Friedman … On the Occasion of His 90th Birthday.”
I think he reconsidered whether the Friedmanite explanation was correct.
But if you read Golden Fetters you'll see that the fed did what they did after the stock market crashed because of the constraints of the Gold Standard. And once they figured that out they needed to run a budget deficit.
If he changed his position, that would be a huge shift. I feel like the story would have made the rounds at least once in the financial press. I can’t recall seeing it. (It doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. It just seems like something the WSJ editorial board would take issue with for a few days.)
face by Bernanke on the causality of the Depression.
Bernanke I think changed his mind about how aggressive the fed needed to be in order to avoid the depression. But I hadn't realized Friedman advocated a large QE program for Japan when it was in its slump, so Bernanke might say that friedman was right and he should have expanded the money supply earlier and faster.
I'm also attaching an article below talking about the parallels between the Depression and Great Recession. In each case the fed raised rates for seemingly reasonable reasons (commodity prices driving pre recession inflation, popping the stock market bubble). In each case the financial system was silently imploding in the background. For us housing prices were dripping in 06 and in the Depression non American economic activity was already declining and American interest hikes forced interest rates up abroad.
In both cases all hell breaks loose and the system propagates the financial impulse propagates. In both cases you had initial easing in interest rates and some bank bailouts. In each case the fed/government let an important financial institution fail and all hell broke loose. Here's an excerpt in case you're pay walled.
"contrary to popular memory, Eichengreen suggests, the Depression-era Fed deserves at least some sympathy. In the wake of the 1929 crash, the Fed acted immediately to pump liquidity into the markets, saving the banking system from failure. It cut interest rates repeatedly in the first half of 1930, sparking a partial recovery on Wall Street. Confronted with a string of bank runs, which were inevitably common in the era before deposit insurance, the Fed supplied yet more liquidity to fragile banks, staving off a wider crisis. Eugene Meyer, the formidable Fed chairman who later ran the World Bank and bought The Washington Post, drafted the legislation creating the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the counterpart to the Troubled Asset Relief Program of 2008. When a major Chicago bank, Central Republic, threatened to collapse in June 1932, Meyer used the RFC to mount an unprecedented, $90 million rescue. That was three times the size of all federal loans to the states that year for the relief of the unemployed and homeless."
But my overall point was that the fed could not have pursued sufficiently expansionary policy given political restraints and you needed sufficient private sector bail outs. Hoover wasn't willing to do that for ideological reasons.
Had Roosevelt been in charge he probably makes similar mistakes. The Gold Standard was orthodoxy back then and I think we've seen how toxic bank bail outs are. Roosevelt even tried to balance the budget before we were really out of the Depression.
I see Hoover like a worse Carter. He could have done better, but was in a wrong place wrong time situation. Had he played the situation perfectly we'd still have done poorly and he'd still have lost. He just wouldn't be seen as one of our worst presidents.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/how-the-fed-flubbed-it/383496/
WTF is so good about a business person? The world is full of successful business people who would be awful at governing.
Running a business and running a government are two completely different things that have little in common. Sure, there are people who are good at both, but it’s pure happenstance.
at governing. The Presidency is meant to be an executive office. Someone who has led a large organization as an organization, rather than as a cult of personality, could be suited for the role. The main thing is getting someone who has done more than make their success be about themselves. (Steve Jobs, Donald Trump).
McRaven ran the University of Texas for a few years, giving him experience outside of the military.
I would consider voting for that ticket.
run as a ticket. What states do they take from Trump and what states do they take from Biden that allows them to gwt to 269 Electoral College votes because if they dont they arent winning. People on the internet can have their dream ticket but need to deal in the reality of 538 electoral college votes.
Can they take enough votes to win every state Biden won? Can they take enough votes to win any states Trump won? How do they do better than Perot did in 92?
Keep in mind while a lot of people talk about being "independent" the data will tell you they actually strongly prefer one party but say they are independent. And of course people want to support winners.
No Labels talks about running a ticket that enjoys majority support but they wont get that. Chrsitie is a perfect example. He dropped out of the Republican primary without hitting double digits in support. For obvious reasons (including his history on abortion) he is unlikely to attract significant support among Dems. People here advocate him joining no labels but he wont attract a majority of support.
The bigger problem is the candidate would need to attract Democratic Support in states Biden won and Republican support in States Trump won. I am not even certain what issues you would campaign on that would allow one to do that. 2020 was obvuously a year where a number of traditional Republican voters crossed over and voted for Biden so obviously a third party candidacy is going to take from him how many would not for Trump? Keep in mind the polling from Iowa whichshows about less than half of the Haley voters would vote fro Biden over Trump while another 6% of her voters would vote for RFK Jr. Overall 11% of the Republicans said they would vote for Biden and 71% said they would vote for Trump.
The Hard reality is there is not enough votes for a third party candidate to win and at best they would throw the election to the house. .
I am not proposing No Lables as a ticket that can win, I view 2024 as an opportunity to weaken the two party system, and shift towards a multiparty system. The two parties are already the aggregation of multiple ideologies. Why not split the parties into smaller subgroups and give voters more options?
I’m also somewhat encouraged by the surge in Independent voters. Voters appear to want better candidates, and appear to be rejecting a desire to be associated with either party. Will this lead to the political duopoly coming to an end? Probably not, since the same thing happened in 2014.
The quality of the political class has been trending down for decades. If rejecting two horrible candidates to make a statement is what it takes to change the balance of power, then I’m all for it.
of how people view politics and government (40+ years of being told it is the enemy) and less a reflection of voter's desire for a party with new views. I say this based on the historical data and more imoportantly the fact most people dont identify an issue with which drives the change. I also think it reflects the fact that while many think divided government is best because it cant do too much, people want government to work and the divided government of the past 15-20 years does not work.
However even if you think I am wrong a WH campaign is the wrong way to accomplish your goal in my view. First, as you admit it is unlikely to win and most likely to send Trump to the WH with the very real possibility of a Republican Senate and House. If you want to push the parties to change go find 20 Senate seats and 50 House seats where the silent middle can flip it from R/D to Independent. The problem is you cant find them.
Not that I think he would have a chance or anything, but I havent seen anything where he said no to the No Label party. The talk is the third party has reached out to Christie's allies, but thats it.
I sure can’t see anything that would change his mind.
of course he was going to say that then.
he doesnt have a chance as a 3rd party presidential nominee, but he still hasnt said no to the No Label. At least not yet.
He’s also said he would only ever run for office as a Republican.
All of this about No Labels contacting Christie tells me they’re not having much success finding anyone to run.