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Rove making excuses

Cleon said:
Listening to political operatives rather than experienced professionals has been the main GOP strategy for years on subjects such as climate change, evolution, smoking, etc. Why would they change that just for software?
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Actually, what struck me the most about reading those links is how much it mirrored my own personal experience in corporate America regarding upper-management-pushed Hot New Computer Technology That Will Fundamentally Transform And Improve How We Do Things, right down to the interminable sales-pitch conference calls hyping the system and it's many awesome features, and its complete and utter failure to deliver what was promised, resulting in the people being forced to use it ending up having to do even more work as they try to get around its deficiencies just to be able to have the same level of output as before the system was installed.

I guess that's par for the course when you have a CEO in charge of your political campaign.
 
Isn't this statement complete bollocks?

"President Obama has become the first president in history to win a second term with a smaller percentage of the vote than he did in the first term," Rove said.
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W lost the popular vote in 2000 that he did better in 2004 isn't saying much.

Factcheck has nothing on this statement yet but I can't help but think its wrong, at the very least misleading.
 
Credit where it's due. Romney was indeed demonized early on.

By Newt Gingrich.
By Ron Paul.
By Rick Santorum.
By Herman Cain.
 
GeeMack said:
Karl Rove may have just deposited himself in the dust bin. It could be that his last piece of spin is the nonsense about the Democratic Party "suppressing the vote" by convincing people that Obama was a superior candidate. That's suppressing the vote? He's a clown.

Rove spent something like 400 million dollars of other people's money to get a handful of candidates elected. His effort met with almost complete failure, big time failure where it counts. His future may well be the same as Sarah Palin's, an occasional red-face ranter on Fox to spew nonsense to the woefully uninformed. It helps keep them all hateful and stupid. That's where Fox's money is, and may be all Karl Rove is good for anymore.
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I think the important bit of evolution that we'll see isn't the disappearance of Rove from politics, but a significant change in the super-PAC system.

Rove pretty much proved that you can't buy the presidency. You can buy name recognition and maybe that will pull you through the primary process, but all of these secret unaccountable millions of dollars are not going to get you votes. I think this is great news.

The lesson for Republicans is that they have to communicate with a broader array of people. To do that, they are going to have to include a broader array of people. And that will cause them to move away from the crazy right edge of nonsense.

The only alternative is for the Republican party to become an ever-shrinking pool of angry, old white people.
 
Biscuit said:
Isn't this statement complete bollocks?



W lost the popular vote in 2000 that he did better in 2004 isn't saying much.

Factcheck has nothing on this statement yet but I can't help but think its wrong, at the very least misleading.
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Andrew Jackson - 1828 - 56%, 1832 - 54.2%
 
Spindrift said:
Andrew Jackson - 1828 - 56%, 1832 - 54.2%
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Also Grover Cleveland, whose two terms were non-consecutive. In his second win in 1892, Cleveland actually got less than half the popular vote, due to the presence of a third party candidate -- James B. Weaver.
 
Biscuit said:
I had a feeling. That sucks because Jackson is my favorite president.
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He did get a lot more votes the 2nd time, the nation was growing fast.
There was a 3rd party that got almost 8% of the vote and the CTers would have all voted for it.
The Anti-Masonic Party
 
ANTPogo said:
Actually, what struck me the most about reading those links is how much it mirrored my own personal experience in corporate America regarding upper-management-pushed Hot New Computer Technology That Will Fundamentally Transform And Improve How We Do Things, right down to the interminable sales-pitch conference calls hyping the system and it's many awesome features, and its complete and utter failure to deliver what was promised, resulting in the people being forced to use it ending up having to do even more work as they try to get around its deficiencies just to be able to have the same level of output as before the system was installed.
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This is another reason why I do not want a typical CEO holding any elected office.
 
Biscuit said:
Isn't this statement complete bollocks?

"President Obama has become the first president in history to win a second term with a smaller percentage of the vote than he did in the first term," Rove said.
Click to expand...

W lost the popular vote in 2000 that he did better in 2004 isn't saying much.

Factcheck has nothing on this statement yet but I can't help but think its wrong, at the very least misleading.
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There's FDR's 4 elections, where he won a 2nd term with more share of popular vote than the 1st, but his 3rd and 4th wins were with less.

We only have these things every four years. You can find firsts of all kind every time. It would be nice if the people who are making this point would also 'splain why it's relevant to anything, and to justify it's relevance over Bush's popular vote loss, which I'm pretty sure not one of them ever pointed out as a delegitimizing factor.
 
Tricky said:
I can't forgive him for sending the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears.
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I totally agree. He has just always fascinated me as a myth and an actual human. I highly recommend the biography, "An American Lion." Thats not for this thread.

So Rove's little caveat is just a pointless talking point I am going to have to suffer through and patiently explain is false and irrelevant.

I think Rove is the quintessential embodiment of placing your party before your country. The sooner the right runs from him the better off they will be. I think its all just a game to him.
 
Of course to Rove and his followers the facts don't matter much. Good riddance.
 
hgc said:
So, you're building mission-critical software infrastructure, for what is essentially one-time use, and it's not field tested? And it appears that the need for secrecy was part of the reason. Dang, experienced software people, who know exactly how to do this stuff the right way, are really abundant in this world -- way more so than experienced political operatives. I assume the professionals were just ignored.
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Well, if they had hired them, the unemployment rate would have dipped below 8%
 
Biscuit said:
Isn't this statement complete bollocks?



W lost the popular vote in 2000 that he did better in 2004 isn't saying much.

Factcheck has nothing on this statement yet but I can't help but think its wrong, at the very least misleading.
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He's certainly the first in a while:
  • As you noted, W increased his share, but wasn't likely to win if he didn't.
  • Clinton's share went up, but so did the share of the Republican nominee, because Perot wasn't a credible alternative in 1996.
  • Reagan's share went up in 1984, but there was a semi-credible third-party candidate (John Anderson) in 1980 but not in 1984.
  • Nixon's share went up in 1972, again because of the lack of a semi-credible third-party candidate compared to 1968 (George Wallace).
  • Eisenhower's share went up slightly in 1956 compared to 1952, and Adlai Stevenson's went down by a similar amount.
  • F.D. Roosevelt went (roughly) 57-61-55-53 in his four elections, so, while he did lose share in his third and fourth elections, Rove's statement remains trivially true.
  • Woodrow Wilson's share went up, but he had three credible opponents in 1912 (including two former presidents) and only one in 1916.
That goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, anyway. I have neither the time nor the inclination to continue trolling through Wikipedia to see if it holds all the way back. I reckon that changes in the system make the exercise fairly irrelevant anyway.

I note though, that while George Washington got 100% of the electoral college vote both times he was elected, Federalist electors got over 90% of the popular vote in 1788/9 and only just over 70% in 1792.

ETA: Doh! Beaten to the punch!
 
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Biscuit said:
Isn't this statement complete bollocks?



W lost the popular vote in 2000 that he did better in 2004 isn't saying much.

Factcheck has nothing on this statement yet but I can't help but think its wrong, at the very least misleading.
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First of all, it must be said: Who cares? Even if that were true, it's such obvious sour grapes. It's a totally meaningless fact. When a team wins the Super Bowl two years in a row, does it diminish the accomplishment if they won by a smaller margin the second time?
Second, Grover Cleveland (1888 and 1892).
Third, Obama won 50.5% of the vote (counting is not finalized yet). Bush won 50.7% for his second term. Huge difference there. :rolleyes: And Bush only got 286 electoral votes that time. Obama got 332. Clinton won his second term with 49.2% of the vote, and there have been other presidents that have won second terms with less, and plenty of presidents that didn't win second terms at all.
 
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