I just read the following article, and the thing that really hit me is that John McCain has still not conceded. He’s going to tear America apart. This is obviously over McCain, you’ve lost. Holding on now is NOT listening to the American people. He’s trying to get the “toss up states” Which I discussed in a previous entry to back him DESPITE the American people’s obvious support of Barack Obama. He’s asking McCain to work together with him to unite the party. You go Barack! Well put.
Senator McCain, please concede…and work WITH Barack for a democratic win in the upcoming presidential election, PLEASE! Your people need you to support Barack now, and not ruin our future.
As I predicted, the mathematics are now clear. Unless he wins Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, and Colorado, the electoral college race is over. The only way John McCain can save his legacy is to face reality and concede for the benefit of the nation. John has severely damaged his legacy by introducing smears into the race. John still has a political future as a Senator with a possible minority leader position. It is now time for Americans to unite.
Like everyone here at Alas and elsewhere in lefty Blogsylvania, I’ve been struggling to understand the actions of John McCain and his supporters as the electoral season winds down. After all, the math is the math: he can’t win the nomination unless the Electoral College overturns the wishes of the voters. And it’s been that way for quite a while now.
And yet, he and his campaign staff and surrogates have offered one rationale after another about how he could actually pull it off. As Obama continues to pile up safe states, though, the rationales have become thinner and less credible.
If this campaign goes on much longer, what will be left of John McCain?
A man uniformly described by his close friends as genuine, principled and sane has been reduced to citing Barach’s distant association with a man who committed crimes when Barack was seven as a reason to stay in the race — an argument that is ungenuine, unprincipled and insane. He vows to keep pushing, perhaps all the way to the election in November. What manner of disintegration is yet to come?
It’s Time To Put Country First
The country can’t afford another month of being torn apart by a divisive and unnecessary political campaign — not when the math makes it clear that Barack has won. There is only one reason for John to not concede at this point, and that one reason is ego, nothing but ego. Ego and spite. And hubris as well.
Concede, John, Concede!
…I don’t know what lesson to draw from this comparison, Amp, other than that this last month of the race is going to make Obama a better President, not a weaker one?
*is trying not to wig out re. the current round of electoral fraud cranks, btw*
Interesting. The “concede, John!” language does sound substantially more crank-ish than the “concede, Hillary!” language did at the time; is this an attempt to draw attention to sexism or to the differences between nomination and presidential battles?
No, no, no, no, no!
Look, I think McCain is dead wrong about practically everything. I think his ugly, mendacious campaigning is (to quote John Stewart) hurting America. And I will be thrilled to see him lose by a landslide in November.
But I also remember how I felt when Al Gore surrendered the Presidential election based on flimsy evidence that was nevertheless much more substantial than what we have now. I felt that the election wasn’t Gore’s to concede, and that absent rock-solid evidence of a Bush win, he owed it to the people who voted for him to hold out until the very end.
Millions of well-intentioned but wrong Republicans decided to place their hopes and trust in John McCain. By conceding the election now, he would be betraying that trust, and he would be reinforcing the poisonous expectation that candidates who are behind in the polls should concede before all the votes are counted. McCain should stay in until the very end.
And he should also quit the bullshit and run a clean, honorable campaign so that when he does lose, he won’t have damaged the country in the process. But that’s a subject for another post.
I think the mechanics of primaries are a bit different from a general election. It’s not like McCain and Obama face off in a series of vote-counts in various states over several months. There is one day on which the whole country votes (or in the case of early/ absentee voters, has votes counted). Until that day, the voters have not spoken. I felt that when I voted in the NY primary back on Feb. 5, that was my vote on the Democratic race and there would be no other.
Or to put it another way, telephone surveys are not a substitute for pulling the lever.
Totally different situation. Barack and Hillary are allies, Barack and John McCain are not. Primaries and general elections are not the same thing.
I had to read this twice and think about it before I decided this was not a parody.
There are a very large number of people in this country who think that Sen. Obama is grossly inexperienced and think that he’s only in the position he’s in because of his speaking skills and the novelty of his race. If you think that leaving them voiceless in the upcoming election is going to unify this country I think you don’t understand the American electorate at all.
I believe that if John McCain quit it would tear this country apart.
It would also make John McCain the biggest quitter in the living memory of American politics and would pretty much end his political career.
RonF, out of curiosity, what made you think this *wasn’t* a parody of the linked blogger? It seemed like a blatant parody to me. For one thing, Amp has basic capitalization and punctuation skills.
Ron:
It’s parody. Check the links.
What? The links don’t look unusual to me.
Sigh. Well, that’s one less person on the internets with whom to argue.
I too am perplexed by this post. It seems to be arguing that calls for Clinton to concede were sexist. That’s a legitimate claim and I’m inclined to agree in many cases, but this isn’t a logical way to make that argument. If you want to compare two situations to make a point about sexism (i.e. Situation A got response X, but response X seems ridiculous applied to situation B, and this is because response X was a sexist response to situation A), then the variables other than sex should be held constant (to the extent possible). That is, it only works if the main (ideally only) difference between situation A and situation B is related to sex.
But that’s not the case here. There are many more differences between Clinton’s primary campaign and McCain’s general election campaign than just sex… most notably that one was, well, a primary campaign, and the other is a general election campaign.
Primaries involve all the states voting in turn over the course of months. General elections involve all the states voting on the same day. It’s common in primaries for candidates to note, after some (but not all) states have voted, that their chances of winning are small and to concede. It’s exceedingly uncommon in general elections for candidates to judge, before any voting has occurred, that their chances of winning are small and to concede.
Again, I’m not arguing that the calls for Clinton to concede were not sexist. I’m arguing that this particular argument is illogical.
Maybe you think that any calls for concession are inappropriate until every vote has been cast, regardless of the structure of the election. And that too is a perfectly legitimate opinion. But it doesn’t remove the differences between these situations. There is still a difference between *some* votes having been cast and *no* votes having been cast.
If you really want to compare Clinton’s campaign to McCain’s, it would make more sense to ironically call for McCain to concede, say, in the middle of election night, before all the results are in.
At the risk of killing the frog….
1) Yes, it’s a parody.
2) I’m not saying that the calls for Clinton to concede, in the period after she had definitely lost (mathwise), but before the race was officially over, were sexist. They were, but that’s not an argument I’m pursuing with this post.
3) What I am saying is that the calls for Clinton to concede were foolish.
4) In primaries, votes by voters aren’t, technically speaking, what decides the race; it’s what the delegates do that counts. The race was no more or less over for Clinton in May than it is over for John McCain now. (i.e., In both cases, it would take a near-miracle for the person to win.)
5) Regarding comment #5, presumably in a larger sense both Obama and McCain are supposed to be on the same side (that is, the US’s side).
I think in the interest of this country and all it stands for, they should both concede to the Green Party slate.
In that case, I think you’re calling this election too soon.
Jab at the expense of Jimmy Carter omitted for being too easy.
Votes by voters don’t decide the general election, either. If the primaries don’t end until the convention, the general election doesn’t end until December.
Not that I disagree with your main point, but I will agree with Em that this particular line of reasoning is faulty.
Ooo! Ooo! Dance!
However, I should say that I think the parallel is brilliant. It may not be directly point-to-point analagous, but that’s not necessary for the point to be made intuitively. Demonstrating how ridiculous a similar, if unidentical, argument feels in this context, hopefully produces a sense of distance from the initial argument that allows one to see the original event in a different light. I think this does an admirable job at that.
Wow. I can’t believe that went quite that far over my head.
Don’t I feel like a total dumbass.
Thanks, Mandolin!
(Joins her in the Green Party happy dance of unexpected victory!)
Sorry, Bjartmarr — I didn’t realize how many people wouldn’t “get” this post.
As vile of a human being as McCain is, I was rather horrified upon reading this until I clicked the links. Clever
Yes, it is time to put America first and America needs a presidential candidate that actually believes in them, as people and as a country. We need Obama, plain and simple. We need someone who is willing to get us out of this mess we’re in and Republicans have reigned over the past 8 years, do we really need to make it 12? A McCain presidency would be the exact same as a Bush presidency…Wait, it would be approximately 97% like a Bush presidency, since that’s how often McCain has voted with Bush on issues. Obama wants greater things for America and McSame and the Pain want more of the same and America cannot take it.
Oh, farg. I didn’t realize the bolded headers were links; I thought the coloration was just part of the formatting along with the size and bolding.
Actually, I thought the whole bit with “Hillary should concede” was pretty dumb. In fact, I thought the “Superdelegates should vote along with the majority of committed voters” was dumb, too, since the whole point why they were created was to create a group of voters that would represent the party leadership and were independent of the electorate. That group could have made Hillary the nominee. But when somehow the superdelegates were pressured into following along with the electorate, the game was over.
Actually, Holly, the Democrats have held a majority in the House for this last Congress and I think they have a thin majority in the Senate as well. Not that they’ve particularly done much of anything with it.
Oh, I see. Yes, if you didn’t get that those were links, then the parody aspect would be harder to notice.
As long as the pressure is legal (i.e., no threats of violence and no bribes), I think putting pressure on the superdelegates is a legitimate part of how the process works. They are meant to be somewhat independent of the voters, but they’re not supposed to be totally indifferent to the voters.
The parody seemed obvious from the style in the first paragraph. Amp is very literate; whoever wrote the original isn’t.
As long as the pressure is legal (i.e., no threats of violence and no bribes), I think putting pressure on the superdelegates is a legitimate part of how the process works. They are meant to be somewhat independent of the voters, but they’re not supposed to be totally indifferent to the voters.
But the Electoral College constitutionally CAN be totally indifferent to the voters.
The difference between the general and a primary is that, well, a general follows the primary so you don’t want to hurt your party’s nominee with a scorched earth policy…especially considering what a democrat says about a fellow democrat has more credibility than if it came out of a republicans mouth. Thus the party risks losing independents who’ll say, even Clinton says he not ready to be commander in chief, for example.
This is why party insiders wanted Clinton to quit the race when it became obvious she couldn’t’t win. Her scorched earth policy gave McCain cover to launch all sorts of attacks on Obama, and not be blamed for it–or even have Clinton loyalists defend him when he does it–b/c they originated from the Clintons or their supporters.
Obama as race baiter, as affirmative action candidate, as drug dealer, as madrassa pupil, as Somali native, as fairy tale anti-war hero, as as not fit to be commander in chief, as sexist, as out of touch with hard working white Americans, and finally as election steeler who lost the popular vote.
and thats just the stuff from the Clinton campaign and prominent supporters. There’s more stuff from the PUMA’s and others not worth mentioning here.
Manju, if anything, I think Obama benefited from the hard fought primary campaign. Ayers is old news now, and so is Reverand Wright; these things would have much more media traction now if they hadn’t come up in the primaries.
We’ll have to wait until the post-election analysis, but I strongly suspect that Obama’s ground-level organization (which is huge) is going to be a big factor in the election. If so, then that’s another benefit to the Democrats of a hard-fought campaign, since it forced/enabled Obama to build an infrastructure in almost all the states.
Rev. Wright is old news to everyone except Sarah Palin (I guess it’s like Juneteenth — some of us are so far away we don’t hear until 6 months later), but Ayers still has some juice. Clinton only hit on the fact that he was a Weatherman, and that was semi-defanged when Obama retorted that her husband had pardoned Weathermen without a peep of complaint from the First Lady. That has a strong implication of “well, we pardon people for what they did 40 years ago.”
But the new Republican talking point is to say that Ayers’s educational philosophy is itself anti-American, complete with Ayers standing next to Chavez in Nov. 2006, shaking his fist and calling for the revolution. Stanley Kurtz, the most prominent conservative writing about Ayers, has even claimed that Obama’s connection to Ayers would be controversial had Ayers never bombed anything. (This doesn’t prevent Kurtz from noting in everything he writes that Ayers did, in fact, bomb things.) The theory behind this talking point is that Obama was approving funding for radical, anti-American educational theories to be put in place in Chicago schools. I haven’t quite figured out what these theories are — the main coverage I’ve seen of Ayers’s education philosophy is that he believes in decentralization: small schools and not putting all the power in the hands of principals. I’m not sure about the principals, but small schools do seem to be a success with regard to improving student behavior, although this factor is meaningless to people who chart all school success by standardized tests.
Anyway, I’ll be interested to see where this talking point leads conservatives. Is the American Education Research Association now a bunch of Reds? They did elect Ayers to be vice president for curriculum. As I noted in the discussion with RonF on an earlier thread, Dohrn and Ayers have been granted opportunities by people far beyond the Hyde Park commie enclaves or even the great Illinois political Combine. Conservative bloggers have been calling out the AERA by names since Obama appeared to have locked up the Dem nomination.
Right.
But a Presidency follows the general, so why is it okay to hurt your country’s President with a scorched earth policy?
Even without the links, I was beginning to wonder whether Amp had been eating Irish babies.
By the way, although McCain mocked Obama for being a “celebrity” overseas, it turns out that McCain is HUGE in Vietnam — bigger than Walter Cronkite — and has been since 1985.
“Celebrity” is out, “That One” is in.
Well-written blog. And I’m really impressed, too, that even the *commenters* use grammatically correct English without spelling errors!
Anyway, I agree with everything except: 1) your suggestion; he should not concede, and I think Bjartmarr nailed the “why”, and 2) the notion that John McCain is “uniformly described by his close friends as genuine, principled and sane”. Thad Cochran certainly didn’t think so. And *everyone* should read the Rolling Stone article titled “Make-Believe Maverick” (Oct. 16 Issue). Here’s the link: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain
McCain is obviously executing a cynical scorched-earth strategy, and he is absolutely damaging his carefully-cultivated legacy. But he has painted himself into that corner. If he had fought a hard but honest fight, then found himself in a losing campaign due to whatever macro variables are at play, he could have walked away with a loss, but an intact reputation as an honorable man with the respect of the nation (not to mention the world). When he decided that he must win at all cost, he left himself no option but scorched earth when faced with declining prospects. It’s a Greek tragedy, which becomes clear when one reads that Rolling Stone article.
Has anyone seen any rebuttals to that Rolling Stone piece, btw? I tried finding McCain-friendly sites that linked it, but very few have, and those that have just say “Biased liberal media!” without contesting the facts.
The only thing I could pick out to criticize was the negative quote from Perot about McCain. Perot believes McCain is trying to hide that there are POWs still in Vietnam who are alive. I don’t believe McCain is so bad a person that he would want to abandon POWs if there was real evidence that they still were there. So I discount Perot’s opinion. It otherwise seemed fairly damning, though; a ton of the stuff that was put down as negative about McCain is stuff documented elsewhere and often admitted in McCain’s own ghost-written autobiographies.
Yes, I understand this is a parody, but I hate this post.
I hate this post because anyone even remotely calling the election means more voters figure it’s decided and they can stay home. We’ve got more registered voters than ever before, many of them for the first time, and I want them to go vote. I want them to vote Obama, I want them to vote McCain, I want them to feel the power of their vote contributing to the future of our country. Even if polls say 100% one way or another I hate posts like this (even in jest) because we need people to get involved in the process.
(Sorry for the rant.)
To be totally fair, Rolling Stone is not a good source for politics. I’ve cringed at many a sensationalist story. They should stick to covering entertainment
Isn’t it time for McCain to loudly consider appointing Obama to a cabinet position? Ah, I guess predicting that he’s going to whup his you know what in the debate is close enough.