Not that I think polls matter much at this point and I’m not too enthralled with SurveyUSA anyway, but this will get headlines, which is the point, I suppose.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump leads Democrat Hillary Clinton head-to-head, according to a new poll released Friday.
The poll by SurveyUSA finds that matched up directly, Trump garners 45 percent to Clinton’s 40 percent.
In other head-to-head matchups, Trump beats out Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by 44 percent to 40 percent; Vice President Joe Biden by 44 percent to 42 percent; and former Vice President Al Gore by 44 percent to 41 percent.
Here’s what I wish they had asked people: “Or would you just rather give President Obama a third term?”
Because as pissed off as people are, they have an outstanding president right now and there’s really no compelling reason to replace him other than a stupid constitutional amendment that would have denied us President Roosevelt from early 1941 onwards.
So, Trump vs. Hillary vs. Obama.
Who do you pick?
If President Obama is going to continue the wars in the middle east, then I would prefer any republican to either Clinton or Obama.
It seems like the latest refugee push into Europe and the horrible picture of that dead little boy are going to give him cover to escalate in Syria. So… better to have a Republican in office if that happens.
Otherwise… to answer the question directly… Obama over Clinton or Trump.
Simply not good enough. Stopping the wars isn’t enough. He has to embrace pacifism.
He would also have to renounce finance capitalism, and seize the commanding heights of the economy in the name of the workers, or I’m not voting for him.
Twice is enough.
A Democrat that doesn’t renounce capitalism, and embrace pacifism, isn’t worthy of the name…
Pacifism… that would be good. It seems to work for the Germans and Japanese.
I expect very little from democrats so the implication that I am being a purist or demanding too much is off base. The democrats would never renounce capitalism and neither would I. I’ve done well as an upper middle class college educated white guy. It would be against my interests to get too crazy with economic populism, but I continue to vote for democrats because I thought they would also have a more realistic foreign policy. Instead Obama is running the same war Bush started but with a lighter footprint… for now anyway. People are still dying at the hands of US military so I can’t really tell the difference between the Iraq surge, the Afghan surge, and the drone / air war on ISIS, Al Qaeda, Yemen, Somalia, etc. etc.
So what’s left for a moderate / progressive minded white guy? Some sort of retreat from the endless wars of the last 25 or so years. But I get it… even that’s too much to ask for too.
While you all pretend you are going to address income inequality, I choose to comment on an issue that should unite the left; but the anti-war left seems to have disappeared. I’m going to keep the fire lit until you all come to your senses… which, I’m guessing, will happen the next time a Republican is president.
Happy Labor Day!
The anti-war left flourishes whenever there’s a war.
Remember how it ended the war in Iraq?
Good point… Is the Iraq war over? I don’t think it is. For the record, I believe it started in 1990.
You two are a match made in heaven. Very entertaining.
“If Obama is going to push wars in the Middle East, I would prefer a Republican who would push larger and bloodier wars in the Middle East!”
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Do you want a democrat in the White House when it ends in catastrophe? Benghazi? Damascus? We know how this ends.
Don’t make me laugh. Americans don’t give a fuck about refugees that aren’t entering the United States. As long as gas prices and terrorist attacks stay low, the Middle East can collapse into Somalia for all Joe Sixpack cares.
I guess I’m thinking that the ISIS atrocities got us to start bombing. Now we have another provocation.
You’re shifting the goalposts, Neildsmith. Your original thesis was that the American voting public would punish the President for the chaos in the Middle East regardless of who was sitting in the seat. Saying that atrocities would escalate American involvement is a different argument.
Sorry for the confusion. I’m saying that, as in 2006 and 2008, once the public gets tired of the carnage, they will punish the party in power. I’m saying that, for me, I would rather then GOP be in control of the military if we are destined to send yet more troops to iraq and syria. If a democratic president is going to escalate our involvement, then I will stop caring altogether. At that point it becomes irrelevant who is president. I’m pretty close to not caring already.
What carnage? As long as it doesn’t involve more than a handful of American military deaths, rising gas prices, terrorist attacks, or embarrassing military rebukes Joe Sixpack doesn’t and won’t see any problem and thus won’t assign any blame.
You keep projecting your concern of atrocity and the horror of war onto the American public at large. Guess what? They don’t give a shit.
It is a matter of grief to those of us who remember that brief moment in which the American public at large did give a shit. I believe that Jimmy Carter was the last President to state that humanitarian consensus.
Now the public is sharing UK Independence Party fascist propaganda through their social networks.
We have lost so very much over my lifetime.
You’re killing me, TarheelDem. I’m completely out of breath. That’s so fucking funny, that you believe that there was a period of time sandwiched between the overthrow of Chile and the installment of the Chicago Boy quislings, the Watergate pardons, the CIA war in Angola, Carter and Reagan kissing the asses of the Contra, completely ignoring the run-up to the Iran-Iraq War in which non-liberal Americans actually gave a shit about non-Americans.
Please spare me the nostalgic hypocrisy. THIS IS WHO WE ALWAYS WERE.
True for some, but not all, values, of ‘we’…
TV networks are happy lots of ultra-violence and suffering for their ratings and the entertainment of Joe Sixpack.
you do live in an alternate universe, don’t you.
No… I realize the foolishness of thinking Obama should have a more restrained foreign policy. Americans are cowards and democrats are no different. The consensus supporting the war on Islam is bi-partisan. It is clarifying to see that love of war playing out in this series of comments and replies.
“The defining feature of the wars of intervention was media-induced mission creep. Each tended to start with sanctions and bombing, `intervention lite’. These were the fool’s gold of intervention. Subsequent Pentagon assessments of bombing campaigns were highly critical of their contribution to any strategic goal. Bombs tend to entrench a regime and draw people behind it. They are highly destructive, making it hard to restore administration afterwards. The past year’s bombing of Isis has reinforced its claim as champion of Islam’s defiance of the West, clouding its role in the Sunni war against the Shia. The longer Isis holds power across Sunni Iraq and Syria, the more its neighbours will move towards accommodation.
The question now is how long can London and Washington tolerate weekly Isis atrocity videos. The western media lacks any self-restraint in publicising them, such that Isis is said to regard them as a far more potent way of drawing attention to itself than the occasional act of terrorism. The clear objective is to goad the West into sending armies back to the desert and renewed entrapment. Nothing has changed since Gladstone was browbeaten into sending Gordon to disaster in Khartoum.”
“In Yemen, the United States has allowed itself to become associated with a destructive and misguided Saudi military expedition, and thus also with the humanitarian tragedy that the operation has entailed. The main Saudi objective is to show who’s boss on the Arabian Peninsula, another objective not shared with the United States. Saudi Arabia’s operation has shown itself, more so than Iran, to be a destabilizing force intent on throwing its weight around in the neighborhood.”
Americans are cowards? speak for yourself
I’m willing to accept the risk that comes with the US military ending the bombings and assassinations. Maybe that makes me brave… maybe it makes me foolish. Either way, it is a risk I’m willing to take. I’m fairly certain all the various enemies won’t come for me.
If President Obama is going to continue the wars in the middle east, then I would prefer any republican to either Clinton or Obama.
My jaw just hit the table.
You’re such an emoprog that you’re determined to punish Democrats by voting for Republicans when every Republican wants more war in the Middle East — and Trump is the most bellicose of all?
The enemy of your enemy is not automatically your friend. Life is not as simplistic as your worldview.
On the contrary… I am a cold blooded bastard. I want the GOP to take the blame for the carnage. These are practical, not emotional, considerations.
You know, the degree of carnage is not a fixed quantity. For instance, a President Gore would not have had to take the blame for the carnage in Iraq, because President Gore would not have used 9/11 as a pretext to conquer Iraq. And then just think of the carnage we would have had under President McCain.
Funny thing about the carnage. I won’t be part of it. Good luck to you, though.
Whenever I see people absolving themselves of responsibility, I think of Pontius Pilate. “I wash my hands of it,” he said. But is it really that easy?
Do you pay US taxes? If so, you’re a part of it.
I think the actual disconnect here between yourself and others, is that if the US is going to continue playing Empire, we might as well let Republicans destroy the entire world and then lose the next election, than have Obama/Clinton manage our Empire in a relatively appropriate way and then lose the next election.
I’m just as much against Empire as anyone, but Empire and “carnage” isn’t black or white. It’s a very long scale, where on one end hundreds of people die, and on the other, millions.
I’m not silly enough to believe that there is an electable candidate for US Emperor (we call him or her the President here at home) that won’t continue playing Empire, because the US is an Empire, full stop.
I’m also not silly enough to think that a Republican Emperor and the associated carnage doesn’t involve me, just because I’m against it abstractly, evidenced by comments on a blog somewhere on the internet.
Paying taxes means you’re a very key component of the US Empire.
Vote accordingly.
I’m forced to pay taxes. I’m not forced to agree with how the money is spent. In the past I have voted for all democrats. I don’t think either party is going to change the economic system, so I hope to see some more moderate foreign policy by voting democrat. Disappointed so far.
Since we are back to war in Iraq and Syria because of ISIS be-headings and (now) a refugee crisis, there is essentially no difference between the parties on policy that matters. Since I despise all conservatives as religious fanatics, I will continue to vote for democrats. There are no politicians willing to stand for peace or even neutrality and that’s a shame. I hoped Obama would, but was wrong. Oh well.
You may wish to persist in believing that Obama’s diplomatic and military policies are As Bad As Bush; I’d suggest that events like the path to normalization of relations with Cuba and the Iran nuclear deal might cause you and others to reconsider.
However, if one of the current Republican POTUS candidates regains control of the Executive, millions of Americans are almost certain to be grievously harmed by the toxic domestic and foreign policies of this Party which has headed completely off the rails. Gazing at it from 35,000 feet, as you appear to be doing by saying “at least the Republicans would take full blame for the people who were hurt!”, seems awfully callous.
Besides, we all know that the GOP would blame all bad outcomes on Dirty Fucking Hippies, slutty sluts, Blacks, Mexicans and Arabs, and much of the mass media would assist them in doing so.
If you vote Republican you’re certainly a part of it. And perhaps implicated in other ways you don’t think about.
Actually it looks like Putin is the one escalating in Syria.
Another pretense for the US to step in. I don’t really care if Assad stays in power. Not my problem or my place to argue for or against him.
Hard to tell right now — we’re always fed much western media anti-Putin propaganda. Probably a lot of exaggeration in the current reporting.
But Russia does have an interest in keeping their ally Al Assad in power and not seeing the country completely disintegrate, overrun by ISIS.
Also, more encouragingly, other recent press reports show Putin willing to a) accept some power sharing by Assad with actual moderate/democratic opponents (if and where they can be found), and b) coordinate the western anti-ISIS military effort w/Russia and the Assad regime.
That seems refreshingly reasonable to me, while our current policy is a confused mix of supporting certain alleged “moderate” anti-Assad forces while also engaging in pinprick bombing efforts against ISIS. An anti-ISIS strategy which, as Putin recently noted, is not working.
Hands down, I’d pick Obama. I’d work super hard to make sure he had a decent Congress tho.
Hey, and maybe this time he’d also work super hard to have a decent Congress. It’s possible he’s learned from his mistakes of 2010 and 2014. Sitting back in September, 2009, and saying “the economy is just fine, Krugman needs to shut up” really worked great, didn’t it?
Clinton has been working hard since 2001 (or was it since 1993 or 1999?) to get that third and fourth term by proxy b/c his first two, in his mind, were so awesome. Only now, fourteen years on, is he beginning to publicly state that he wants a do-over b/c maybe he wasn’t so awesome the first time.
One thing Clinton and Obama have in common is that they were gifted with both house of Congress of the same party and both managed to get creamed in the first mid-term election. Their mistakes were similar – they trusted Republican-light advisers on policy and didn’t have any plan at all for winning the mid-terms.
My take is that both were invested in not being liberal. Believed that there’s some freaking middle zone of conservative economics and mushy liberalish social policies and that it’s what a majority of Americans want. Doesn’t seem to matter that the midterms, without a more attractive POTUS candidate on the ticket, with Democrats running on that formulation lose big time. That gets excused and blamed on voters that can’t be bothered to show up and vote for “we suck less.”
Obama and Clinton’s problems were different. Clinton was going to lose his majority no matter what he did — though getting routed in Washington didn’t help things. That he went into 1994 with a Democratic majority at all was a miracle of Democratic leadership, since it was a fake majority bouyed by Southern Dems and Appalachia with a constituency significantly more conservative than the Democratic Party at large. What the hell was Clinton supposed to do; agitate harder for liberalism and lose only 3 seats in Washington at the cost of 8 more in the Southeast? Convince Dems in 1990 to Gerrymander harder?
Obama lost his majority by not responding to the 2007 financial crisis strongly enough. There’s some disagreement as to whether it was Obama’s fault (for not agitating hard enough for fiscal expansion) or whether it was the Democratic Party’s fault (for not getting rid of that fucking filibuster) but the fact remains that a larger stimulus package and sooner would’ve significantly staunched the bleeding in 2010 and probably wouldn’t have made 2012 and 2014 so Pyrrhic and devastating.
Can I have Obama as president and Hillary as VP? He can control the war machine, she can work for women’s rights, and the Conservatives would all have strokes.
What is the MOE on that poll?
We are 14 months away from election day, and people treat polls as if they are etched in stone.
But what I see is a propaganda campaign of fear permeating the grassroots through churches that are networked to AIPAC through Jim Hagee and Birgitte Garbiel and to the UKIP and European nationalists birthrate of muslims fear campaign. Fascist crap is being pushed through the conservative religious social media and the conservative trash talkers are catapulting the propaganda.
Next out is Roger Stone’s Hillary-hates-women tell-all book sure to be passed own through supermarket tabloids.
The form of the Wurlitzer tune is taking shape, and you want a third term for Obama? What planet are you now living on?
Meanwhile the Democrats are still trying to sabotage (and likely unsuccessfully) Obama’s major foreign policy accomplishment just because Mitt got his old colleage Bibi Netanyahu to try to sandbag Obama from the beginning. And that includes the DNC chair.
I’ve been reading Douglas Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. We have as a country been this loony before; it did not end well. It even seeded the Hispanic (cough, immigrant) issue by capturing Spanish/Mexican territory from Texas to Alta California.
I’m expecting retro-plantation slavery rhetoric any moment from the clown car. That and concentration camps are all they have left to go. At least one of them has touched of every other right-wing wet dream.
The MOE is not too wide (3.3% for the head-to-head questions), but there are some weird things about it, some of which are covered by Steve M. Also, they include cell phone users, but in a way that seems likely to undersample badly, sending the subject a screen questionnaire instead of voice interview. Since cell users are more likely to vote Democratic, that makes for a bias.
You would have preferred a third term for Reagan? That’s what you are proposing. We lose this time, the Republicans lost with Reagan.
I prefer the two-term limit.
So, Trump vs. Hillary vs. Obama.
Who do you pick?
Warren.
What would warren do differently? I like her also, but I just cannot imagine any democrat acting differently than Obama. It truly doesn’t matter which one we elect. Sanders, Clinton, O’Malley, warren… it just doesn’t matter which one wins. As long as one of them wins.
Let’s just all kill ourselves.
That is your point, right?
well, we should; I think he wants our stuff
Another one off the planet by focusing just on numbers:
Variation matters. Especially in sampling.
That’s just the thing. Did Booman check the numbers before he posted that poll? As has been pointed out elsewhere(including Billmon), Trump isn’t going to get anywhere near that number re: black and Hispanic voters. Which makes the poll very suspect.
It depends on how many Ben Carson-types and Thomas Sowell-types there are in the black and Hispanic populations. Some folks after 50 years have given up on government doing anything for justice. It’s sad, but they are suckers for the small government siren song. And then there are ex-military “Dems can’t do national security types” like the nutcake former Congressman Allen West. Don’t think those guys are one-of-a-kind.
There are less of those than you think. Just because Faux puts West or Carson on the TV all the time doesn’t mean Trump is going to get a bigger percentage of the non-white vote than the GOP has had in living memory.
Allen West is sufficiently one-of-a-kind that he is now tossing his rhetorical stinkbombs from outside the halls of Congress; he lost his House seat after a single term, even with racist wingnut money flowing into his campaign coffers from across the nation. West has made himself nearly unelectable to Congress with all his horseshit.
Ben Carson and Thomas Sowell lead as close to zero African-Americans as can be measured within the MOE. Carson said the first Black President’s signature domestic accomplishment is “…the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery…it is slavery in a way”? And that’s not the only time he’s used slavery in an extremely offensive metaphor:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/08/23/ben-carson-credits-slavery-to-changing-his-opinion-on-abo
rtion/
Also memorable is Carson’s extended metaphor describing President Obama as a psychopath. And we shouldn’t forget his multiple uses of Nazi metaphors to attack “political correctness”, a woman’s right to full family planning choices, the IRS, and liberalism/Democrats.
No, this verbal sonambulist will not be leading the GOP back to double-digit voting percentages from his fellow African-Americans, not with his reliably crazy rhetoric.
I still like the idea of Obama relieving Mark Kirk of his Senate seat in 2016. Not because I think this is necessarily a realistic scenario, but because I worry about Congress. Republican strangulation has already done considerable damage, and we’re in danger of accepting a new norm where the president acts without congressional authority, and gets away with it, because he has no choice.
Which is also why the incessant focus on the presidential campaign troubles me, because I feel that the 2016 congressional elections are at least as important. As long as the Republicans control either house, Congress will continue its slow drift into irrelevance.
Worry more about the state legislatures.
I think Congresswoman Duckworth will take care of Kirk
Between Obama, Clinton, or Trump, which one do you think Wall Street would prefer? My guess is that it probably would be Hillary. Has there been any polling of the billionaire hedge fund masters of the universe class yet?
Sanders.
What are we waiting for? I’m already long popcorn futures.
I like Obama’s personality and overall humanity and morality more than Hillary’s – a lot more. But in terms of actual progressive policy I think it’s either a wash, or Hillary is a little better.
The only truly crucial thing is beating the republican so as to have control over scotus nominations (and to avoid all the other obvious disasters of a GOP president). The second most important thing is congress and the senate. It’s here that I had hopes Hillary would do better than Obama for the simple (and horrible) reason that she would defuse the racist backlash enough to win a few more states and longer coattails. At this early point, I’m not sure that would be the case. Trump getting over 40% nationally is not something that I’ve been able to get my head around.
She’s going to bomb Iran.
Plus banksters.
Every true progressive knows that.
Speaking to the actual question…
Washington defined essentially what the presidency should be, and NOT be.
Lincoln defined the US as a unified nation truly beholding to rights of man over the whim of confederated mini nation states.
TR cemented the rights of individual workers over the boundless power of money
FDR kept nationalistic facism away while guiding an unwilling nation to the right side history against perhaps the worst atrocities of all time. Perhaps he would have done as well as Truman in navigating the post war/Cold War years. He was sick and exhausted. Hard to say.
With them Obama has been among the best presidents of all time. And he did it under perhaps the worst circumstances and without a single scandal. I’ll count Clinton’s emails as her scandal alone. And if you read Kerry’s words yesterday about how he thinks the Iran deal will very likely play out and shape Middle East diplomacy for at least a generation I think his will be a blliant legacy.
Has it been perfect? Would some prefer more direct paths? Sure. But what he has done and how he has done it seems to be exactly as much as was remotely dreamed possible.
Yeah. I’d take four more years over any of the garden gnomes I see on the landscape. Most of all I appreciate that he isn’t totally tone deaf to what people are feeling or what reasonable people see as necessary. Of the current candidates only Sanders seems to have that
Why not let Obama have a third term? Let me count the ways.
No, on second thought letDave Lindorff count the ways:
No more need be said.
WTFU.
You been had.
AG
More heckling from the grandstand of philosophical detachment. I would just make one observation. In every one of the particulars that Lindorff enumerates, there is no question that Bush/Cheney were incomparably worse. Indeed, Lindorff goes so far as to call Obama the worst president ever, based partly on his failure to prosecute Bush/Cheney for their crimes. The contradiction is so glaring that I’m seriously tempted to type WTFU at you, even though I’d be wasting my time.
(By the way, I’m sure you’re aware that true wisdom begins in doubt. Have you ever wondered if you’re truly as fucking awake as you think you are?)
I have.
And then someone like you posts kneejerk leftiness nonsense like this and your comment below and I stop wondering.
“…failure to prosecute Bush/Cheney for their crimes” is one thing. That in itself is more than a little suspect, but of course there could be political motives behind such a glaring error that excuse it. But then to spend eight years constructing a civilian spying system that makes the Gestapo rat-on-your-mother system look like child’s play; to continue by “kinder, gentler means”…which mostly entails using robot drones and surrogate fighters to do the dirty work instead of Americans…to prosecute endless blood-for-oil wars and to use the various lobbyist-funded congressional hack systems to finish off the economic and manufacturing balances of the country that was started in the Clinton I administration and warned about by Ross Perot in his “giant whoosh” comments during the Clinton I/Bush I/Perot so-called “debates???”
WTFU.
Lindorff is right on the money.
You been had.
BIgtime.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. Amping up the whole “The terrorists are coming!!! They’re growing them domestically!!!” bullshit is the main reason that cops are so trigger-happy now. That and the progressive lowering of wages for the poverty-line folks by export of manufacturing. Both are indeed on Obama over the last 8 years as well.
Perot on the subject:
THINK, man!!!
Think instead of kneejerking.
Think.
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Let me see if it’s possible to make an argument that’s specific enough that you will actually address it. What you’re dismissing as kneejerk leftiness nonsense on my part is my response to this:
That’s part of Lindorff’s indictment, so I presume you read it. My argument here consists of two basic propostitions:
Oh for fuck’s sake. I didn’t read the whole thing at first, but Lindorff is blaming Obama for police violence against blacks? Seriously? Fuck him.
For me, the most interesting finding by far is that Sanders does just as well (very slightly better, but that’s not statistically significant) against Trump than Clinton does. She’s been running a perpetual campaign since before some of you were born, whereas a few months ago, few people even knew who Sanders was. Many still don’t, but they will.
I’m all in favor of repealing the 22d amendment, but not necessarily to enable another soft, pretty good term for O. I’d like to think we can do better.
We need stronger progressive leadership in the WH, someone willing to take on the MIC/national security state aggressively and dictate to them rather than the opposite. And a nominee who will have chosen wisely in the VP pick to have assassination insurance.
It’s just pathetic though to see there are no obvious alternatives out there in the Dem field, announced or not. Not one candidate has staked out a strong anti-neocon position in FP. Indeed, FP matters are barely on the radar in this campaign.
The Hillary campaign only gets talked about in the media in terms of emails (including a few posters here), which allows her hawkishness on FP to go unchanged and unchallenged. Satch Sanders’ campaign is all about economic injustice, and few of his liberal-lefty supporters are familiar with his not entirely lefty, not exactly socialist-democratic FP positions. Joe Biden would be no more of a threat to the national security state than O has been, and is probably worse on Russia/Ukraine/Nato.
Eliz Warren’s FP positions are hardly known as she rarely speaks to them. No one cares about third tier candidates like Walter O’Malley, Link Appleyard and Jimmy Webb.
Hugely important FP issues are out there in the RW now, devolving as we speak, and rarely mentioned in this marathon presidential campaign. And there doesn’t appear to be much interest by the grass roots in discussing them, so our leaders don’t.
I Have A “Comment” — BUT — 1st, Upon Reading The “Other” Comments — Some Of You Could Be A Little More “Succinct” & “To The Point”, Okay! Me Thinks The “Ramble” Goes A Wee-Bit Too Far. NOW, For My Comment — Sure, Why Not Allow Barack A “3rd Term” — Mainly to Select 2-3 MORE Supreme Court Judges! Everything Else Is “Gravy”!
Because it’s as unconstitutional as the KY county clerk refusing to issue SS marriage licenses.