Thread: Presidents Polls (merged)

Originally Posted by countryboy

If B.O. gets his way with what he has proposed do far, you can rest assured all of the above mentioned negative effects on business will occur. So let not your heart be troubled.

No, they won't, and the idea is not to have "negative effects on business," but to stop corporations from using the government to screw over everyone else.

Originally Posted by Rude Boy

I was thinking the same thing re: FDR.

The reasons the polls are dipping is not because of the Right. Obama will always have the fanatical 20%ers that dislike him no matter what he does. It's those on the left who are starting to see a pattern of the continuation of Bush policies (some would even say he's going further) that are expressing their disappointment via these polls, hence the dip.

Exactly. What I would expect leading up to the 2012 election (unless Obama comes to his senses pronto) is the emergence of a strong left-leaning third-party candidacy. This will force Obama to move left, or lose enough votes to the third candidate to throw the election to the GOP. That's exactly what happened with Roosevelt in '36, and resulted in the Second New Deal -- the one that actually made a difference and wasn't a giveaway to corporate interests.

Originally Posted by TSGracchus

No, they won't, and the idea is not to have "negative effects on business," but to stop corporations from using the government to screw over everyone else.

But you're perfectly fine with government screwing everyone. Awesome dude!

Originally Posted by countryboy

But you're perfectly fine with government screwing everyone.

No, I just don't believe that "government" and "screwing everyone" are synonyms.

Originally Posted by TSGracchus

Exactly. What I would expect leading up to the 2012 election (unless Obama comes to his senses pronto) is the emergence of a strong left-leaning third-party candidacy. This will force Obama to move left, or lose enough votes to the third candidate to throw the election to the GOP. That's exactly what happened with Roosevelt in '36, and resulted in the Second New Deal -- the one that actually made a difference and wasn't a giveaway to corporate interests.

Agreed, and ironically enough, countryboy's whining notwithstanding, it was FDR that saved "capitalism" from itself. The Left supported Roosevelt because he adopted the rhetoric of the socialist, communist and labor parties. That's what brought the New Deal into being, and that's what staved off what looked to be a socialist revolution at the time.

It's absolutely ironic that countryboy wails about the destruction of "free-market" capitalism, when it was a fairly liberal Democrat that saved capitalism.*

*Free-market is not necessarily synonomous with capitalism. The former is compatible with socialism, while the latter is only self-sustaining by corporate wealth and power for a priviliged elite.

Originally Posted by countryboy

But you're perfectly fine with government screwing everyone. Awesome dude!

We are supposed to be the government, and we are held accountable. Huge multinational corporations? Meh, not so much.

Originally Posted by Rude Boy

Free-market is not necessarily synonomous with capitalism. The former is compatible with socialism, while the latter is only self-sustaining by corporate wealth and power for a priviliged elite.

Yeah, according to Karl Marx, who coined the term "capitalism", as a pejorative for free markets.

FDR did not "save" capitalism. It was the end of some of the Raw Deal....er....New Deal policies during WWII, that pulled us out of the economic morass, caused by the Great Depression.

Originally Posted by countryboy

Yeah, according to Karl Marx, who coined the term "capitalism", as a pejorative for free markets.

FDR did not "save" capitalism. It was the end of some of the Raw Deal....er....New Deal policies during WWII, that pulled us out of the economic morass, caused by the Great Depression.

The markets wern't totally free even then, indeed Britian and the Empire was very protectionist at that point. The term, I believe was coined by Adam Smith (I may be wrong about that). The two are very different concepts, one being an economic system and another an element of trade between nations.

Free-market capitalism is actually an oxymoron. In order to have capitalism, you have to have government intervention in the market on the side of capital formation and against the interests of labor.

When capitalist sympthizers decry interference with the "free market," what they really are objecting to is government interference on the side of labor, against capital. As long as the interference is on the side of capital, in their view it doesn't count as interference.

its gone from -5 to -8 today, prezbo down to 30%

Originally Posted by countryboy

Yeah, according to Karl Marx, who coined the term "capitalism", as a pejorative for free markets.

But I'm not a Marxist and I don't follow his teachings. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (in Europe) and Josiah Warren (in the US) developed the anarchist tradition of socialism complete with a free-market (they both came to pretty much the same conclusion without even knowing each other). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's "Mutualism" formed the basis for what is called "Market Socialism" or "Free-Market Socialism."

Originally Posted by countryboy

FDR did not "save" capitalism. It was the end of some of the Raw Deal....er....New Deal policies during WWII, that pulled us out of the economic morass, caused by the Great Depression.

Huh? This is like saying the earth doesn't revolve around the sun. It turns empircal evidence on it's head, or dismisses it outright in order to keep one's worldview in a safety bubble. You need to stop watching Fox Noise.

Anyway, unlike you, I like to bring evidence to support my assertions, so please feel free to see the following provided by Hoover Institution:

How FDR Saved Capitalism
By Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks

During the economic crisis of the 1930s, many expected a socialist revolution. The revolution never came. Why? The man in the White House co-opted the left. By Hoover fellow Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks.

[snip]

The politics of the 1930s furnishes us with an excellent example of the way the American presidential system has worked to frustrate third-party efforts. Franklin D. Roosevelt played a unique role in keeping the country politically stable during its greatest economic crisis. But he did so in classic or traditional fashion. He spent considerable time wooing those on the left. And though many leftists recognized that Roosevelt was trying to save capitalism, they could not afford to risk his defeat by supporting a national third party.

Co-opting the Left

If the Great Depression, with all its attendant effects, shifted national attitudes to the left, why was it that no strong radical movement committed itself to a third party during these years? A key part of the explanation was that President Roosevelt succeeded in including left-wing protest in his New Deal coalition. He used two basic tactics. First, he responded to the various outgroups by incorporating in his own rhetoric many of their demands. Second, he absorbed the leaders of these groups into his following. These reflected conscious efforts to undercut left-wing radicals and thus to preserve capitalism.

Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated his skill at co-opting the rhetoric and demands of opposition groups the year before his 1936 reelection, when the demagogic Senator Huey Long of Louisiana threatened to run on a third-party Share-Our-Wealth ticket. This possibility was particularly threatening because a “secret” public opinion poll conducted in 1935 for the Democratic National Committee suggested that Long might get three to four million votes, throwing several states over to the Republicans if he ran at the head of a third party. At the same time several progressive senators were flirting with a potential third ticket; Roosevelt felt that as a result the 1936 election might witness a Progressive Republican ticket, headed by Robert La Follette, alongside a Share-Our-Wealth ticket.

To prevent this, Roosevelt shifted to the left in rhetoric and, to some extent, in policy, consciously seeking to steal the thunder of his populist critics. In discussions concerning radical and populist anticapitalist protests, the president stated that to save capitalism from itself and its opponents he might have to “equalize the distribution of wealth,” which could necessitate “throw[ing] to the wolves the forty-six men who are reported to have incomes in excess of one million dollars a year.” Roosevelt also responded to the share-the-wealth outcry by advancing tax reform proposals to raise income and dividend taxes, to enact a sharply graduated inheritance tax, and to use tax policy to discriminate against large corporations. Huey Long reacted by charging that the president was stealing his program.

President Roosevelt also became more overtly supportive of trade unions, although he did not endorse the most important piece of proposed labor legislation, Senator Robert Wagner’s labor relations bill, until shortly before its passage.

Raymond Moley, an organizer of Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” emphasized that the president, through these and other policies and statements, sought to identify himself with the objectives of the unemployed, minorities, and farmers, as well as “the growing membership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), Norman Thomas’ vanishing army of orthodox Socialists, Republican progressives and Farmer-Laborites, Share-the-Wealthers, single-taxers, Sinclairites, Townsendites [and] Coughlinites.”

Destroying the Third-Party Threat

Beyond adopting leftist rhetoric and offering progressive policies in exchange for support from radical and economically depressed constituencies, President Roosevelt also sought to recruit the actual leaders of protest groups by convincing them that they were part of his coalition. He gave those who held state and local public office access to federal patronage, particularly in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and New York, where strong statewide third parties existed. Electorally powerful non-Democrats whom Roosevelt supported included Minnesota governor Floyd Olson (Farmer-Labor Party), New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia (American Labor Party), and Nebraska senator George Norris (Independent), as well as Wisconsin governor Philip La Follette and his brother, Senator Robert La Follette Jr. (both Progressive Party).

This strategy had an impact. In 1937, Philip La Follette’s executive secretary told Daniel Hoan, the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, that a national third party never would be launched while Roosevelt was “in the saddle,” because Roosevelt had “put so many outstanding liberals on his payroll [that] . . . any third party movement would lack sufficient leadership.” The president told leftist leaders that he was on their side and that his ultimate goal was to transform the Democratic Party into an ideologically coherent progressive party in which they could hope to play a leading role. A few times he even implied that, to secure ideological realignment, he personally might go the third-party route, following in the footsteps of his cousin Theodore Roosevelt.

Franklin Roosevelt ran his 1936 presidential campaign as a progressive coalition, not as a Democratic Party activity. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. has described Roosevelt’s tactics as follows:

As the campaign developed, the Democratic party seemed more and more submerged in the New Deal coalition. The most active campaigners in addition to Roosevelt—[Harold] Ickes, [Henry] Wallace, Hugh Johnson—were men identified with the New Deal, not with the professional Democratic organization. Loyalty to the cause superseded loyalty to the party as the criterion for administration support. . . . It was evident that the basis of the campaign would be the mobilization beyond the Democratic party of all the elements in the New Deal coalition—liberals, labor, farmers, women, minorities.

Roosevelt was reelected by an overwhelming majority in 1936. Yet his second term proved much less innovative than his first. This was due, in part, to several Supreme Court decisions during 1936 striking down various New Deal laws as unconstitutional and the president’s subsequent inability to mobilize popular protest against the Court. Reacting to a perceived shift in the public mood to the right, particularly from 1938 on, Roosevelt substantially reduced his reform efforts. The change, however, did not lead to a loss of leftist support. The Communist Party, following its Soviet-dictated Popular Front policy, actively opposed efforts in a number of states to create independent radical anti-Roosevelt political campaigns. Sounding like a moderate liberal group, it increased its membership, formed large front groups, and generally expanded its influence in the labor movement.

[snip]

Much more at link provided.

Originally Posted by daddio

its gone from -5 to -8 today, prezbo down to 30%

I was just about to mention that... The new graph is

As Ive said before, polls are 100% accurate. Everyone in this country agrees exactly with the 1000 people asked over the phone at dinner time.