EPISODE 88 — Why Nothing About The Presidential Election Matters

[JulyDiaz 2797]

Newsflash: You only have 407 days until the 2016 presidential election. Do you think you'll have enough time to make an informed decision? We think so. In fact, you could bury your head in the sand on Mars for another full year and still have enough time to suss out which candidate you think should be the leader of the free world.

 

But why, over 13 months out, is every news outlet leading with an election story like it's coming up tomorrow and we still have approximately 45,000 candidates? Why are no serious Republican candidates calling out Trump for being a rodeo clown in a fancy suit? And why do people think Donald Trump can win when -- spoiler alert -- he's not going to become President?

 

Dan O'Brien is joined this week by Cracked editors Kristi Harrison and Alex Schmidt to answer these burning questions and remind you that what's going on with the presidential election right now is a total farce; you can go back to your normal business until February 2016 at the earliest.

[DirkBender 31]

Good stuff overall, and thanks for the reminder that absolutely nothing we're hearing about is going to matter, and won't matter until we've got at least a couple of primaries/caucuses (cauci?) under our belts.

I'm sure it wasn't intentional due to cross-talk between Dan & Alex, but boy, it's clear as day on at least three or four occasions listening to this one that Kristi's trying to get a word in edgewise and not succeeding.

[Chris T 6]

To be fair I don't think internationally George Bush getting re-elected was much more crazy than Donald Trump getting elected would be.

[KevinCarroll 0]

I know there isn't much chance of this happening, but what I really want is for Trump to not get the nomination,but keep on truckin as an independent and face off in the general election with Sanders and Rubio or Jeb!. I think that debate would be INCREDIBLE. Sanders' sincere passion, Rubio/Jeb providing a stoic and intentional counterbalance, then Trump as the wild card. While I'd love to back Sanders, I'll automatically cast my vote for whichever candidate is able to most successfully shut down Trump's traps while simultaneously fully addressing the questions, and conversely (and regretfully) vote for Trump if the other candidates lose face to his trollery.

[clever username 35]

I think Dan is massively overestimating the power the party establishment has, especially on the Republican side. If he was right that the party bosses could crush any insurgent candidate they didn't like, Eric Cantor would still be in the House of Representatives instead of being out of a job because a Tea Party candidate beat him despite being outspent something like 20:1.

 

Jeb Bush is not going to be the nominee. I don't know if Trump is going to win (though I suspect Dan is being way too confident in declaring he has no chance), but he's killed Jeb's candidacy. Jeb's dead. If Republicans were smart, they'd nominate Rubio, but he's way too soft on immigration to make it out of the primaries alive.

 

Clinton still has a good shot at winning the nomination, but to say Sanders has no chance is also an overstatement. He might not have big donors, but he almost beat Clinton in fundraising this latest quarter. Clinton has a lot of Super PACS behind her, but when one of the (Correct the Record) tried to go after Sanders, not only did the attack not stick but it caused an avalanche of small donations to flow into the Sanders campaign.

 

I also think Dan's wrong to say the private server controversy is "nothing." Republicans are definitely pushing it for political reasons, but it is not okay for a government official to use a private email address to get around FOIA requests and Congressional subpoenas. And despite all the attention it's been getting, it also is not the worst thing Clinton did as SoS by far. She backed the right wing coup in Honduras, and then told all the refugee children who fled the violence in its aftermath to go home. She overlooked unions in Columbia being disbanded at gunpoint, and the oil magnate who was doing the disbanding was a big donor to the Clinton Foundation. She also rewarded Arab dictators (who were also donors) with even bigger weapon deals then they usually get. And even though Republicans fixate on Benghazi to an unhealthy degree, she was the main member of the Obama administration pushing for intervention in Libya, and that's turned into a massive shit show.

 

And on domestic politics, she's been flip flopping wildly lately in order to try and stem Sanders's rise. But even though she's come around to opposing the TPP (even though she easily could have killed it if she'd opposed fast track), she still won't come out in favor of some basic progressive goals. Take Wall Street. She just released a plan that aims to "nudge" (ugh) big banks to voluntarily decrease in size. But she says she won't bring back Glass Steagle, which separates commercial banks (like your savings account) from investment banks. And she won't commit to forcibly breaking up too big to fail banks. In a very anti-Wall Street primary, those are going to hurt her.

[JoJeda 41]

I recently started listening to the podcast in order from the start. Guess which one I started listening on Tuesday?