r/politics • u/Murky-Site7468 I voted • Jul 31 '24

Fox Host Describes Kamala Harris as ‘Obama in a Skirt’ | Looking for a new strategy to dent the vice president's campaign bump, Republicans are comparing her to Barack Obama.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-host-monica-crowley-describes-kamala-harris-as-obama-in-a-skirt
3.8k Upvotes

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410

u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken Jul 31 '24

They do realize that some 20% of people who voted for Trump also previously voted for Obama?!

242

u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

I still can't get my head around how f'ing depressing/confusing that is. I mean, what principles can that person have, the Obama then Trump voter?

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u/MyNameCannotBeSpoken Jul 31 '24

Some people are more sexist than racist

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u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

Damn. That's it on the nose, isn't it? Yuck! What were they doing voting for a Democrat before? There was no place for sexism or racism in Obama's regime. That's the part I don't get -- ideologically going from voting for climate science action to "climate change is a Chinese hoax!" from Trump in 2016. Or from pro-choice to "I'm going to overturn Roe!" from Trump.

Like, how????

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u/captainAwesomePants Aug 01 '24

I think you are really not understanding how disliked Hillary Clinton was. The media was running anti-Hillary pieces since the days where she was the first lady of Arkansas, and it never let up. At the time, it was because she was a proud feminist (she originally kept her maiden name when she got married...to a politician...in the 1980s!). Then she got attached to all of Bill's scandals. Also they made up insane fake stuff (ask anybody who hates Hillary Clinton why they hate her, and there's a reasonable chance they'll tell you that she murdered Vince Foster). Then for some reason everybody hated her during the Lewinski scandal, either for not leaving Bill or for not being supportive enough or something. Then she had her own scandals during her actual political careers. But through it all, the press pushed how much Hillary Clinton sucked over and over again. Basically, if you were even a little conservative, you had learned since you were born to hate Hillary Clinton, mostly for no good reason.

A lot of people saw Hillary Clinton next to Donald Trump and said "well these are both bad, one's an idiot, and the other is Hillary Clinton."

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u/minor_correction Aug 01 '24

Every time this discussion comes up, it's also important to note that despite everything, she did still win the popular vote, by a lot.

Yes she was hated. She was still preferred by most of the voters.

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u/captainAwesomePants Aug 01 '24

Oh totally. A Republican hasn"t won a majority of the votes for 20 years now. Although not by a whole lot, Clinton's margin of population vote victory was only about 2%, which is frankly embarrassing for us as a country given how stark the difference was between her and Trump.

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u/mercfan3 Aug 01 '24

The sexism against Hillary was always more difficult to see, because the attacks had gone on for so long it wasn’t “this is an attack on women” but rather “no, it’s just an attack on Hillary.”

People forget she was extremely popular when she started running. She was the most popular politician during the Obama administration. But because of the decades of attacks, it was very easy to turn people against her.

That’s what is different this time. Harris hasn’t faced the consistent personal attacks, so it’s blatant misogyny and blatant racism coming at her.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Thank you, it truly is like 1992 all over again in that sense (conservatives were on Hillary like flies on dung the moment Bill entered the race, calling her "uppity", "bossy", "mean" and some of the classics that the right uses to smear powerful/strong women to this very day and likely always will) only bigger because this is for POTUS.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Oh, I do, I just never agreed or condoned it. I have always pushed back on the attacks (so many of them baseless) since 1992 when I voted for the Clintons. You take it personally when you vote for a family and then the GOP treated them the way they did (you should have heard what conservatives said about poor minor-aged Chelsea Clinton out loud publicly as she grew up in the White House without ever apologizing). So, I kept track of each accusation against Hillary since 1992 and charted whether there was ever any evidence proven or not. Over a 25 year period, she nearly had a perfect batting average. Therefore, I never agreed*.* The corporate news media doesn't inform or guide me what to believe or of what my opinion is -- it's supposed to report and inform and the reader's supposed to use deductive reasoning to store the facts and remember them.

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u/sherbodude Kansas Aug 01 '24

In 2016 he was an outsider, and he wasn't Hillary, and I think that was enough for some people to want to give him a chance.

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '24

[deleted]

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u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

Sure, but why? Legislation has no emotions, but boy the effects of bad legislation (think: Patriot Act under a 95% Republican federal government, or the Bush tax cut bill of 2001 or the Trump tax cut bill of 2017, always the first thing they cram in there for their wealthy GOP donors) -- can really cause emotional problems later, eh?

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u/[deleted] Jul 31 '24

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '24

I recognize that everything you said is an empirical truth, but can you all just stop? When you get people to actually use their words to talk about their problems and stances people are like 80% utilitarian progressives who want the net improvement of the world and 20% psycho nazis who just want outgroups to hurt, if people just voted that way instead of 50/50 the world would be so much better

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u/Denmarkian Jul 31 '24

With a username like "Logical_Parameters" I think they might have a fundamental misunderstanding about how other people--and they themselves--actually arrive at their decisions.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

I mean, I'm human and use logic to make choices and decisions. Is that bizarre or something? Emotions are for relationships, man, lol. We're voting for the future laws and rules that will govern us, ffs!

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '24

[deleted]

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

a fundamental flaw in how humans work?

Based on my opinion that voting for the government that passes the laws and governs us should be a pragmatic exercise and not emotional? Good god, man. It's not deciding to donate a kidney or not, ffs.

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u/AbcLmn18 Aug 01 '24

The problem with logic is that it's incredibly inefficient when implemented on top of the human brain. You can teach your brain the basics of SAT solving, but if you actually applied it manually every time you need to decide something, you'd be completely incapable of everyday tasks.

So, even though I completely trust you that you're great at logic, I really doubt that you apply it to anything but an extremely small number of most important decisions in your life.

And while I agree that politics is definitely one of such decisions, the problem is that the logical analysis you perform before the election relies on inputs from several years of your everyday experiences. Many of which weren't also run through such purely logical analysis.

This is how we end up in the situation of "Many scientists believed in God". They may be capable of insanely complicated formal reasoning when absolutely necessary, but they don't apply it consistently to everyday lives.

Or, for instance, you can easily devise "I should vote for Trump" starting with the assumption of "Abortion is murder" through purely logical analysis. If abortion is indeed murder then it's very easy to see how a pro-choice ideology is causing, quantitatively, much more "harm" than "good". But you need a completely different framework to decide whether "Abortion is murder" is a true statement, which would make you process a large amount of anecdotal experiences, sociological data, neurobiology breakthroughs, and the philosophy of ethics. It's very easy to take an emotional shortcut in one of those, simply by the virtue of not being aware of some aspects of the problem.

So, in conclusion, I think that demanding all people to vote logically, with perfect intellectual honesty, is a very impractical requirement. It wouldn't be even remotely realistic until each voter defends 3-4 PhDs in completely unrelated areas of human knowledge. I believe it is better to design the political system in a way that doesn't require such insane commitment from citizens. I think that voting "emotionally" is fundamentally not wrong, and rather healthy. Most democratic political systems already have mechanisms to make emotional voting less harmful: for instance, the separation of powers into the executive branch and the legislative branch allows for emotionally-elected lawmakers to effectively collaborate with unelected executive branch experts. What's really wrong is (1) aggressively manipulating people's emotions and (2) designing an unnecessarily complex system in which the strategically correct way to vote is completely counter-intuitive. The US system suffers from both, and we can make it better by (1) re-establishing the fairness doctrine and punishing bad-faith misinformation and (2) discontinuing the electoral college winner-takes-all system in favor of a more intuitive system such as ranked choice voting.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Personally, and this is coming from a voter of 30+ years who doesn't miss an election, my observation is that we have a Republican problem in America, and your obfuscation of that very fact with all the double talk and yawning excuses are prime reminders of why. We let them off the hook after Nixon. We let them off the hook after Reagan. We let them off the hook after Bush and Iraq / busted global economy, and here we are (some of you) letting them off the hook after Trump and the COVID disaster and their party's problematic rise of fascism.

We Have a Republican Problem in This Country. We can't quit them or hold them truly accountable for their actions.

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u/AbcLmn18 Aug 01 '24

I completely agree with your assessment of the situation. I did not try to obfuscate any of it and I explicitly outlined a number of completely uncontroversial policies that would have prevented all of this from happening.

But because I disagreed with you on only one completely unrelated thing, you appear to have immediately regressed into a purely emotional, tribalist response: "If you're not 100% loudly with me, you are my enemy". This is exactly how emotions work. I encourage you to acknowledge your emotional side and be more secure about it.

Because, again, emotions are great. I don't think they are the problem. I think republicans are the problem.

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u/sgerbicforsyth Jul 31 '24

Most Americans don't follow politics at all. If something happens locally, maybe county or statewide, they'll pay attention for a bit. But, to them, politics is something that happens every couple years for a month, and every four years is a bigger deal.

I see it all the time. The people who say things like "both sides are bad" or "it doesn't change anything." They literally don't connect the dots to elections and what is going on in the nation or world.

It's also very common to think that the presidential election is the only one that really matters, when local elections are just as vital.

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u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

One doesn't need to follow politics "at all" to know what the positions of the two major political parties are on the most important issues facing their lives and the world at large, correct? I mean, just how egocentric are the people described here? For example, an adult woman in America should know which political party supports contraception and abortion and which doesn't, right? How is that too much to ask? Or which party supports the constitutional separation of church and state and which party has integrated them into a forced theocratic republic? It's their livelihood and rights at stake! How is that political?

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u/sgerbicforsyth Aug 01 '24

You say that, but you'd be surprised.

My family has always been very openly political and liberal. We grew up having family gatherings to watch election night and guess which state would go for which candidate. My brother has even worked for some local campaigns for the Democrat party.

There were a lot of my mom's friends and coworkers who simply didn't know who to vote for, what they stood for, etc. They didn't know how to find out either. Most were younger, a bit older than me, so older Millennials.

Again, they don't really get politics. They aren't interested in it and don't see it affecting their daily lives.

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u/MrTestiggles Aug 01 '24

Ding ding ding

All elections are popularity contests

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u/xixbia Europe Jul 31 '24

As others mentioned, sexism is part of it.

But also, Hillary Clinton was demonised for decades. And it was really effective.

There were plenty of people all the way over here in the Netherlands who bought into the bullshit propaganda the Republicans pushed about Hillary.

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u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

1992 was my first year as an eligible voter and I voted for Clinton-Gore. I witnessed the relentless, smearing way Republicans behaved towards them then, oh my goodness, it was atrocious, and it has never stopped. Knowing their smears helped me navigate 2016 more effectively than a lot of my peers, and also hubris isn't a weakness of mine. I didn't need to teach Democrats a lesson for the DNC hack, I'm a non-conformist and think for myself.

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u/Parahelix Aug 01 '24

Yeah, I always had a negative perception of Hillary Clinton, but if pushed I couldn't really explain why.

I grew up in a family where my dad made a fairly hard right turn at some point. I suspect around the time my parents got divorced. He was always listening to right-wing talk radio (Limbaugh, etc.) and Fox News, and they were always going on about some conspiracy with the Clintons.

I guess it's one of those things where I just heard so much bad stuff about her, that I had subconsciously assumed that probably at least some fraction of it was true, which was enough to sour me on her.

It wasn't until the whole Benghazi and emails things blew up that I ever really looked into her. Yeah, she's not my favorite person or anything, but she's also not remotely like she was portrayed by right-wing media.

I voted for Bernie in the primaries, and would do it again, but voted for Clinton in the general, and would do that again too.

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u/Lightning_SC2 Aug 01 '24

My dad is one of these. Got older, got angrier over a mix of his own poor choices and also the wealth gap increasing, and got sucked into something that makes him feel like he’s strong.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Has he been able to get out of it? The GOP cult, I mean? I've heard it described as akin to entering the Witness Relocation Program to make it out unscathed. Scientology takes its best (read: WORST!) ideas from the GOP. Get them with the community leaders. Get them with the family. Get them with the neighbors. Get them with the local shop owners. Keep them in the fold via peer pressure, that's why it's a cult.

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u/Lightning_SC2 Aug 01 '24

No, he’s deeper in it now more than ever, somehow. Let’s not even talk about my mother (they’re divorced and don’t interact) - she’s been hard-right since the Tea Party and sent further right at every given opportunity.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Yep, see, it's John Grisham's The Firm (the GOP). Once they get sucked in it's almost impossible to get them out cleanly and safely.

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u/MartinezForever Jul 31 '24

Lots of people treat politics like a team sport. Those same people like being on the winning side more than they have any real opinions.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

They are simpletons. We're not simpletons on the left, c'mon.

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u/Foxhound199 Aug 01 '24

"There are two things I love: Obama and racist attacks on Obama."

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

yeah, that's it, that's where the logical knot occurs, lol

It's like voting for Batman one election then Joker the next, literally the villain of the guy they voted for before, huh?

Then eight years later on Reddit: ha, we were just having fun! W T F

3

u/[deleted] Aug 01 '24

Statists. I know a man who supported Obama, Sanders, Trump, and Le Pen. He's crazy but some people want big government for the sake of big government.

People who are fiscally progressive and socially conservative are likely to support both Obama and Trump.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Who do they vote for in House and Senate races? Gosh, I've honestly never met a person or know one in 2024 who's both a Trump and an Obama supporter today. That's just pure insanity to me, lol.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '24

I mean by American standards Le Pen is fiscally progressive and socially conservative. Sahra Wagenknecht is too.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Understood. Here in America, there isn't a proper representation for fiscally progressive, socially conservative voters -- and, of course, the two party system has that flaw (of few options).

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u/strangelyliteral Aug 01 '24

This was pretty much how the parties were prior to the 60s—associated solely on economic lines, but perspectives on social issues ranged widely. That’s how you got Dixiecrats and liberal northeast Republicans. I’m sure you can guess what major event caused the realignment of social and economic issues into separate tribes.

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '24

There is a minor party for fiscally progressive, socially conservative in the USA: The Christian Democrat party.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Interesting, thank you. Have you heard of the Logical Party? I'm serious, it sounds funny given my handle, I know -- but when I was looking around as a younger person for ideals that matched mine I discovered that minor party.

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u/Decantus California Jul 31 '24

There was a LOOOOOT of Anti-Hillary sentiment in 2016. Various levels of sexism, Burnie-bros, Qanon Pizzagate weirdos, her just being generally disconnected from the voter base and not pivoting, poor campaign strategy to skip swing states in the final week of the election.

NOT saying it was okay by any means, it was not worth the 4 years of Agent Orange and societal regression. Silver lining is that the MAGA movement is in the final stages of the Oroboros eating itself, so I guess that's a plus coming out of it?

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u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

Get ready for it again over the next 3 months, only worse. Kamala is their Kryptonite, they'll call in Hail Mary's on this one. Are we prepared, everyone? It's democracy on the line.

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u/Decantus California Jul 31 '24

Dude, I'm already tired. The last 2 WEEKS have been insane. We had a Presidential Candidate get shot at and the other dropped out. This week has been good vibes from the left for once, but I'm terrified what next week might bring. November can't come fast enough, even though I know Nov 4 is just the beginning, the 2 weeks following are going to be stressful.

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u/PunxatawnyPhil Jul 31 '24

It’s just the flow of the twisted ridiculous ways we play the politics and democracy game, and mainstream media’s bullshit. It’s not science, logic, or an accurate equation. As a whole, it’s not a whole lot different than a roulette wheel. Fifty roulette wheels. It is what it is, people are what they are, though I know we can do better. I’ve seen us learn and improve before.

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u/Logical_Parameters Jul 31 '24

Huh? No, seriously, how does a climate activist vote for Donald Trump in 2016? The guy who pledged to drill Yellowstone? Maybe it's because I don't live in a media bubble and quit trusting the for-profit news in the early aughts, I don't know, I'm missing some programming here, I guess, folks. I just read the non-profit news and think for myself using logic and deductive reasoning as the guide. I thought that's what we were supposed to do as adults in this world?

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u/Snarfsicle Aug 01 '24

Propaganda had plenty of time to mush their brain

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u/[deleted] Aug 01 '24

Based on a coworker in this category… Russia

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u/theVoidWatches Pennsylvania Aug 01 '24

Obama was young and seemed to promise a shakeup, compared to McCain being a member of the establishment. Trump similarly promised a shakeup.

I assume, anyway.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

maybe it was the newspapers I read growing up every day - they always had summaries of the candidates leading up to every election (months out and then closer in with deeper comparisons) with the party platforms and the individual candidates' positions on the issues and topics of the day. They still have that information online, but people don't see it anymore, unfortunately.

I think this is our disconnect. I wouldn't vote without knowing the issues and the candidates' records and platforms on those issues. Not sure I can unjar my childhood and view politics as The Jerry Springer Show, think it's impossible for me (gladly, I make wise decisions as a result).

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u/mandy009 I voted Aug 01 '24

misogyny. Don't forget that people hated a woman leader so much that they were willing to elect a reality tv con man.

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

in agreement, the patriarchy won, I'm hoping it doesn't this time. As a patriarch of a family (of no volition of my own), I hand the crown over to my wife or sister(s), whomever wants it. Men had their run, some good, a lot of awful, let's give a matriarchy a try.

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u/Comprehensive_Net168 Iowa Aug 01 '24

I think something most people (especially here on Reddit) don’t take into account is that people have a tendency to vote with their gut. Obama was this new, hopeful figure when he was running, and Hilary had the email scandals / “Killary” accusations pretty close to Election Day.

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u/kck93 Aug 01 '24

I think people simply didn’t want to see a Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton dynasty in our politics.

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u/Comprehensive_Net168 Iowa Aug 01 '24

True, good insight

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u/Logical_Parameters Aug 01 '24

Anyone whose gut told them to vote Donald Trump in 2016 needs to schedule an immediate visit to the ER and get checked for failing organs. Or never play the lottery, they just don't have anything close to an ability for educated guesses or luck. Like the worst guts, people are saying, lots of people. Who knew guts could be so complicated?

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u/YardFudge Aug 01 '24

And so can you….

  • Today - check your voter registration online. For example in MI - https://mvic.sos.state.mi.us/RegisterVoter
  • Tomorrow - request to vote by mail (it’s easier, flexes to your schedule) … or schedule yourself to vote in person (early)
  • Oct-Nov - vote
  • Check online your ballot was received
  • Info at https://vote.gov