Josh Earnest Quotes

Diebold was the manufacturer of Computerized Voting Machines which had more than 130,000 in service by 2006 serving millions of voters. The University of Maryland and others had done studies on the Diebold machines and demonstrated that there were a number of different ways that the vote count could be tampered with by someone wishing to control the vote results. Although not illegal for a voting machine manufacturer with knowledge of how to rig their voting machines, this quotation was used by the many people who opposed computerized voting machines generically and many who suspected a strong partisan vote rigging capability to support their positions.

See {583344} for Dewey's famous reply.

Utley made the statement on election night of 1948 when HG Kaltenborn and must other pundits observed that Truman’s early lead was not big enough to overcome the results of the rural precincts which were slower to report and most assumed went heavily for Dewey. Utley, however, had conducted his own exit poll in the Chicago region and found that people who supported Dewey, when they got into the voting booth just could not support him. He appears to be the first journalist to call the election for Truman.

At the time of this statement neither major political party had a base large enough to win a Presidential election. The winner must get independent votes. However, much campaigning is done to motivate the base as without the base winning is also impossible.

Kristol’s reputation as a political pundit suffered as a result of this assertion. However, Kristol was a very astute observer of the political scene; it indicates how remote Obama’s chances were believed to be even in 2006. Kristol was not alone in his view, just more bold in asserting it.

This appears to be the first time in American history where the losing opposition did not at least claim that they wanted to work with the elected president to better the country. In this case, the partisanship was so bad that the major goal of the Republicans was to do what they could to have the president fail in his first term. To achieve their objective, the Republicans opposed almost every presidential legislative initiative of Obama’s including those that they had supported in previous ones. In several cases, the President proposed to accept previous Republican programs and ideas, and must Republicans then voted against the proposal so that they could deny the president any legislative success even if it moved the Republican programmatic agenda ahead. The Strategy worked in the sense that that Congress passed fewer bills that any in history, but failed to keep Obama from a second term. While the voters were not happy that the President was not able to persuade the Republicans to compromise and pass needed legislation, enough of them realized that the Republicans were more responsible, and reelected the President. The constant opposition to anything Obama advocated and the drumbeat of accusations against him drove his public approval numbers way down. In the process the Republicans drove their own approval percentage under 10 percent. The Republicans followed McConnell’s leadership, hurt the President badly, hurt themselves worse, and hurt the country.