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Seriously? No thread on the Iowa caucuses yet?

The hardest part is determining a fair immunity challenge. I'm always up for a good pie eating contest, though.
 
Caucus + IRV is my preferred combo.

Regardless of whether or not Perot ended up influencing the '92 election, it's pretty easy to see how a third party candidate could result in the least desirable candidate winning under the current system.

Ross Perot DID influence the elcetion. Simply by running. He took votes from somewhere. Having said that I am not saying he changed the outcome but he affects it by simply running.
 
I don't dispute the importance of a significant third-party candidate. It's actually one of the 13 keys of Lichtman's. However, the presence is always interpreted as being bad for the incumbent party.
 
Who was the official Democratic nominee in January 1992?

Exactly.

Clinton was busy fighting against his own. Meanwhile, Perot was attacking the only other official candidate, Bush, and siphoning votes from him. In the Jan polls, Bush had a fairly significant polling lead over any of the Dem candidates.

Clearly, a lot happened in the following 10 months, but it's not unrealistic to conclude that Perot unintentionally helped to swing votes from Bush to Clinton.
 
I think Americans put too much stock into who is President and not enough stock into who's really running this country. When we allow lobbyists to buy off err I mean, contribute to campaigns of the senate, why would anyone think that one person in the white house will make any difference against a Congress that has their own agendas?

If only we held congress half as accountable as we held the President....

As we've seen under Bush, when Congress wants to do something, they can get it done. Whether it be massive spending or tax cuts.

As we've seen under Obama, if Congress doesn't want to do something, they will throw America, its credit rating, and everything else, under the bus to promote their own agendas. Obama has been a lame duck President for 4 years now since Congress has said NO to everything he's proposed.
 
EClearly, a lot happened in the following 10 months, but it's not unrealistic to conclude that Perot unintentionally helped to swing votes from Bush to Clinton.

Unlike the rampant stability of poll numbers between January and November in other Presidential election years.
 
Hyperbole

Definately. He hasn't even been in office 4 years.

More seriously, it may just be the nostalgia effect, but it seems to me that partisanship went up a little bit. I don't recall any highly-ranked Democrats in 2001 saying their primary mission was to make Bush a one-term President.
 
Definately. He hasn't even been in office 4 years.

More seriously, it may just be the nostalgia effect, but it seems to me that partisanship went up a little bit. I don't recall any highly-ranked Democrats in 2001 saying their primary mission was to make Bush a one-term President.

That and the fact that both houses were under Dem control his first two years.
 
How can expanding our empire be a bad thing? I mean we have already annexed all of Europe as the 51st thru 55th states. we rule all of the middle east, and soon we will set up our own governor in Korea. Once we own the world the dollar will be what we say it is. Go empire!!1!

Oh how about reading history, and learning that all empires eventually come to an end. This empire is collapsing from within as we speak, along with the dollar.
 
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