Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Bulsajo]

OK, I know the elections were contentious, but officially it was a minority that didn't vote for him, right?
But they weren't a minority by very much, hence the 'slim' part.
I'm not sure why that phrase of mine has caused confusion...

[Tiger Beer]

[Kuros]

Where are you getting 360 million, Tiger? The CIA Factbook lists 298,444,215 Americans for July 2006 est, which is actually a future date.

You point still stands, though. 62 million is only just over a fifth of the entire population.

[EFLtrainer]

There isn't one yet: we're still awaiting the article.

[Tiger Beer]

[Tiger Beer]

the other sad thing about that election is those 59,028,111 votes for Kerry were essentially NOT BUSH votes..

Kerry's campaign rather sucked.. he didn't even have a campaign.. he was Bush Lite and his his campaign was essentially the same except he wasn't Bush so could get EU more involved in Iraq than Bush was able to do because he wasn't Bush - that basically was his campaign.



I'm actually stunned with amazement that he came that close to winning without campaigning or standing for anything whatsoever rather than being 'NOT' Bush. That kind of says volumes right there about the election.

[dogbert]

Shouldn't you be counting Americans of voting age?

[wannago]

[Tiger Beer]

[Bulsajo]

[Gopher]

I think what you said was clear enough; we're just not used to hearing it as you said it. How about this:

W. Bush was barely elected by a slim majority.

Both Gore and Kerry lost by a sliver. This constitutes a powerful minority in what is, increasingly, a polarized political process.

[Bulsajo]

True enough, and most American expats I'm sure are already painfully aware of the following: this distinction- for the most part- doesn't count for much outside of America (the exception to this might be Canada and maybe the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth); as far as most of the world is concerned, Bush is America's President- he was elected, and then re-elected.
To believe otherwise would be to believe that the world's greatest democracy isn't really a democracy.
That sort of opens a huge can of worms for supporters of America and American ideals around the world.

[Gopher]

...and a can of worms, really, for any nation-state claiming to be a "true democracy."

I know about Canada's House of Commons, for example, and some of its authority, but I also know how the Canadian Senate is selected, which is not exactly democratic.

What we have in the U.S. is an indirect-democracy, representatives who we elect (between president, senator, and representative, constantly revolving and stable at the same time), and the officials and bureaucrats they appoint, who decide for us, not to mention an independent judicial and criminal justice system -- which creates new law every day via the British common law system we inherited -- the media (including Hollywood) that has appointed itself an independent watchdog and the fully autonomous university and centers of information-production (professional journals, university presses, etc.) as well.

This is impacted, complicated, enriched, and corrupted by an enormous and ongoing give-and-take kind of tug-of-war between the two major political parties, their lawyers and lobbies and many, many foreign lobbies, political action committees, even some grass-roots organizations that sometimes eventually make their way to Washington.

To say that we are not a democracy because we lack the ancient Greek city-state direct-citizen-vote method, like by acclamation is puerile and out of touch with the modern, industrial world.

In any case, I believe that, strictly and narrowly speaking, W. Bush is legally the president of the United States by election. It is polemic. But there it is. The Supreme Court, Al Gore, John Korry, and others, including Congress, recognize and do not dispute this, even if it is sometimes difficult to accept. And I do not believe that W. Bush is in control of the above-described system, nor has he usurped it.

At the heart of the problems we are seeing in the U.S. political system today is simply that many people do not lose well.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Gopher]

[deleted]