Election ’08: Super Tuesday
Edition
First off, anyone who tells you
that they know what happened on Tuesday is probably full of it, especially if
they’re this guy. The last episode of the Sopranos had more closure than Super Tuesday. Five people went in and five came
out with no clear favorite, but one clear winner: Mike
Huckabee.Huckabee, considered the spoiler for Mitt Romney, did more than
just take away votes from Mitt, but won nearly all the southern states that
participated last night. These wins did more than just elongate Huck’s
candidacy, but virtually guaranteed him either a VP spot on the McCain ticket,
or a cabinet post. Why? Because in a battle to shore up the Republican base Huck
is the CLEAR favorite. Come election time, McCain is going to need these votes
to have a fighting chance and only Huckabee will be able to deliver them. If the
Huckster isn’t around the evangelicals will stay home since it’s extremely
unlikely that they’ll rally around Micky C who they consider a traitor to the
social conservative movement
. His wins, by the way, were really theonly surprise of the night.Mitt Romney is in a WORLD of hurt, bleeding
out his behind like the dude who got raped in American Me. Though he managed to snatch up more
delegates than Huck, he trails McCain by a significant amount; he’s lost
Mittmentum and his attempt to become a face of mainstream conservatives. Losing
Cali was a huge blow, and really showed that for all his money he just can’t
shore up voters. According to MSNBC, Romney’s campaign said today will be a day
of “frank discussions” regarding the rest of the
race as they crunch the numbers to see if they still have a shot.McCain
is doing A-ok, finally conceding that he is the front runner. As long as his body holds
up, it looks like he’s got the GOP nod.But, for the
Democrats, things aren’t nearly as obvious, as the race has become nearly a dead
heat. If you take the Obama’s campaign at face value, everything is going
according to plan as they reported to Ambinder:”We fully expect Senator
Clinton to earn more delegates on February 5th and also to win more states. If
we were to be within 100 delegates on that day and win a number of states, we
will have met our threshold for success and will be best positioned to win the
nomination in the coming months.”‘Binder thought they were aiming low
(probably trying to get some of that underdog Giants momentum) and sure enough
they did do slightly better, garnering more states and slightly more delegates than Hillary, although
they’re still behind by about 70 or 80 delegates.
Clinton tried to claim that she was gaining momentum, but what we’re seeing is
an Obama surge, pushing against her ingrained supporters, especially the Latino
community that gave her a big push in California. What happens when an
immovable object
meets an unstoppable force? Well MSNBC.com claims they might go negative, and I’m sure they will as thespin war intensifies to tornado proportions. But what really has
been bobbling around in my mind today is how the picture is looking for the
general election. If you’d asked me a year ago how the GE would go I would have
given you the same answer I gave in 00 and 04: all Democrats, all the time. But
with the Huckabee surge, and the impact of Latinos in the Democratic primaries,
I’m not so sure. Let’s say it’s Hillary and McCain and let’s say McCain takes
Huckabee as his running mate. Huck shores up the South, Hil takes Cali and the
strong Northwestern Democratic states, which leaves the East Coast open.
Assuming she’s able to take white women and blacks from McCain, and split the
white male vote (which is definately not guaranteed) , that puts Latinos in
the driver’s seat and they tend to be more pragmatic while socially
conservative. Still I can’t say that they wouldn’t go Hil’s way since they like
her. But now substitute in Obama for Hil and the picture changes. Not only do I
think he’ll do worse with Latino voters, but he’ll, most likely, bring the war
up as his focus since his early opposition is his strongest point, and he
definitely lacks experience versus McCain. Now here’s where it becomes VERY
tricky.See there’s two ways you can look at the war: a) we shouldn’t
have been in there in the first place, and we should withdraw at the earliest
possible time (Obama) or b) Yeah, yeah we shouldn’t have been there, but screw
it, we’re there, Middle East = Terrorist, ‘we need to fight them over there so
we don’t have to fight them over here’ (trademark Don Rumsfeld 2003) and the
real issue isn’t should we be over there but we’re not fighting them competently
and we want to ‘win’. (McCain). While I totally agree with item a–I see that b,
strategically can work. It worked for Bush in 04, and considering that Americans
don’t like to ‘lose’, and McCain has a war hero ‘presidential’ image, b can be
enough of a polarizing argument for McCain to make against Obama to win if he
can siphon off enough white men and Latinos.Of course it’s too early to
tell, and most of this is mere speculation. Obama has shown himself quite able
to bring out votes from no where, McCain has hung the Bush albatross around his
neck, some of those southern voters wouldn’t vote for McCain if Jesus Christ was
running with him, and I’m underestimating Latinos’ adherence to both the
Democratic party and progressive ideas. But even the Death Star had a weakspot,
and although it was no bigger than a womp rat, the rebellion was
able to exploit it. We may be entralled in watching ‘history unfold’ (tradmark
Wolf Blitzer 2007), but we shouldn’t forget what lies down the
road.The Wolf runs a blog on political matters at www.wordofthepeople.blogspot.com. His first novel, The Intellectual Prostitute, will be dropping this Fall
