McCain on a roll
January 30th, 2008, 8:54 am · 3 Comments · posted by Scott Kent
John McCain earned an impressive and convincing victory in the Florida Republican Primary Tuesday, confounding the “experts” who predicted there would be a razor-thin margin between him and Mitt Romney, and that the result might not be known until all the votes were counted late into the night (shades of 2000).
It turns out that the race was over by 8 p.m. Central Time. McCain won the biggest prize yet in the primary season — the largest, most diverse state, once much more reflective of the nation than previous primary/caucus states — AND one with a closed primary. That means that he couldn’t count on independents to vote for him as he had in the open-primary states. Considering McCain’s stormy relationship with the conservative GOP base, this was seen as an advantage to Romney. And indeed, according to a CNN exit poll, Romney won conservative voters 37 percent to 27 percent for McCain. But that was not a big enough margin (credit Mike Huckabee for siphoning off some conservatives from Mitt). Maybe if it had been a two-man race, the results would’ve been different. But you can’t play “what if” games like that.
It now looks like the Republican nomination is McCain’s to lose. He heads into Super Tuesday with real momentum, competing in states that he already had an advantage in (New York, New Jersey, Arizona, California). But will a McCain victory split the GOP? Will conservatives hold their nose and vote for him in November vs. the Democratic nominee? How much difference does it make if that nominee is Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama? Would McCain’s choice of a running mate smooth things over?
January 30th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Scott, I have to wonder how many people were like the two old fellas at one precinct who said they were voting for John McClain. You know, Bruce Willis’ character from “Die Hard.” Heck, if he ran I might vote for him too. His campaign slogan: Yippie-ky-ay …
January 31st, 2008 at 8:54 am
Heh. I wonder how many Republicans would say, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
February 1st, 2008 at 12:10 am
It appears that the democrats are going to end up with the majority in the House of Representatives, because 28 republican congressmen are retiring, a majority of them with no replacements. The Senate is a tossup, but still favors the democrats, because the republicans have 6 senators retiring and have to defend 23 seats to the democrats 12. If we end up with a democratic congress and a democratic president, the USA will once again be in the same position as we were in the years under a republican congress and republican president; there will be no checks and balances and partisan corruption will flourish. This tends to make me lean towards the republican candidates.
Of the two, we have Romney and McCain. The LDS (latter day saints, the mormons) thing bothers me not a whit, I doubt that he is going to be taking orders from the LDS council of elders. What really bothers me about him is that he has no foreign policy experience and has chosen Liz Cheney, the daughter of the man who has made a mess of America’s foreign policy (among other things) to be his foreign policy expert. This indicates that 1) Romney is going to continue Cheney’s disasters, unchecked and 2) all the corruption of the last 7 years will be excused like it never happened. So forget Romney, he would be poison to the nation.
This leaves McCain, and he is 71 years old. That may not be such a bad thing, considering the lack of integrity of the baby-boomers, Clinton and Bush. His voting record as a neocon shill can be explained away by party loyalty. He is the only one with any military experience running, which is a strong plus for we must get our military back into shape after years of neglect by the short term, “I got mine” Cheney/Bush administration. He is the only one of the four left who understands that the VA needs expert guidance right now, after years of being run by incompetent cronies. Navy folks have an unwritten rule that “the navy takes care of it’s own” and I believe that if McCain gets in the military wounded will get a whole lot more attention than the sorry way that they have been treated by the current bunch.
On the democratic side we have Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
I dislike Mrs Clinton, very much. All throughout her political career, she has had many scandals where she has traded her or her husbands name for hard cash in a shady deal. For a while I thought it was just the republicans getting after her in a series of witch hunts, until the presidential pardons at the end of Bill Clinton’s term in office. There is no way to explain the pardons to Mark Rich and Hillary’s brothers cocaine clients; they traded the respect of the presidency for cash. If she’ll sell us out for cash once, she’ll do it again, for that is the way of criminals. So forget Hillary Clinton.
Then we have Barack Obama. With his background as a constitutional scholar, he may just be the man to return the nation to the rule of law, suspended under Bush. No more signing statements to stop whistleblowers. No more recess appointments. No more sleazy legal tricks to enhance corruption in the civil services. But with OBama, you get a lot of questions about his lack of experience and his foreign policy. I disagree with the PNAC plan to turn the middle east into puppet American colonies; but after the hatchet job that Rumsfeld and Cheney did on Iraq we cannot just up and leave, as Obama proposes. Not only will we end up without the oil, it will embolden every Arab around the world against us. The saying from Lawrence of Arabia about the Arabs was “either at your feet or at your throat” and to just up and leave before things are stabilized will provoke the latter.
All that being said, there is still the probability that Cheney will start a war with Iran and call for martial law and the elections would be suspended. Slipping that signing statement through about stopping the “Truman commission” into looking into corruption in Iraq on the night of the state of the nation address indicates that America is still under attack by the neoconservative wing of the republican party. They have put the interests of their cronies ahead of American interests for 7 long years and bombing Iran would be very lucrative for their interests. I won’t feel safe from them until whomever the new president is gets sworn into office.