Muddle

6 February 2008



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Super Tuesday Resolves Nothing

Super Tuesday in American politics was supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff once and for all. It did nothing of the kind. While Senator John McCain (R-AZ) rolled up his delegate count, he didn’t run the table, and he stands about halfway to the nomination. Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) rallied his campaign to a few victories in the south, and Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) discovered some strength in the west. On the Democratic side, Senator Barrack Obama of Illinois seems to have won more states that New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton, but she managed to carry New York and California. The overall result is a muddle.

According to Reuters (other source's counts vary), Senator McCain has the support of 613 pledged delegates and needs 1,191 to be nominated. Governors Romney and Huckabee have 269 and 190 respectively. The challenge for the senator is to find a way to win another 578 delegates when the GOP rules are largely winner-take-all and when there aren’t that many friendly states left; Kansas on Saturday is a possibility, Virginia on Tuesday and possibly Maryland and DC as well, Rhode Island and Vermont on March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, and Indiana on May 6 are the more likely places he could win. But they don’t add up to 578.

The governors are going to have a different problem; in a three-way race, they split the anti-McCain vote. Each needs to become the alternative to the front-runner, and neither managed a leg up yesterday. Moreover, the Huckabee camp needs money, and the Romney family checkbook is only going to help so much before the kids demand that dad stop spending their inheritance. The good news for them is that Senator McCain could use some cash, too.

The Clinton campaign’s inevitability died in South Carolina on Saturday, but the party rules continue to favor her. No fewer than 20% of the delegates will not be elected but rather will be “super-delegates,” more commonly known as party hacks. President Clinton’s wife is calling in the markers from the 1990s here, and if she and Senator Obama are relatively even as the convention approaches, these hacks could be the difference.

As for the “black” candidate, Senator Obama won such lily-white states as Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota and Utah. Indeed, yesterday he took 40% of the white vote. He only really lost out with women over 50 and the Latino vote. He has some momentum, he’s flush with cash, and in DC, Maryland and Virginia, he could engineer a sweep. The next place for the Clinton camp to make a stand is Texas and Ohio races in March, and finally in Pennsylvania in April.

So much for the great national primary. It told the country what it already knew. The Republicans are divided and angry. The Democrats are divided and confident. In either case, divided matters more.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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