Feb 05 2008
Super Duper Wuper Tuesday!
I am heading back from warm sunny climes to the chill of DC today. Will be getting home as the election results start rolling in. I expect a big day for the two insurgent camps – Obama and McCain. As Jay Cost notes today McCain has most moderates and plenty of ‘conservatives’ to take nearly all the contests. Romney is trying to rally the ‘pure’, but there aren’t enough ‘pure conservatives’ to win a GOP primary – which is the lesson of 2008 for the GOP. Patience is better than purity. The former leads to a slow build up of progress while the latter causes schisms in a governing coalition, which leads to losing ground. When people moan about having to select the better of two evils they should realize they may be one of those evils people may not chose.
McCain needs a big win today to meet expectations. Obama actually has it easier. If he snags a few big wins he will cripple Hillary. As some have noted the democrat nomination is rapidly leaving the hands of the voters and is now in the hands of the Super Delegates – a.k.a. the political elite machine that runs the party. The socialist nature of the Democrat Party is going to show its ugly head this year and many on the left will realize they truly are puppets in a grand charade. It will be interesting to see which way they go, but the dems are heading for a split in their coalition as well.
Catch you all in the flip side as Super Duper Wuper Tuesday raps up.
Update: And no, I do not believe the ‘shock poll’ on Drudge Report right now – seems more marketing gimmick than hard reality. In fact, that is all Zogby does – he comes out with wild polls which the media latch onto but never go back and show how wrong he was. This is classic media elite back scratching. Obama is not ahead by 13% in CA, and I doubt Romney all of a sudden surged with support from a upwelling in conservative purity as Californians embrace the desires of conservative talk radio. Just hype for buck$.
Update: This is a great analysis on why the democrat side will not be resolved but will be forced into the hands of the party machine to determine.
Today is also a primary day of elimination for pollers. The ones with the most on the line are Zogby and Rasmussan. Remember when Rush touted Zogby as the most accurate of 2004. This was quickly replaced in 2006 when conservatives didn’t like his results. rasmussan has continually pooled higher for Romney, both in states and nationally. Are everyone else wrong? Well, maybe but unlikely.
My guess is that mccain takes all the winner take all states and Romney will either slightly win or tie in CA. As CA allocates delegates by congressional district, who knows what impact this will have on the delegate race.
What does it mean? Well the conservative hatred (those words always seem to be used together alot lately) of Huckabee will only grow, further alienating Huckabee’s base and throwing them to McCain. I know conservatives think of them a barefoot, ignorant buffoons but they are needed to win in the fall. At some point, probably before the convention, Huckabee will tell his delegates to support McCain as Romney’s scorched earth policy fails him again. Has any Romney supporter ever contemplated how he will actually win in the fall when he has alienated everyone but the 30% purists of the Republican Party.
As for Romney, we will have spin central. Anything less than a McCain romp in CA will be spun as a win for the taliban, er, I mean conservative base. He will live to fight another day and write his campaign another $20M check (remember when we criticized Kerry for doing that?) However, looking at the schedule, its hard to see him doing extremely well enough in the remaining big states (VA, PA, TX and Ohio) to make up the mcCain lead. But the hate mongers will continue their hate filled diatrabes. NR is continue to call mccain worse than hitler, stalin and bin ladin. Rush will pop a couple more pain killers and Levin, Ingraham and savage will contemplate assassination attempts. Only kidding, well maybe not.
Super Tuesday Buyer’s Remorse…
Well, the day has finally arrived. Super Tuesday. Pajamas Media has a big roundup from around the nation and the blogosphere.
It’s the day that candidates for President hope will make their campaign and assure their nomination…and there may yet ….
At this point, if the choices offered by the GOP at this point are limited to Romney or McCain, I will vote for either one of them in November, so in a sense I don’t have as much of a dog in this fight — but you know, I have to admit that part of me is rooting for McCain just so I can watch the principle-mongers’ heads exploding.
McCain is basically Harriet Miers II at this point. People are running around screaming about how horrible McCain is and how grossly, wildly, obscenely unfit he is for the president’s job. Some of them are even ready to jump ship and let the opposition win, if not actually run out and campaign for the opposition. Well, gee, I’d like to know where these people were months ago. If McCain is such an abomination, maybe his detractors should have been making their case months ago, before McCain had time to build up a lead in the polls, instead of scrambling trying to make their case in the week before Super Tuesday.
I mean, I look at the Right and I’m just thinking, man, they really don’t have their s**t together these days.
I can’t vote today – have to wait until the race is probably over, which doesn’t seem like a particulary good plan that the parties have come up with. (If you want a national primary, then HAVE one, don’t have a halfway-one that decides the issue but leaves so many out!)
That gripe have been said, I would vote for Romney, but I can live with McCain as the nominee. One nice thing about McCain – it will be sweet watching all the pro-deportation conservatives have to choke on the results as their policies go down to absolute and disastrous defeat.
I saw over at Memeorandum that Rush is defending Hillary and Obama on Iraq. That is right, he is sticking up for the Democrats, while he is accusing McCain of trying to destroy the GOP for his loss in 2000.
I hate to point out the obvious, but it is not McCAin that is trying to wreck the GOP. All McCain did was run for his president. If it had not been for those horrid people voting for him in spite of Rush’s instructions to the contrary then McCain would not be in the running.
I think this episode points out once and for all, that the talking heads of the far right do not care about anything or anyone but themselves.
And I think Rich is right on how this day will go down.
Limbaugh too, huh? Cripes…
It wasn’t so long ago that the very idea of Hillary as president was presented as just about the worst thing that could happen politically. And I believed it. Now I’m witnessing people on the Right getting twisted so far out of joint over McCain that they seem to have changed their minds about Hillary and even talked themselves into thinking maybe a Hillary presidency wouldn’t be so bad. Because at least the Clintons aren’t McCain.
Funny, I seem to remember frightening stories about the Clintons siccing the IRS on private citizens, either because these citizens insisted on telling one or the other of the Clintons off, or merely because they got in the Clintons’ way (like Billy Dale, who just happened to be working in the wrong job at the wrong time). But suddenly I’m supposed to give credence to the idea that maybe, just maybe, John McCain, the GOP’s OWN CANDIDATE (well, not yet, but he very well could be soon enough) would be worse as President than the Ceaucescus of the Ozarks.
WTF, over??? Can I say now that big ragged bleeding chunks of the Right are in serious danger of jumping the shark when they insist on comparing McCains with the Clintons and finding McCain WANTING?????
Romney made a stupid mistake this morning in attacking Dole, after Dole’s endorsement of McCain. Dole of course ran the worst presidential campaign in living memory (about like Fred Thompson’s primary campaign) but still – the attack made Romney look churlish and petty, bad things for a guy who most people already see as a pretty cold fish.
WTF, over???
Aitch, I can actually answer that. Believe it or not, it is about illegal immigration. Yup. The whole banana. You had to have been watching certain Pundits from way back. Long before Katrina. They have quite simply driven themselves nuts when they can’t vote for McCain over Clinton. Nutty as fruitcakes.
Romney made a stupid mistake this morning in attacking Dole, after Dole’s endorsement of McCain.
He sure makes it hard to buy what he is selling.
Let’s see, Dole is a disable vet and McCain is a POW and the right is sucking up to Clinton.
Gag me.
And exactly what do they think Hill or Barack’s immigration policy would be like? At least with McCain you might get secure borders. With Obama you would probably get a big blinking neon sign at El Paso saying
ENTER HERE!
morons.
this world has gone mad or madder
someone please remind me why I thought the GOP was the party of common sense
Romney’s backers have certainly made backing him distasteful to a degree.
But at the same time, it’s very hard to stomach the fact that a major reason he is not getting the nomination may be because of where he goes to church.
I’ll be viewing the choice in November with a lot of mixed emotions.
I just heard James Dobson on the Dennis Prager show say that he won’t vote at all if McCain is the GOP nominee. Where is the logic in this kind of thinking? He claims to love his country and love the military. How can one come to a logical conclusion that McCain would be worse for the country than Obama or Clinton?
BTW, Dobson did say that he would vote for Romney or Huckabee if either was the GOP nominee
I just heard James Dobson on the Dennis Prager show say that he won’t vote at all if McCain is the GOP nominee.
As I said, nuts. I say that anyone that says they will stay home in Nov if McCain gets the nomination is a Spineless Wimp. Rummy went with the military he had. He didn’t get these options. Bush has had to deal with people calling themselves his Overseers. Hundreds of Overseers. Grow up kiddos.
Harold:
I have never heard anyone say anything about Romney’s religion. I don’t doubt there are people out there who send stupid emails around and every kind of idiot imaginable is on talk radio…but just in day to day life it is not something people make an issue of. To be honest, people around here are more concerned with the fact that he is from Massachusetts. Strange, I know.
TerryE,
Why not look at Article6Blog.com, and see for yourself how Huckabee, in particular, played the game.
Romney faced his own issues with purists.