Hillary and the Giuliani Strategy

Barack Obama is surging, and Hillary Clinton is losing ground fast. So she has decided to employ the same strategy, or let me correct myself, disastrous strategy, of Rudy Giuliani. She is going to sit back, bide her time and let Barack Obama sweep through everything that isn't Texas and Ohio.

This is dangerous, and as we found with Rudy, prone to failure. If you let the other candidate grab all of the momentum the way Hillary is right now, and as Rudy did in the months leading up to Florida, you run the risk of getting run right out of the national landscape. When you run out of the delegate counts for long enough, and your opponent gets to make flowery victory speeches with thousands of cheering supporters while you justify the losses by saying tomorrow will count more, it can really kill the positive news stories, which every candidate needs as much as anything else. Rudy became a non-factor in the Republican race, as he let Romney, Huckabee and McCain steal his thunder, leaving him with nothing when the chips were actually counted.

Obama is about to win two more primaries this coming week, in Wisconsin and Hawaii, as he has pulled ahead in the polls, just as he's pulled ahead in the polls in the last month. He is rising, and the more time Hillary lets him build and build, the brighter his star is going to shine. When Texas and Ohio do roll around, on March 4, where she is currently leading, and where there are more blue collar and Latino voters (with whom Hillary has done very well) she could very well pull ahead in the delegate count, even if Obama seems like a surefire candidate by that time.

Barack did do very well winning over Latinos and blue collar workers in the primaries he won in Virginia, Maryland and D.C., so maybe this is a beginning towards winning over those voters, as well as everyone else that is already sliding to him. Hillary has managed to maintain her lead in the Latino, blue collar and women voters so far, but this could be the beginning of the end of that as well.

An endorsement by John Edwards for either of these two, likely Obama, if anyone, would mean a huge swell of support among blue collar voters, as Edwards would have been their man had he still been in the race. Obviously it's not a dead-set correlation that what Edwards says, people will do, but if they respect him enough to have wanted to vote for him, they will respect his opinion, and a good chunk of them could slide over to Obama, giving him the rise in Texas and Ohio that he needs to break this election wide open.

February is going to be interesting, and I think this strategy of Hillary's...frankly, its going to fail, and when political science classes look over this election in the future, as they will, its groundbreaking in so many different ways, they will see this strategy near the end of the Democratic nominations as one of the greatest political miscalculations in history.

Count on it.

Obama Wins Georgia, GOP still too close

It looks as though Sen. Barack Obama has won the Georgia Democratic primary. Early exit polls from the state, which just closed its ballots as of half an our ago, show Obama taking 2/3 of the vote among Democrats in the state who turned out the primary. Early results show Obama with 66% of the ballots cast, with Hillary taking the rest. Of course this is early, but Georgia is very rich with delegates for the one who takes the lion's share of the vote, and it looks like Obama right now.

The Republicans are still fighting it out in the state, with each of the three main candidates pulling around 30% right now, with Ron Paul pulling the rest. This is a surprising turnout for McCain, as Georgia is quite a conservative state, but he seems to be pulling a large contingent of the military vote, which is strong. Huckabee is picking up the Evangelical vote, and pushing Romney's numbers down amongst conservatives. The one who comes out the winner will pick up a big chunk of delegates, as of course, the Republicans run a winner-take-all campaign. Apparently McCain has spent a large percent of his time over the last two days in the northeast, in places like Massachusetts and New York, which surely cannot help him in the conservative southern states where he needed as much face-time as possible to convince these people that he was their candidate, strong conservative credentials or not.

By staying up north, where any Republicans would likely choose him anyways, McCain has neglected a large contingent of folks that make up the Republican electorate, and if he does go on to become the party's nominee, he may regret not giving the South more attention at this stage in the game. People don't have short memories when it comes to this sort of thing.

I'll stick with this and anything else, as the next polls close in just about 45 minutes...

John Edwards, An Obituary

Oh John Edwards, so much promise, so much heart, and so many sound and defined policies. And yet, gone so soon...

Edwards is a man who is perfect for the Presidency. He grew up with almost nothing, so he remembers how a majority of people in the US now live. He's self-made, and he has the right priorities, such as Universal Healthcare programs, fighting a war on poverty and taking on corporate interests in Washington. Great, right? All good things, and issues people can get behind and feel good about getting behind.

The only problem is, that John Edwards never had a hope in hell of winning this nomination.

When he started his campaign, the widely held belief was that Hillary Clinton was the de-facto nominee, even before the process started. Edwards was going to position himself as a new-age candidate, and Hillary as someone of the old guard, a Washington insider. And that is exactly what he did.

Only problem is that there was someone else who blazed in and took up that mantle. Pretty plainly, it was Barack Obama that knocked Edwards out, and nothing more.

Edwards had great goals, great policies, he was from the South, which is always a good thing for a Democratic nominee, and he was well-liked and respected by his colleagues and the voters. But Barack just had so much more right now that the country is craving.

Edwards' other problem was that he was beginning to become an also-ran, running and losing the nomination in '04 to Kerry, then losing the general election as the VP nominee, and now running in a deep third place this cycle. He started to take on the air of someone that had a great vision, but just couldn't close the deal.

I think John Edwards would make a fantastic President, and he still may one day, but unfortunately, he was running in the wrong year. Against two powerful, groundbreaking candidates, he barely got a sniff, and he deserved so much more.

From launching his campaign in the 9th Ward in New Orleans, to ending it in the very same place, then walking off to the background to build a house for Habitat for Humanity, John Edwards was a good man, and a good candidate, but just came along at the wrong time, and miscalculated his chances this time around.

Give it a decade, maybe a little more. Edwards can do more work for the poor, the disaffected, make a difference outside the political process, as Al Gore has done. Love Al or hate him, he has brought attention onto Climate Change, and that is a plus. Edwards can do the same, he can make the change he so desperately wanted to by entering the race in the first place, then come back around when the Clintons, the Obamas, even the Gores of the landscape have passed, and win himself the position he so richly deserves.

I have a confession, I'm in love with a Republican

Well, a Libertarian, but that's just extreme Republicanism anyways. The one I am currently in love with would of course be the premier libertarian on the scene today. Ron Paul.

Watching the Republican debate the other night, I was struck by how on the ball and committed to the real problems facing the US today this man is, and how doggedly he has tried to get his voice into this debate.

While Mitt Romney and John McCain were squabbling over the context of Romney using the term 'timetable', and what that term would mean, Paul interjected himself into the debate, with real ideas not about whether to withdraw from Iraq or not, but that they shouldn't have gone in the first place, that they should be debating whether the US should be interventionists or isolationists, the economy, healthcare, education, tax reduction and y'know, things that matter to the regular, everyday, middle class voter. Y'know, the same ones that will make up 40-50% of the electorate?

Now while I'm not a libertarian, and far from it actually, I always love seeing someone so committed to their cause state their argument so plainly and rationally in the face of pettiness. I don't think any of the Republican nominees would be the right choice, but out of all of them, I think Ron Paul would probably do the best job. He wouldn't re-write the US Constitution to include more religious references (Huckabee), double the size of Guantanamo Bay (Romney), or keep the US in Iraq for a “hundred years” (McCain).

He would stop the US from being the world police, he would stop stomping all over 90% of the country to benefit the top 10%, and he would make things a lot more workable for the majority of Americans.

He would also do plenty of things I'm not in favor of, such as cutting taxes. There wouldn't be supportive government programs such as universal healthcare, which should be a pillar of democratic society, as a representative government is in place to benefit the citizens, or Social Security. Education would likely become less subsidized, instead of more-so, as is needed.

Libertarians put the burden on the individual to provide for themselves in a free and open market, but that market simply isn't there, as workers are not valued as prized and important components, but numbers to generate profits. I'm not going to get into a whole diatribe about corporations and the working person, but all I will say is without a fundamental overhaul of the way the US economy is structured, which is towards the rich, everyone from the middle-class down will not have the resources to make these kinds of free and open choices that they need to survive, such as medical insurance, money for post-secondary education, and retirement security. This is the reason the US economy is in a downturn. The Bush administration has put too much emphasis on the individual to secure their own futures, without giving them the ability to have the resources to do so.

If Ron Paul gets elected (fat chance, I know) he would likely bring about the kind of change necessary to make a Libertarian-style system work, but it would be a long, tough road, and I'm not sure the US electorate has the stomach to weather that kind of storm and let the government that set them on that road stay in power. It’s always the short-term fix that wins elections, not sound, long-term policies that will bear fruit after a long slogging.

Libertarianism, and Ron Paul by extension, are long slogs, and while it possibly could turn out for the better, and Ron Paul is a strong and determined man who I have a lot of respect for, people don't have the stomach for it.

Ron, we could have been beautiful, and some place in my political heart, I'll always have a place for you, but for now, I think its best if we go our separate ways...