John McCain Wins GOP Presidential Nomination

John McCain has secured the Republican nomination for President, officially.

He reached the magic number of 1191 today, mainly via the Republican delegates in Texas. They propelled him over the top and into the seat, knocking Mike Huckabee, possibly the most lovable Republican ever, out of the race.

I'll take this opportunity to congratulate McCain as well, as he has overcome tremendous odds to get to where he is today. Even six months ago, he was broke, running fourth and fifth in the polls, and on his last legs. Until he opted into the matching funds campaign that he is now violating, blatantly, and was able to secure a loan with it as collateral and get himself back into it. He's turned his back on his principles and his stances to get to where he is as well, as most of the positions he took during his time in the Senate have been reversed in the last 2 years or so.

Most notably, Bush's tax cuts to the wealthy. Voted against it twice, said he couldn't in good conscience vote for something that harmed the middle class so much. Now supports these cuts as a permanent part of the Tax Code.

He has ties to lobbyists, not just monetarily either, who basically run his campaign nowadays, he has violated the campaign finance law that he was a CO-SPONSOR for, the controversial acceptance of the endorsement of John Hagee, certified nutjob and hater of the Catholic Church. He has had numerous scandals just in the last few months, leaving aside things like the Keating 5 (Look it up, insider trading, five Senators involved, everyone went down but McCain).

McCain is going to be a tough candidate in a national election, as he is a street fighter, but I really think with everything he supports, plus the big elephant in the room I didn't even mention, the Iraq War, he is going to go down in flames this November, and whomever wins the Democratic nomination after what looks like a protracted fight, will be able to coast to the White House.

He is traveling to Washington tomorrow to get the blessing of George W. Bush at the White House, have some pictures taken and a nice press conference. Apparently it slips past the logic of McCain and his organizers that Bush has an approval rating hovering around 20% right now, so he might not be the man you want shaking your hand, agreeing with your policies and giving you his blessing to continue on with his legacy. But hey, a sitting President is a sitting President right, no matter that 80% of the country thinks he’s doing a terrible job.
I'm going to do another post on the Democratic races tonight, which are as tight as can be, but for now, John McCain gets his moment in the sun, before he is eclipsed by the tidal wave of crap gathering behind him.

Wisconsin, Hawaii, and McCain

Barack Obama swept both Wisconsin and Hawaii, his home state, last night by rather large margins. In Wisconsin, he beat Hillary Clinton by about 20 points, and in Hawaii, he blew her out of the water by about 40. Now as I said above, Hawaii, being Obama's home state, was expected to give him a crushing victory, but Wisconsin is a bit of a different story. It was sort of a harbinger of things to come for Hillary, as a lot of Latino and blue collar voters swung Obama's way. If this trend continues through Ohio and Texas on March 4, Obama will have the delegates to finally secure this nomination, even though as little as 6 months ago, he wasn't seen as having a viable shot at anything.

This is fairly amazing, but without Ohio and Texas, it doesn't mean too much. Obama has won ten straight primaries/caucuses by convincing margins, but if he doesn't pull off at least one of the two March 4 states, all will be for naught.

John McCain, on the other hand, took one more step forward on the path to the Republican nomination, as he also won Wisconsin, and Washington State last night, leaving him within spitting distance of the magic number he needs to finally push Mike Huckabee out of the spotlight and let it shine unto him and him alone. McCain is going to have problems against whoever he faces, and it will be a serious uphill battle to convince voters they aren't getting 4-8 more years of Bush's failed policies, even though those policies are essentially what John McCain has put forward so far. It'll be interesting to see whether he softens these as we move towards November, but he needs the base of the Republican Party to congregate behind him so badly that he may even go more right-wing to do so before it is all said and done.

A few things of note:

- Huckabee, I think, by staying in the race for so long after he clearly has lost, has completely played his way out of a VP slot on McCain's ticket. It likely wasn't going to be him anyways, but after this growing embarassment and distraction he is becoming for the Republican Party, I don't think he's going to be too popular of a man when McCain comes a'callin.

- McCain is really starting to jab at Obama as well, calling himself the experience candidate, as he has done all along, but calling Obama, not by name, out on his lack of experience. He hasn't done the same thing with Hillary though, leading me to believe her fortunes are a lot worse off than we are all led to believe. McCain is attacking the person he feels he will have to go against in November, and that person is not Hillary Clinton.

Romney...seemed so perfect didn't he?

Oh Mitt Romney. Such a quick and smooth tongue. So witty and seemingly-personable. Such perfect hair, and teeth. Former Governor of Massachusetts, and rich. Make this man President, right?

I mean, he sounds like a Presidential candidate, like every single one we've seen, maybe even a little better. He's got George Bush-style policies with the ability to form a coherent sentence, and get everyone in the room laughing as he does.

Mitt was the epitome of what the US seems to like in their Presidential candidates, and that was pretty much what killed him in this campaign. Much the same as the John Edwards campaign, Mitt was perfect for a Presidential run, for all the reasons I've mentioned above. Mitt's problem wasn't running into two ground-breaking, once-in-a-generation candidates, as Edwards did, but that people were craving something different, and the a-typical politician just was not their cup o'tea this election.

Romney was also burned by a bit of the loose tongue. And when I say loose tongue, I mean, lying. Mitt is the kind of politician that plays to whatever crowd he is in front of, and when he was running in Massachusetts as a Republican, he obviously had to soften some of the right's more extreme views to be able to have a hope in hell of winning. And he did, coming out pro-abortion, pro-gun law, and not as a tax cutter.

But now, these kinds of views are problems, and so are biting attack ads that include bits of info that aren't quite, what's the word...truthful. Mitt had trouble with both of these things, and it, to an extent, doomed him as well.

So did his religion, as he is a practicing Mormon, and while it helped him take Utah, with a whopping 85% of the vote, there is a real divide with this religion and the mainstream, which I think also caused him problems. not as many as a lot of people predicted, but it didn't help. For example, Mike Huckabee, former priest, won the fundamentalist states. If Mitt's not a Mormon, those states could easily go to him.

A lot of factors contributed to Romney's fall from grace. I've been watching his campaign rise from its beginnings, and I honestly thought, with the man's pedigree, money, look, everything, that he would be the nominee. Even when he was running back in the polls, I was telling everyone to watch out for this man, who was a slicker, more composed and intelligent George W. Bush, and would follow the same type of policies, the failed neo-con policies of the current administration. He would probably have been alright economically, as he is a very successful businessman that turned around the Salt Lake City Olympics and has amassed a huge private fortune, but there's too many other drag-downs that killed his campaign.

Lastly, he had a real cocky sense around him. He was that kid in high school that drove the slickest car, had all the clothes and the girls, and someone most of us weren't, and most of us couldn't relate to. I wish Mitt Romney the best of luck, as he is an intelligent, composed, and well-put together man, but it seems his Presidential aspirations may have to be set aside. For a man that really looks the part, in the end, it seems he can't really fill the role.

Super Tuesday, and the Aftermath...

Sorry for the delay in reporting the final numbers. I had an aggravating connectivity issue that took a while to solve.

Anyways, it looks like on one side, we came out with a clear nominee after the super primary, and on the other, the waters became as muddied as possible.

John McCain will be fightinig on until November, it seems, as he dominated Super Tuesday, winning the large chunk of states and delegates, and jumped about 400 delegates ahead of his nearest rival, Mitt Romney. Romney got hammered, losing the states he needed to have any shot, the ones with conservative bases, to Mike Huckabee. Huckabee played a magical spoiler for Romney, and really handed the campaign to John McCain.

Romney has since dropped out of the campaign, and rightly so. It would have been a waste of money from this point out, with almost no chance of him coming back from the blow Super Tuesday was to his campaign. I'm going to do a whole post in a bit on what happened to Mitt, the man who walks, talks, and looks just like a President, and yet, seemingly won't be.

Onto the Democratic dogfight, which is basically where this campaign is headed from this point out. On the day, Hillary pulled only a handful more delegates than Barack Obama, and squeaked out a narrow victory in California, the richest state, delegate-wise, of them all. Barack won a lot of not tradionally Democratic states, which bodes well for his range of support, as it shows he can walk the walk and pull in independent or even Republican-leaning people to vote for him come November.

What can be thanked for Barack's share of the delegates is the proportionate way the Democrats assign them to their nominees, as even though Hillary won the big population states, like California and New York, Obama still pulled a big portion over to himself. The Republicans, who operate on a winner-take-all type of system, ended up with their clear winner in John McCain, whose margin of victory in the states he won was around the same as Hillary or Barack in the states they won. But he got 100% of the delegates from each state, which gives him the crushing majority he holds now.

Hillary and Barack will be doing this dance for at least another month, maybe even more, maybe all the way to the convention a few months from now. This can only be viewed as bad for her and very good news for him.

Hillary has been slowly trending downwards and Barack has been slowly trending upwards over the last year or so. The curve has really accelerated the past month, with Obama catching up to her in almost every national and state poll, after being down by 20+ just months ago.

Hillary will really fight until the end, as she thought she was going to coast to this nomination, coast into the White House on a Democratic victory and a big 'Hell No' from the US on continuation of Bush-style leadership, but now this young upstart has come out of nowhere and stolen her nomination and her Presidency out from under her.

There is a better chance for Democrats (and sanity) in the US with Barack as the nominee. Its been said a million times, and I'm going to go there again. Hillary has too many negatives to win a national campaign. She can't grow the party to new voters, and some Democrats dislike her so much they will simply not vote, or will turn to a liberal type of Republican, as John McCain is. if 47% of potential voters say they will never consider voting for you, you're going to have a problem winning a plurality.

Obama also has higher numbers against McCain than Clinton does, beating him in almost every demographic and overall by 5-10 points. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is up and down, and within the statistical tie area against McCain nationally, winning ir losing to him by 2-3 points in every major poll taken.

Obama has also raised almost $40 million since the turn of the year, and $8 million alone in the 48 hours since the polls closed on Tuesday. He has at least $20 million still on hand by estimates, and will have all of that going forward to dominate the airwaves in the remaining states with his message.

Hillary, on the other hand, just lent her campaign $5 million of her own personal money to keep it afloat, and there are reports her top advisors and staffers will go without pay for the next month to give them some extra money to throw around. Hillary still has $20 million in her back pocket for a national campaign, but she might want to think about unleashing some of that now, or else there won't be a national campaign to run.

John McCain's job got much easier after Tuesday, as he can pretty much kick back, consolidate, work on unifying the Republican Party behind him (no easy task, I know, but easier when you don't have to fend off Romney) and begin to chip away at both of them. It's a virtual month or two headstart on the national campaign. He'll need it too, as Republicans are going to be a tough sell, but would be much easier against Clinton, and a lot harder against Obama.

I'll leave you with one thought from one of the most brilliant and hated political strategists the US political world has ever seen, Karl Rove. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not promoting Rove and his brand of divisive political strategy, but it wins elections. He gave two elections to George Bush that the man had no business even being in, let alone winning. With Bush, Rove has proven his mastery, he can even put this man into the White House, twice. But the thought that I wanted to highlight was that Rove wants Hillary to win this nomination, wants it even more than a tradional conservative nominee on the right. He wants this because he knows Hillary is a much easier campaign opponent than Obama. She has skeletons, and a large list of negatives. Barack has less skeletons, and less negatives, and has a groundswell of support.

Rove would love it if Hillary Clinton won, which should tell all of us left of Hitler than Obama is the best chance to save the US in the coming election.

I will, of course, be here throughout the rest and far beyond, and I hope you will be too, because this is shaping up to be the election of a generation, and one that will affect the US, and the world, for a few more generations after that.

Updated Delegate Numbers

The Democratic Magic Number to win the nomination is: 2025

Through Super Tuesday as of 7pm PST:

Hillary Clinton - 299

Barack Obama - 219

The Republican Magic number to win the nomination is: 1191

Through Super Tuesday as of 7pm PST:

John McCain - 309

Mitt Romney - 135

Mike Huckabee - 54

Ron Paul - 6

As you can see, the Democratic side is still a dogfight, although Hillary has scored serious points in the Northeast. California will still play a big role, but this race is looking to go past today, barring some massive unforseen event.

On the Republican side, McCain still looks to be pulling away, although Mitt Romney did just as expected and won the Utah primary a few minutes ago. Huckabee is still running strong, but he's still not a viable candidate for the Presidency. At this point, he's fighting for a spot on a ticket, and it's not the lead one.

Breaking: McCain wins Oklahoma, with 41 delegates added to his count.

Breaking: Barack Obama wins North Dakota, with 21 delegates coming his way.

Obama wins Alabama, Huckabee showing strong

Barack Obama has won Alabama, with over 2/3 of the vote, reports CNN. He is also leading in Idaho, North Dakota, and Minnesota.

Obama is matching Clinton step-for-step and state-for-state. This is increasingly looking like it will continue past today's vote.

Huckabee is still winning Georgia, although Romney is doing well in the urban areas, and McCain is doing well in the military areas. Votes are still being counted, and not much is changing right now. It will be down to the wire here.

Huckabee is also winning in Missouri and Minnesota, and it looks like Mitt Romney's chances fade every time another breaking result pours in.

Delegate Count

The Democratic Magic Number to win the nomination is: 2025

Through Super Tuesday as of 6pm PST:

Hillary Clinton - 279
Barack Obama - 210

The Republican Magic number to win the nomination is: 1191

Through Super Tuesday as of 6pm PST:

John McCain - 208
Mitt Romney - 99
Mike Huckabee - 54
Ron Paul - 6

As you can see, the Democratic side is still a dogfight, and likely will be past today.

On the Republican side, McCain looks to be pulling away, and Mitt Romney needs to pull out some delegates quick, or else he will be out of this race by tomorrow morning. Same goes for Huckabee.

Hillary wins new York

Hillary Clinton has won her adopted state of New York, whom she represents in the US Senate. There are no numbers yet on the vote, but it looks like Hillary has taken 3/4-2/3 of the vote, leaving her with a large chunk of the 200+ delegates up for grabs in the second-most populous state.

All of the other states reporting at 6pm have no clear winner, even in John McCain's home state of Arizona. Surprising that McCain didn't pull his own state so overwhelmingly that it wasn't immediately available to call, as Hillary did.

Tennessee is still up in the air, but it looks like John McCain may have put another state into his pocket.

Clinton is also ahead in early numbers in Massachusetts, which is a tad surprising with all the high-profile endorsements Obama has gotten from the state's politicians like the Kennedys, John Kerry and the state's governor. This could be big for Hillary, from a PR standpoint, as Massachusetts doesn't have a powerhouse amount of delegates, but if Hillary wins, she will have done so in spite of the Democratic establishment in the area turning against her.

Breaking: Barack Obama pulls Delaware, with all 23 delegates going to him.

McCain carries New Jersey

John McCain has won the populous primary of New Jersey over Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee, by a large margin.

McCain is over 60 delegates ahead now over Huckabee and Romney so far in the Super Tuesday polling.

Also, in a breaking result, Hillary Clinton is taking New Jersey by a 2-1 margin over Barack Obama, although these results, as with the above, are very early.

Multiple State Results - Illinois, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oklahoma

It looks like Barack Obama has won his home state of Illinois, as predicted, and in the same state John McCain has won on the Republican side. McCain has also carried Conneticut, and Mitt Romney has taken his home state of Massachusetts. Hillary Clinton has taken Oklahoma.

More reports on numbers in a bit, but I thought I'd report these early numbers on wins in the Republican and Democratic primaries.

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...