After nearly three months of continual trivial stories about the gaffe du jour or the horrible friends, acquaintances, or endorsers of the candidates, the primaries are over and each party has its nominee: McCain for the Republicans and Obama for the Democrats.
For the Democrats there has been no decisive victory. Roughly 5% of the total pledged delegates separates Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama, hardly a knockout punch. Rather, Democratic Primary voters had a decided difference of opinion.
I believe that an electoral or popular vote blow-out in November is highly unlikely for either candidate. Don’t believe polls, surveys, or samples. Americans have spent twelve (or sixteen or twenty) years giving the expected answer. They’re going to give the expected answer to pollsters, too.
I believe that this election will be decided on the margins, by very small percentages, by very small numbers of votes. In all likelihood Democrats will carry the states they carried overwhelmingly last time overwhelmingly this time, too, and Republicans will carry the states they carried overwhelmingly solidly. A few states that narrowly went Republican last time around will narrowly go Democratic this time around. Yes, I think that the odds are with Sen. Obama. Slightly.
The facts on the ground favor the election of a Democratic candidate. There’s an unpopular war going on in Iraq and a forgotten, in my view futile war in Afghanistan. Gas and food prices are rising. The economy is in the doldrums.
And during the last eight years of Republican control of the White House, six of them with Republican control of the Congress, the Grand Old Party has, to say the least, not covered itself in glory. It has revealed itself, to the surprise of its naive supporters, to be filled with self-aggrandizing, power-seeking rent-seekers, corrupt and hypocritical.
However, in a year in which the stars have converged to deliver the White House and the Congress to the Democrats, the party has lurched uncontrollably towards the candidates that provided them with the highest hurdles to leap while the Republicans have, with a remarkable sense of self-preservation, selected the only candidate in their field with even the slightest chance of winning the general election.
I’ve read a lot of things about how the primary elections have created divisions in the Democratic Party. Nonsense. The primary process revealed the fault lines that have existed in the Democratic Party for decades, black and white, gender activists and traditionalists, blue collar Average Joes and technocrats, and a host of other divisions large and small. Many of these will join hands to support the Democratic Party candidate in November. Some will lick their wounds and sulk on the sidelines during this election. Some will vote for the other guy.
What proportion does what may well decide the election in November.
Considering the historical primary we have just witnessed…I would not be surpirsed to see another historical event come Nov 2008. I think, as I have thought all along, that there will be a huge and historical turn out and the democrates will sweep the election easily.
Our democracy may be broken in many respects, but it is not dead yet.
Fault lines are everywhere, most are harmless. A paraphrase from a Steven King novel, It’s a long way back to Eden, so don’t sweat the small stuff, we just might see something extraodinary happen this fall.
While the republicans (the Right) have narrowed their focus these last decades, the democrates, (the Left) have had to widen theirs, I think we’re in for a wonderfully exciting presidential race….one that just might change our nation for years to come…
“the party has lurched uncontrollably towards the candidates that provided them with the highest hurdles to leap”
While I agree with you in general, this doesn’t ring true to me. Who, among the worthies that contended for the Democratic nomination, would really have been a stronger general election candidate than Obama or Clinton? Richardson had the resume, but he showed himself to be a consistently clumsy campaigner, ill-suited to the spotlight of 24-hour reality TV. He had months to gain traction, and never moved an inch. Ditto Biden and Dodd. Furthermore, Richardson and Biden, have their own glaring weaknesses that would be easy for the opposition to exploit.
The only one I see who would probably have been a stronger candidate overall was Edwards, and like you, I think he would be an atrocious president.
Oh, and Mark Warner of course. But Clinton drove him out of the campaign before it even got started.
On Republicans’ disappointment with their elected representatives, I suspect that the emotion felt is more disappointment than surprise.