Liberty in America
columnist: rtbohan

Topic: Presidential Campaign 2008
Hillary, Barack, and "Honest John" in PA

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The Pennsylvania primary is over, to the relief of all Pennsylvanias. The candidates' struggles go on.

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by rtbohan
(Libertarian)
Wednesday, April 23, 2008

After six weeks of campaigni advertisements, misstatements, claims of victimhood and personal attacks, the traveling circus called the Presidentital campaign has wound up its affairs in Pennsylvania. The candidates, weary and wounded are moving on.  For the next two weeks the voters of Indiana and North Carolina will get to enjoy the ecstacy and the agony of attention from the media and the candidates.

If the Republican Party establishment, as Rush Limbaugh implies, really want their candidate to face Hillary Clinton in November, they nust be happy about the outcome of the Democratic primary.  The Republican primary is a different story.

The establishment's candidate, John McCain, won the primary.  But it was a primary for which only a little over 808,000  voters  turned out, as opposed to over 2,300,000 who voted in the Democratic primary, Local Republican leaders said that they expected party switchers to return to the Republican Party in  November.  To make it easier for these voters, the party intended to have precinct officials with the necessary forms for the voters to switch party identification.  Waylaying voters on the street and hectoring them to change their registration hardly sounds like the action of a confident party leadership. And changing one's registration hardly guarantees one's vote in November.

The Republicans who switched party at the suggestion of Rush Limbaugh or Richard Mellon Scaife, probably are eager to get back to the party of their heart.  The voters who voted in the Democratic primary because they want to vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton for President in November will remain in the Democratic column if their candidate wins the nomination.  If their candidate does not win the nomination, they may vote Republican to punish the usurper, or they may stay home on election day.  The voters who switched party because of their opposition to the Iraq war are not going to vote Republican unless Ron Paul is nominated.  They will vote for the Democratic candidate or a third party peace candidate or sit at home.  Those who switched party because they are worried about the economy will vote Republican only if there is dramatic recovery before election day.  John McCain cannot win these voters. Either George Bush and his administration have to win them back, or the Democratic candidate has to drive them back.

John McCain, who seems to have slipped in press reports from "the certain nominee" to the "likely" or "presumptive"  nominee of the Republican Party, won the primary with 73% of the vote.  It must be a little unsettling for the candiate with a seemingly insurmountable lead in pledged delegates to have nearly 30% of his party's voters reject him. Senator McCain did not stay in Pennsylvania long enough to stage a victory party, or even to watch the voting take place.  He was in Ohio trying out his populist persona.  He was telling voters in Youngstown, once a thriving steel center, that he felt their pain.  High paying jobs, he told them, would return to the area, but they would be in the information industry.  It was an interesting contrast to the "Straight Talk" John McCain who had told the unemployed auto workers in Michigan that high paying jobs would never return.

The Repulican voters who rejected McCain were divided between Ron Paul, who ran ads and campaigned briefly in the state, and Mike Huckabee, who has stopped campaigning and endorsed McCain.

Paul won nearly 130,000 votes, 16% of the total.  This is the highest percentage of votes that he has won in any state this year.  Because the Republican primary is a winner take all system, Paul win not add to his total of pledged delegates.  But the vote does indicate that the "Revolution is alive and well" in Pennsyvania as well as Montana.

Mike Huckabee finshed in third place with just over 90,000 votes, 11% of the total.  This was impressive for a candidate who did no campaigning.  Presumably most of these votes came from the religious conservatives who have also been the bulk of his supporters.  It might indicate a wish to see Huckabee as the Vice Presidential nominee--perhaps with an unspoken wish that President McCain would emulate President William Henry Harrison.  The most likely interpretation is that religious conservatives still do not trust or accept McCain and will not vote for him in the fall.

Hillary Clinton won an impressive victory in the Democratic primary.  During the last weeks of the campaign her eleven point lead in the polls declined to four points, but on election day she rebounded and came away with a ten point victory,  1,259.832 (55%) to 1,0444,655(45%).  Impressive as it was, however, her vitory in the popular vote gave her a net gain of only eleven delegates, leaving her still more than 100 votes behind Obama in pleddged delegates.

Her victory was achieved largely through increasingly strong attacks on Obama, based mostly on his past associates.  Bill Clinton told audiences that the campaign would get dirtier if Hillary won in Pennsylvania.  He also, having been warned about portraying his wife as victim, cast himself in the role, complaining that the"race card" was being played against him, because an Obama supporter. asked about his campaign speeches in South Carolina.  Hillary herself decided to show her belligerent side instead, announcing her plans to "destroy Iran" if Iran bothered a whole new list of client states of the U.S.  This may hurt her if she is the nominee.  Just as she could not compete with Obama in the question of which was more against the Iraq war, she cannot compete with McCain for the imperialist vote.

Obama's loss of momentum was due more to his own shortcomings than to the Clinton effort.  He showed again that he is not skilled in the debate format, and then complained about how rough the questions were.  He is right that the moderaters in the ABC debate concentrated more on questions about his associates that he has already answered than on any substantive matters.  But having criticised Clinton for "'whining" about her teatment in earlier debates (an idea she seems to have picked up from a Saturday Night Live skit) he should have kept quiet, as Clinton pointed out.  On the other hand, in complaining about her treatment, she could only claim that she always got the first question.  Obama had to answer a series of hostile questions.  The fact that one of the moderators was the former press secretary to Bill Clinton certainly gave him grounds to claim unfairness.  His off-hand remark about the bitterness of people from small towns did betray an elitest attitude, but no person who feels that he should be made President really considers himself "plain folks."

If Obama can get his act together and wins in North Carolina and Indiana, he can win the nomination because Clinton cannot overcome his lead.  If he does not recover his poise, his candidacy could be in jeopardy. Still it seems probable that the fight will go to the floor of the Democratic National Convention.  I wrote an article in this column about that possibility ("Hillary's Choice, or How the Democrats Can Lose the Election.)  I stand by what I said in that article.

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2008 rtbohan, all rights reserved.
Published: Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Last modified: Wednesday, April 23, 2008

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