If you haven’t been paying attention to the races for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, you ought to, because it’s the first time we’ve had interesting primary races in more than 50 years. They’re interesting because usually each party has nailed down who its nominee will be after the third primary, and primaries held in the other 47 states serve as a mere formality. This year we’ve got a real race – roughly 30 states have held their primaries, and while we’re closer to choosing our two nominees who will run against each other in the general election, this race is by no means settled.
By Megan Ritter,
Senior Staff Writer
If you haven’t been paying attention to the races for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, you ought to, because it’s the first time we’ve had interesting primary races in more than 50 years. They’re interesting because usually each party has nailed down who its nominee will be after the third primary, and primaries held in the other 47 states serve as a mere formality. This year we’ve got a real race – roughly 30 states have held their primaries, and while we’re closer to choosing our two nominees who will run against each other in the general election, this race is by no means settled.
For the Democrats, Barack Obama has been the big excitement. He draws crowds of up to five thousand everywhere that he speaks. The other candidates consider a campaign event to be a smashing success if three hundred people turn out. As early in the race as last summer, Obama set records for fundraising and for numbers of individual donors. The number of people willing to put their money where their mouths are in support of Barack Obama is unprecedented in American politics: as of January, more than 600,000 people have given money to see Barack Obama win the presidency.
Since primary elections have started, every state where Obama has won has experienced record-breaking voter turnout. In Iowa, where voters can register at the door and where he won by 8 percent over his nearest rival, 60,000 first-time voters registered at the entrances to their voting locations. Just about every item for sale in the online store of barackobama.com is on back order right now – including t-shirts emblazoned with “Republicans for Obama.”
Yet for all the excitement Obama has engendered, until this weekend he ran at best neck-and-neck with Hillary Clinton in numbers of delegates, won through primary voting, who will elect the party’s nominee at this summer’s Democratic National Convention. When virtually every political analyst forecast that Obama would win the New Hampshire primary in a blowout – he enjoyed a 13 percent lead in opinion polling the day before voting – Clinton pulled out a comfortable win and seemed to reclaim her former front-runner status. Since then she and Obama have been locked in an odd sort of dance, alternating command of the race each week.
My only conclusion is that I have no conclusions – and that anyone who says that they do is probably lying to you. Democratic voters have a lot to be confused about. Clinton’s strongest claim to the nomination lies in what she describes as thirty-five years of experience – but with that experience comes an odor of Washington D.C.’s double-dealing corruption. Obama is running as the Washington outsider who will do away with “politics as usual” – but his opponents claim that he doesn’t have nearly enough experience to be president, and he occasionally plays right into their hands, as he did last August when he suggested that he’d deal with Osama bin Laden by invading Pakistan. (Pakistan, in case Obama missed it, is one of our firmest allies in the war on terror.)
The race for the Republican nomination is even more mixed-up. In the last year, the honor of being considered the G.O.P. front-runner has jumped from Rudy Giuliani, to John McCain, to Mitt Romney, to Mike Huckabee and back to McCain.
Giuliani, who came into the national limelight with 9/11, quite justifiably believed that the Republican nomination was his for the taking and went with the bizarre strategy of refusing to compete in any of the first three states to hold primary voting. He dropped out of the race less than a day after finishing a distant fourth in the first state in which he actually tried to win votes. Romney donated $35 million – one-tenth of his personal fortune – to his own campaign and dropped out last week after failing to win any races except those in Michigan where he was born and in Massachusetts where he was governor and a scattering of states in which he was the only candidate with the financial resources to actually campaign.
As if this election couldn’t get more interesting, the two remaining Republican candidates (Ron Paul is quietly dropping out to focus on retaining his seat in Congress) are the two who have been most consistently and most fiercely attacked by those considered the conservative Republican elite.
John McCain has, since Romney’s exit from the race, been celebrated as the presumptive nominee. A significant wing of the Republican Party has mobilized to denounce John McCain – they point to his controversial votes on immigration, tax cuts, education reform, and campaign finance reforms. There are serious questions about McCain’s commitment to his own party’s platform, so debating ideological differences is alright. The outright character assassination that has been committed against John McCain is not alright.
It’s hard to see how the Republican Party can claim its old moral high ground as a defender of the military when so many are working so hard to shred the reputation of a former Navy officer who, offered early release from a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, refused to leave unless everyone from the camp was released.
On the other hand, Mike Huckabee remains in the race, wondering why the conservative elite is urging him to drop out when just this past weekend he won two primaries (Louisiana and Kansas) to McCain’s one (Washington). To those who argue that Huckabee should follow Romney’s lead and drop put of the race to clear McCain’s path, it’s clear that McCain hasn’t been able to rally conservatives.
According to ABC News, in every single primary that McCain has won so far, he has still failed to win a majority of those people who identify themselves as conservatives – the very ideological group that has made up the Republican Party for 60 years. McCain has so far failed to win primaries in states that are traditionally dominated by Republicans.
Those states, interestingly, make up a majority of the twenty or so states who have yet to hold their primaries. Huckabee, therefore, still has a reason to remain in the race and a chance to win – but the Republican elite doesn’t like him any better than they like McCain. When I say that, I mean that some of the most significant leaders of the Republican Party – including Rush Limbaugh, the radio host and author who is the reason why I became a Republican – have sworn that they’ll vote for a Democrat before Huckabee or McCain.
I’ve never understood the logic that says that if someone doesn’t toe their party line 100 percent of the time then they must belong in the other party. I understand even less what the Republican Party was saying only a few months ago: “Anyone but Hillary.”
I thought all along that if the party was willing to nominate anyone who we thought could win, then we probably deserved to lose. Now, however, we’re in the position that we have two strong candidates who somehow fail to pass muster with our self-appointed leaders. We should take a lesson from the Democrats – they’re squabbling over two candidates, yes, but no one is trying to destroy anyone else’s character in the process.