February 6, 2008
The numbers aren’t all in, but Romney is running third across the South. In perhaps the most conservative part of the country, the candidate of the conservative elite is getting worked by Huckabee and McCain.
Right now it looks like I overestimated Romney and underestimated Huckabee. Stay tuned for more.
February 5, 2008
Democrats
Obama is surging, no doubt about it. The big victory in South Carolina gave him some real juice. The question is will it be enough? Was there enough time on the clock for him to close the gap in critical Super Tuesday states? Two weeks ago Senator Clinton enjoyed big margins in these states. Not so anymore.
Obama doesn’t have to win everywhere, of course, since the Democratic primaries / caucuses award delegates in proportion to the popular vote. A few big wins and a lot of close 2nd’s gives the challenger a lot of fuel to keep his campaign going. (A win in California, for example–which I now expect–would be huge, as he was down by about 20 percentage points at the time of the South Carolina primary)
Here is how I see the delegate split working out for the Dems:
Clinton 900 Obama 788
Republicans
The polls seem to be showing a late surge for Romney in the delegate rich state of California. I don’t think he’ll be winning a lot of states nationally (Utah, certainly, and Colorado to be sure). But a win in California gives his flagging campaign some more life. Will it be enough to put him on the A-Train to the nomination? No. However it would buy him some more time during which he could conceivably rally the conservative ground troops to his cause (which boils down mainly to beating John McCain). I still expect McCain to be the GOP nominee in November. But if Romney wins in California, he gets a repreive.
Here’s how I see the Republican delegates being apportioned Tuesday night:
McCain 541 Romney 301 Huckabee 181
Be sure to tune in Wednesday to see just how much crow I have to eat!
February 3, 2008
Steve Forbes and former Solicitor General Ted Olson have endorsed Senator McCain. (HT: Real Clear Politics)
As I speculated in an earlier post, it looks like GOP leaders are beginning to unite behind the maverick Senator from Arizona. Americans love a winner, as General George S. Patton once said, and McCain has the feel of one right now.
The Super Tuesday poll average at Real Clear Politics doesn’t provide much good news for Romney, either. So it’s not just the establishment that’s rallying to McCain. Looks like much of the rank and file are too.
February 2, 2008
It’s an unscientific estimate, however looking at some of the poll numbers, the delegate counts, and the trends, Super Tuesday seems to be shaping up as a big night for McCain. My preliminary–and incomplete–count shows that McCain may be headed towards collecting on the order of 400 delegates in one night (thanks in no small part to winner-take-all primaries in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware, and Arizona).
As I say, this is an incomplete estimate and I’m certainly not hanging my hat on it just yet. There isn’t much data for some of the smaller states that will be voting, and that creates some guesswork. A final calculation could go higher or lower (though my bet right now would be on higher). Nonetheless February 5th is looking pretty good for McCain. I will post my predictions Monday night / Tuesday morning.
February 2, 2008
A new Fox News Poll out Friday shows McCain is the choice of 48% of Republicans nationwide compared to Romney’s 20%. This is when all remaining contenders are included in the poll. When the field is narrowed to just McCain and Romney, the numbers shift even more dramatically in the Senator’s favor. In that two-way race he dominates with 62% to Romney’s 29%.
While the conservative Talk Radio echo chamber continues to pull for their man Romney, painting McCain’s rise as the revenge of what they term as the Republican establishment, these numbers paint a different picture. Can 62% really be termed as “the elite”? Sounds pretty mainstream to me.
January 30, 2008
In both the Democratic and Republican Presidential nomination battles, the establishment has been challenged. That is great news for America.
For months before the primary / caucus season began, pundits seemed ready to coronate Hillary Clinton on the left and either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani on the right. The voters, however, had something else in mind.
In Iowa, the establishment suffered a pair of body blows as outsiders Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and former Governor Mike Huckabee (R-AR) won substantial victories in the season’s first contest. Then in New Hampshire, another candidate despised by the establishment–Senator John McCain (R-AZ)–scored another big victory for the little guys.
As the race has carried on into the south, voters have continued to signal their displeasure with the status quo by throwing their lots in with Obama and McCain. Does this mean that they have their party nomination’s secured? Far from it. However, a message is being sent: conventional wisdom doesn’t decide elections. Votes do.
The American people are making their voice heard loud and clear, and the nation will be better for it.
January 30, 2008
Tonight’s win in Florida for Senator John McCain makes him the clear front runner. Not just in momentum, but also in delegates.
The math now becomes much more difficult for Romney. With Giuliani’s loss, many of the states where he was strongest–New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California, all of which are delegate rich–may well become McCain strongholds. Moreover, Romney has yet to show that he can win in any state where he doesn’t enjoy a home field advantage. His wins in the mountain states of Wyoming and Nevada more than likely reflect strength garnered from his Mormon roots (for example, while Nevada’s population is 7% Mormon, they were 20% of the electorate there a week-and-a-half ago) and his Michigan victory was expected as it is his native state. Yet in every other primary this season (where he has outspent his opponents on the order of 9 and 10 to 1) he has fallen woefully short.
Romney strikes me as a very good man. He’s certainly built a career and a family to be proud of. But he’s not winning the contests where he has his opponents out-spent and out-gunned. In the end you have to win and not just in your backyard. Especially if you’re pouring the kind of resources Romney has into the states where he has been the also-ran.
The Republican race has rapidly narrowed into a Romney-McCain race. As of this moment, however, it’s McCain who holds the hot hand.
November 11, 2007
Garry Wills has caused a dust-up with this op-ed from the L.A. Times.
I agree with Wills that abortion is not a religious issue. In fact, it’s no more a religious issue than murder is. This, I believe, is the single greatest mistake made by most people in the pro-life movement: They make abortion a religious issue. They quote Scripture, they pray rosaries outside abortion clinics, etc. So no wonder pro-choicers perceive that pro-lifers are attempting to “impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.”
That, however, is where my agreement with Wills ends.
“If one claimed, in the manner of Albert Schweitzer, that all life deserved moral respect, then plants have rights, and it might turn out that we would have little if anything to eat.”
There is no contradiction in respecting something while consuming it at the same time. The only contradiction would be if we asserted that plants have equal dignity as human beings.
“Opponents of abortion will say that they are defending only human life. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized.”
Here Wills commits the common mistake of failing to recognize the substantial change that takes place during fertilization. A zygote is a different substance than a sperm or egg; if it were the same as any other cell in the body, we’d be able to take any cell, put it in a woman’s womb, and nine months later a baby would be born.
“Nature is like fertilization clinics — it produces more embryos than are actually used. Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?”
Yes. Unfortunately, they meet an early death.
“Whether through serendipity or through some sort of causal connection, it now seems that the onset of a functioning central nervous system with a functioning cerebral cortex and the onset of viability occur around the same time — the end of the second trimester, a time by which 99% of all abortions have already occurred.”
Wills is suggesting that a functioning nervous system or viability (or both) are what makes a fetus worthy of legal protection. But he fails to show why either quality is the distinguishing feature between that which should be protected and that which should not.
Furthermore, if either quality makes a fetus worthy of protection, then he would be obligated to oppose any abortion after that point. But in fact:
“The woman is the one closest to the decision. Under Roe vs. Wade, no woman is forced to have an abortion. But those who have decided to have one are able to.”
No distinction is made here between pre- and post-viability abortions. Wills does not call for a ban on abortions after viability, even though he intimated that position earlier in his essay.
So while Wills is right that abortion is not a religious issue, it does not follow that the pro-choice position is more reasonable than the pro-life one. Pro-lifers would do well to realize this also.
October 13, 2007
I’ve recently come to a realization about socialism after reading this article:
http://www.socialism.com/fsarticles/vol28no5/28513RWclinton.html
No, I haven’t become a socialist, but I have learned a little about how socialists think. The point in question appears in the penultimate paragraph, where the author describes her dream candidate as “someone who would lead in building a movement to nationalize healthcare, transportation, communications, and energy under workers’ control.”
First of all, I wonder why we should limit ourselves to just these four areas. If capitalism is so bad and socialism is all it’s cracked up to be, why stop at just health care, transportation, communications, and energy?
But the main point is that socialists see socialism as a means of “power to the people”–the people own the government; the government owns x, therefore the people own x. Presumably, the people’s ownership of x would make x more responsive to the people’s will as opposed to that of cold, greedy corporate masters.
Conservatives tend to cast liberals as weak-kneed wimps who like the security of the government providing for all their needs. But for many (at least those in the socialist camp), the issue isn’t so much providence but power. The question then is: Does government control over something really amount to control by ordinary citizens?
I think this is a big ideological divide that both sides need to acknowledge and understand if there is to be any progress on this issue.
September 28, 2007
The Republican Party’s top four Presidential candidates inexplicably skipped a debate on minority issues, ceding the stage and the topic to the second and third tier of the party’s field. GOP loyalists should be gravely concerned about the impact that this snub will have on the party’s attempts to win over African-American and Hispanic voters in the 2008 election cycle. However, of greater concern should be the fact that these candidates willingly surrendered an opportunity to engage voters in a discussion about the future of our nation.
The challenges facing America on the global and domesetic fronts are greater than at any time since the Soviet Union’s collapse signalled the end of the Cold War. US troops and intelligence officers are engaged in a global war against terrorism; across the Pacific, the most populous nation in the world–China–is building a blue water fleet with the intent to project its power and protect its interests around the globe; and here in America, race relations, immigration, and health care reform wait to be addressed by a leadership class that apparently has forgotten that it is they who work for the American people, not the other way around.
America deserves a leader who is unafraid to engage all comers in discussion and debate, no matter the arena and no matter the topic. We are owed a campaign of ideas and inspiration, not one that seeks merely to turn out the base of either party. Sadly, of the four men most likely to be the Republican standard bearer next summer, none saw fit to rise to the challenge this time. This was not only bad politics. This was a silent commentary on the arrogance of power.
