football every night. Heck no. It's not much different, football draws less blood, maybe. Modern presidential politics is good old-fashioned competition with handicapping, predictions and all the things that go with sports.This political primary season has been a doozy. On the Republican side, 3 months ago we had written off John McCain. Too old, too worn out, too out of touch with today's voters. Wrong. He will be the Republican candidate. Who could have predicted a serious threat coming from Huckabee? And yet he is winning some southern states. And speaking of Huckabee, as much as I would love to see the disintegration of the IRS, the chances of him shutting down the IRS are slim and none. Do you really think the most powerful branch of government, the federal bureaucracy, is going to let that happen. No way, Jose. There isn't enough political capital available, let alone a Congress willing to permit it. It makes exciting political speechmaking, but it's disingenuous of him to make promises he knows he can't keep.
Picture right: J. McCain with Florida Governor Charlie Crist and California Governor Schwarzenegger. You'll see this a lot in the next few months. Florida is a toss-up state and McCain is the only Republican with a chance of taking California. A Huckabee VP selection and McCain pulls in the south and some of the evangelicals. The Republican's have announced their strategy.
On the Democrat side no one predicted Senator Obama to get too far out of the gate, but he is running close to the favorite, Hillary Clinton. I'm a Republican in most platform issues, which probably comes as no surprise to regular readers, but I will say this, the most moving person and the only person generating real, old-fashioned, political excitement is Barack Obama. He's a candidate to be reckoned with.
I still predict a Clinton victory in November, and to my Republican friends all I can say is, the Oval Office changes everyone who enters it.
For the record, my news-station of choice is MSNBC because I like Chris Matthews. I don't require that the newscaster agree with me or I with him, I do require a certain sincerity, integrity, and likability.
(Happy Birthday to Stephen, 28 years. When school gets difficult, remember the refrigerator.)
4 comments:
What a great blog, you're doing a super job!
Hmmm . . . my beloved mother has passed on, may she rest in peace, my wife wouldn't say that, friends .... nahhh . . ., my granddaughter can't write yet. I give up, I don't know who wrote this.
I agree with you on being a political animal and preferring MSNBC. Mostly because of Matthews.
I put in 9 solid hours last night and found the whole thing to be utterly fascinating.
As a recovering statistics geek, I enjoy all of the numbers inside the numbers and wish I had all the data on my own laptop to do my own crosstabs, but alas...
My brief thoughts over on my site fortworthblogorrhea.blogspot.com
Steve -- I read at your blog frequently.
Matthews is an active Catholic like I am -- and we don't agree with much after that. I like him because he treats everybody with a certain respect, has thoughtful guests, and isn't trying to over-schtick everybody.
The conservative talk show radio and TV guys annoy me. Especially Rush.
Ohbermann is a little too stuck on himself for me. Dobbs is too anti- everything but I do like CNN's Anderson Cooper. He's a sharp guy.
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