I know the policy wanks and politicos all want to think elections are all about platforms, platforms, platforms but nothing can be further from the truth. Most voters will not take the time to learn half the party platform and any party is lucky if the gist of one or two points register, for good or ill, on any given voter’s mind. It’s all about how a candidate presents and the emotional context or quality for those brief moments when a voter’s attention is captured by a candidate.
Canadian politicos should think back to the alleged hidden agenda concept the Liberals have created in the mind of the Canadian body politic. It hasn’t mattered what published platform agenda the Conservative party publishes or what level of depravity the Liberals are caught indulging in; the Conservatives still have yet to a capture the majority vote. And it’s the fear of a “hidden agenda” which holds the crowd of maddening voters back.
I have this theory about the US electorate. The country seems to be fairly well divided between Democrats & Republicans…we saw this in play during the Bush/Kerry 2004 race. There are only two ways a candidate for the presidency can carry the vote. The candidate must be appealing enough to motivate his base to turn out the vote while enticing a small percentage of the other guy’s side to vote against their natural inclination. The other way to win the White House is to pray the other guys choose a presidential nomination which polarizes and/or repels at least a third of their own party to stay home on Election Day and/or motivates the “other” guy’s to switch teams.
The Democrats have two choices for the presidential nomination. Obama and Hillary. If Obama did not present as a personable educated black male there would be absolutely nothing to talk about which leaves Hillary - who can be a very risky choice depending on who the Republicans elect. Hillary can motivate her side and while she is a polarizing figure for the Republicans, she isn’t within her own party. If she wins the nomination even the nut-root wing of the Democratic Party will fall 100% behind her to get out the vote.
The question becomes can Hillary entice enough Republican voters to cast a ballot her way on Election Day? In other words what’s her real pull factor? I’d say it was practically null unless the Republicans really drop the ball and choose a nomination which alienates or divides their party and has minimal pull factor with democrats. For the Republicans 2008 is their election to lose.
The alleged top tier contender is Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. Romney can raise money, and is a relative conservative but he is dogged by the perception he is a flip-flopper on social conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage. Then there is the fact he is a practicing Mormon. Go ahead and go all JFK on me but at least RC was within the traditional Christian community. In most American minds Mormonism is not even a close second to Christian orthodoxy. Religion might not matter in places like Massachusetts, (home of the nut-roots and the electorate which continues to defy human reason and return Ted Kennedy again, and again, to the Senate) but it does to the rest of the country. America is not Europe. Mormonism is perceived as something separate and apart from Christianity in most American minds and is seen not much better than Scientology. The average American is about as likely to vote a Scientologist into the White House as a Mormon. Just stop and think for a moment, how many times and how many Americans have closed the doors on uninvited Mormons who have come to proselytize at their doors? You cannot buy that kind of bad pr.
The average southern republican will listen politely to Romney speak and say he has a point but will instinctively squirm at the idea of voting of actually voting him into office. Elect Romney and the base will stay home in droves on Election Day.
I am not even taking into account what the nut-root wing of the Democratic Party will do if Romney wins the nomination. From the funny underwear to the rather ambivalent LDS positions on race every nut-root and their momma will hit a bull’s-eye.
Mormons can stand at every corner of America and shut about a belief in equality but if you think for a minute that any person of colour in America will vote for a man whose church sanctioned until the eighties the concept of equating spiritual purity with skin colour - you are a raging idiot. Wait till you see the Moveon.org commercials. And how can you carry the South when every black Baptist minister turns his back on you? Romney cannot carry the South, and if a candidate cannot carry the South, there is no presidency. You better believe Hillary is saying her prayers every night before she sleeps for a Romney win.
Senator John McCain is a decent man but his well-known positions on immigration/ illegal aliens have estranged him with not only his base but a significant portion of
Democratic Party as well. Couple that in with his hawkish position on Iraq and he has alienated the other side of the democrat divide. McCain has no pull factor. Zilch. McCain wins the nomination, bet on the Republicans going down in defeat in November 2008.
Rudy Giuliani, America’s favourite mayor. While I admit Rudy has a significant pull factor among Democrats he is not a big favourite among the social conservative republican base. His well-known stands on abortion, gay marriage and immigration put him directly and actively opposed to all the issues closest to the so-con heart. Not only that, but the judgment he has exercised in his personal life is repugnant to most so-cons. Rudy wins, the soc-cons stay home in record numbers and/or change sides. So Hillary moves into the White House; though, I would bet the debates could get very entertaining in a very vicious kind of way.
Fred Thompson. How boring, tired and old do you want to be? Thompson only excites political republican journalists while he puts everyone else to sleep. He needs to keep his day job of pretending to be other people with character.
So much for the top tier of republican candidates. So is there any republican candidate who can motivate republican voters and steal voters shamelessly among Democrats? Yep, there’s one. Mike Huckabee, the other guy from Hope, Arkansas and former three time governor of Arkansas. He has a rather stellar record for a governor in a non-nut-root kind of state way, but at the same time, he is just nanny-state enough for the average democrat to feel comfortable with him. He is the weakest on foreign policy and presents more as an isolationist/protectionist which has traditionally gone down well with all stripes of American voters.
Put the guy in front of a podium across from Hillary and she becomes Hillary the Hag or at least the evil witch in the mirror from Snow White. Former Baptist minister and still Mr. ‘Squeaky Clean and Decent’ knows how to work the crowd and inspire at the same time. Hillary on a good day can only manage to keep scaring you awake. Huckabee’s decency presents better than Hillary’s ‘nuanced’ decadency. If life was about pop culture - Hillary Clinton would be the Yoko Ono of politics - while Huckabee presents more like a Paul McCartney pre-Linda character.
Personally, I would love to see Hillary use her good o’ girl southern accent against the other guy from Hope. Huckabee will use his guitar to smoke on the water her out. Who better to defeat the Clintons than the guy who came in after and had to clean up the state after them? And that’s another thing. Hillary might have Bill as her secret weapon, but in America - a guitar player always trumps the guy playing sax.
9 comments:
Hillary Clinton won't be running against any of the potential candidates you mention. She'll be running against George Bush, just as Stephen Harper really ran against the legacy of Jean Chretien in the last election.
Poor Republicans. They're trying desperately to yank George out of the spotlight (you'll notice that interminable string of foreign policy announcements staged in front of cheering, carefully-arranged multicultural troop mosaics has come to an abrupt stop?), but odds are good that Americans will be still be dying in Iraq next November, the economy will still be tanking, and God knows what tales from the crypt will be prompting next year's corruption scandals.
I disagree Balbulican. Bush is already irrelevant, and the Democrats already had their moment of running against Bush during the Senate races. George lost and the Democrats took the house.
George won’t be an issue in the next presidential elections – mind you, most democrats would like nothing better than to have the presidential election run against Bush but with Hillary as the nomination it would backfire - bigtime. This is why it won’t be an election about Bush. She’d be the only candidate who voted to actually authorize Bush to actually start a war. It would be a gift 2x4 for any Republican candidate (other than McCain) to beat her over the head with.
Furthermore, the only ones with approval numbers lower than Bush are the duly elected senators currently in the house – the majority of which are democrats.
There is certainly nothing to suggest if Hillary was in charge; US soldiers won’t still be dying and not just in Iraq or that the economy won’t be tanking. This is why a national/protectionist like Huckabee has a far wider appeal than a Hillary across red/blue state lines.
"Bush is already irrelevant."
Really? The Commander in Chief of the world's most powerful army, with a year left in his mandate, veto power, and an ideological streak a mile wide, is "irrelevant"?
To quote Fezzik, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
I'm not commenting on what makes sense in terms of electoral merit: I'm predicting a campaign strategy. The last election was fought primarily on the basis of the war/not-war records of the respective candidates. The next one will be fought on the basis of the current President vs. Hillary's past fundraiser, etc. Hell of a way to elect a government.
Yes, I certainly do mean irrelevant as in a complete non-entity in the next presidential election. I will try to say again what I have already said and hopefully clearer this time. The race for president will have noting to do with Bush and/or his record.
The Senate race was about Bush and his record but the 2008 presidential election will be a fresh start.
I’d give more credence to your opinion on the American body politic if there was a Bushite in the line-up for the GOP nomination - say like Cheney but there really isn’t. The closest would be for McCain and he needs to win the nomination first. And even if McCain won - you can try to poke Bush’s record in McCain’s eye but it will miss ever time. McCain has been Bush’s nemesis since forever and a thorn in the Bush Administration’s side.
Besides, if Hillary wins the nomination - she gets dogged by the same war vote/record. The democrats can’t afford to take that track if they want to be thought of as anything other than losers.
No one fights the current election based on the last elections issues.
No other GOP nomination has close ties to the current Bush administration – look the GOP body politic started to seriously fall out with the Bush Admin after the nomination of Harriet Miers in the fall of 2005 and its been going downhill ever since. They will not lay down and play good dead dog for Hillary to walk over.
Pretend you’re a democratic strategist for Hillary. Huckabee wins the GOP nomination. Telling the country not to cast a vote for Huckabee because he’s a sycophant of the Bush administration is going to have you laughed out of any venue you try it in.
Well, the nice thing about testable assertions is that they're testable. If you think the Democrats are going to let the Republicans off the hook for an unpopular war and an unpopular President, you are mistaken. But we're both making predictions. Same this thread in a time capsule, and we'll talk in a year.
"No one fights the current election based on the last elections issues."
Really? Gee. The Liberals fought the last one on a three-elections-old "Scary Conservatives" meme - the Conservative fought the last one on Chretien's mismanagement of government. Maybe things are different in the States. Oh, that's right...they fight elections on each others' forty year old service records.
Balbulican, can you not see how be ridiculous and absurd it would be for Hillary to attempt to go on the offensive by demanding a Romney, Giuliani or a Huckabee defend the Bush White House record when not one of them was on the Bush team or even a GOP senate representative during the Bush years? Let the laughter ensue.
The presidential issues of 2004 are not the issues of 2008. For the democrats to pretend the issues are one and the same would be lubricous. Also, I am a tad surprised you are attempting to mix American & Canadian body politics. I would have thought you would have instinctively recognized entirely different beasts in entirely different systems… but to harp on just one notable difference -Americans elect their leaders directly and save punishment of a political party for the Senate. Canadians have no say on who leads any political party.
You are right in one thing and we will see in a year’s time but I will warn you, I have been winning every US election pools since Carter and Reagan.
That's nice.
We'll see in a year's time.
As for the absurdity of any given campaign strategy...yes, I thought it absurd that a presidential campaign would be fought on the basis of a thirty year old service record. American politicians and voters can astonish me at every trun.
Today I read your praise of Mike Huckabee, and some more from Chuck Norris. Though I'm still a Giuliani guy, I think Huckabee's starting to gather steam. I just hope he doesn't peak too early. :)
I got a snicker out of the Chuck Norris endorsement...now what does Arnie say?
But really, its not that Huckabee is really my personal favourite per say - its just I believe he'll ultimately make a much stronger candidate. Rudy's cool but the so-cons will stay home in droves if he wins the nomination nor can he carry the south. It was the so-con's that carried the day for Bush 2000 & 2004 - alienate them at your electoral peril. Elect Rudy, and Hillary becomes Commander & Chief - and to paraphrase Huckabee, there is nothing funny about Hillary Clinton as commander and chief.
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