Saturday, February 09, 2008

Another wild finish in the GOP

Republicans in three states voted for our nominee today. Mike Huckabee won Kansas almost three to one. Huck leads Louisiana 44-42 and trails in Washington 26-24 as we publish this post. Seattle is supposedly in so the remaining rural counties trend toward Huckabee.

Counting has stopped in Washington and the votes are coming in slowly in Louisiana. If Huck wins all three states he will have finished the week winning nine states, geographically as diverse as West Virginia and Washington.

John McCain’s delegate lead is impressive, and only the delegate really matters. Neither McCain nor Huckabee will earn delegates from Louisiana because neither received 50%. Neither Kansas nor Washington provide a large bundle of delegates for their winners. Although the ultimate nominee may be unaffected by today’s finish provides powerful evidence of Huck’s great campaign skills.

It’s too bad that media created expectations have so replaced actual results as the disparities factor in the primary system. Don’t you think that Edwards, Rudy and even Mitt, whose victory in Michigan wasn’t sufficiently overwhelming to meet the media standard of performance, would have been better served by more patience from the Fifth Estate in describing and defining the race. Even more so would be some of the longer shots, especially the three Democrats Richardson, Biden and Dodd.

Much like their should be no football polls until after the week three games, the press should not be able to handicap the race until after South Carolina.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

John McCain Gets Soros Cash

DiscovertheNetwork.org / Moonbat Central, March 10, 2005 | Richard Poe


Senator John McCain's Reform Institute has suffered some bad press recently due to its involvement in an influence-peddling scandal with Cablevision. As usual, however, mainstream media have failed to go to the root of the matter.

Founded on June 26, 2001, McCain's Reform Institute for Campaign and Election Issues has long served as a nerve center for the so-called "campaign finance reform" movement – a movement which has done nothing to clean up campaign finance, but has done a great deal to empower federal judges and government bureaucrats to regulate political speech, in defiance of the Bill of Rights.

Now here's the kicker. The list of donors published on the Reform Institute's Web site reads like a veritable Who's Who of radical, leftwing foundations, including the Tides Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Proteus Fund and George Soros' Open Society Institute. (hat tip, Winfield Myers)

Not surprisingly, in view of the above associations, Arianna Huffington serves on the Reform Institute's Advisory Board. Huffington has long acted as a front for George Soros' "campaign finance reform" efforts. In 2000, she organized the so-called Shadow Conventions which provided John McCain with a bully pulpit to stump for his now-infamous McCain-Feingold Act. George Soros shouldered about one third of the cost of the Shadow Conventions.

Anonymous said...

"If you go over a cliff with all flags flying, you are still going over a cliff."

-Ronald Reagan

Anonymous said...

Arizona Republican Senator John McCain echoed Watkin's comments and said if the full Senate gets to weigh in on Law of the Sea ratification "the vote would be 95 to five" in favor.

The Arizona Republican honed in on the issue of climate change and the concern about the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the oceans.

He cited a new study that shows the oceans are directly impacted by the increased CO2 that is being pumped into the atmosphere by human activities and called the Bush administration's position on climate change "disgraceful."

Lautenbacher said the administration's policy is "to slow down the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and to stop it ... through controls and voluntary restrictions."

"It is technology that will take us out of this problem," he told the committee.

McCain said that view is shortsighted and irresponsible.

"We are every single day laying a burden on our children and grandchildren," McCain said. "The evidence is there in overwhelming fashion and we are paying a very heavy price."

Anonymous said...

Why did they stop the vote counting in Washington's caucusses as soon as McCain pulled ahead?

Anonymous said...

Finally, Spotlight asks a good question!!!

Cedar Waxwing said...

What the Washington GOP did out there was shameful...

I've organized the caucuses here in my county for nearly 10 years now...

From everything I've seen about how Washington conducted their caucuses--there was no transparency what so ever.

No public record can be found so far of what the EXACT vote totals were from every county, every precinct in the state of Washington.

We all know how its done here in Iowa..and in fact, RPI did a great partnership with Google this year where as the precinct results were automatically put up on the RPI website and transmitted to the media.

The winner of the caucus was known by 9:30 on caucus night. No need to count for several days as they seem to be doing in Washington.

It took them til nearly 1 am Eastern time to get to 87% counted..

In fact, in our county, we hold on to all ballots from our caucus for a period of 1 year, in case there are any questions as to what the exact vote totals were...

The irony over this whole issue is that the Washington GOP was screaming bloody murder about Dino Rossi's apparent victory in 2004 being overturned after a 3rd manual recount of ballots..but here we have the Washington GOP itself who can't conduct an election properly..

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