Super Tuesday is upon us. About 24 states are either picking national delegates or, at least, starting the process today. The principle behind this, the longest primary day, was much like the Longest Day itself: create a decisive victory in a single great 24 hour battle. But how the best laid plans go awry.
TRS has consistently predicted that today will be inconclusive in both parties. Ironically, when we Republicans had four or five candidates within spitting distance of each other the conventional wisdom projected an almost irrelevant Super Tuesday. Like most pundits, TRS thought Super Tuesday’s delegates would splinter among several Republicans. Now it looks like a three way split with Mac finishing the day around 650-750 delegates, hundreds ahead of Mitt and Huck but still hundreds short of the nomination. Such a result puts Johnny Mac in a strong but not yet victorious position. It‘s kind of like Iraq, the process of victory is ongoing but victory not yet achieved. Mac’s lead may be sufficiently large to scare Mitt and Huck into surrender but neither has shown much interest inclination toward surrender.
With California now really in play our race has the potential to get closer than the conventional wisdom expressed above. The latest changes in the voters’ mood makes the Democrat race much closer, closer than Sunday’s Super Bowl to be sure. If Obama wins California going away the Wednesday morning delegate count could see the Drama of Obama and Evita separated by no more than a few dozen to maybe 100 committed delegates. Since the Democrats don’t use winner take all, close finishes in large states make a decisive day unlikely.
The Democrats, now only a two candidate race now openly expect an inconclusive result. .With big states like Texas and Ohio yet to vote the ultimate Democrat nominee won’t be known until, at the earliest, next month. Good for us, bad for them it seems.
Share your thoughts over this long night tonight.
TRS has consistently predicted that today will be inconclusive in both parties. Ironically, when we Republicans had four or five candidates within spitting distance of each other the conventional wisdom projected an almost irrelevant Super Tuesday. Like most pundits, TRS thought Super Tuesday’s delegates would splinter among several Republicans. Now it looks like a three way split with Mac finishing the day around 650-750 delegates, hundreds ahead of Mitt and Huck but still hundreds short of the nomination. Such a result puts Johnny Mac in a strong but not yet victorious position. It‘s kind of like Iraq, the process of victory is ongoing but victory not yet achieved. Mac’s lead may be sufficiently large to scare Mitt and Huck into surrender but neither has shown much interest inclination toward surrender.
With California now really in play our race has the potential to get closer than the conventional wisdom expressed above. The latest changes in the voters’ mood makes the Democrat race much closer, closer than Sunday’s Super Bowl to be sure. If Obama wins California going away the Wednesday morning delegate count could see the Drama of Obama and Evita separated by no more than a few dozen to maybe 100 committed delegates. Since the Democrats don’t use winner take all, close finishes in large states make a decisive day unlikely.
The Democrats, now only a two candidate race now openly expect an inconclusive result. .With big states like Texas and Ohio yet to vote the ultimate Democrat nominee won’t be known until, at the earliest, next month. Good for us, bad for them it seems.
Share your thoughts over this long night tonight.
3 comments:
I have the "pleasure" of being here in CA today - as a Des Moines resident it is interesting to hear the views of Californians who are thrilled they get a true say in their choice.
From today's Howard Kurtz article in the Washington Compost:
"If I believe the country will suffer with either Hillary, Obama or McCain, I would just as soon the Democrats take the hit . . . rather than a Republican causing the debacle," he said. "And I would prefer not to have conservative Republicans in the Congress paralyzed by having to support, out of party loyalty, a Republican president who is not conservative."
-Rush Limbaugh
McCain refused to open his records and fought viciously against the POW/MIA families and the prisoners left behind in Vietnam....a smaller number of former POWs, MIA families and veterans have suggested there is something especially damning about McCain that the senator wants to keep hidden.
Without release of the files, such accusations must be viewed as unsubstantiated speculation. The main reason, however, for seeking these files is to find out if there is any information in the debriefings, or in other MIA documents that McCain and the Pentagon have kept sealed, about how many prisoners were held back by North Vietnam after the Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973. The defense and intelligence establishment has long resisted the declassification of critical records on this subject. McCain has been the main congressional force behind this effort.
The prisoner return in 1973 saw 591 Americans repatriated by North Vietnam. The problem was that the U.S. intelligence list of men believed to be alive at that time in captivity — in Vietnam, Laos and possibly across the border in southern China and in the Soviet Union — was much larger.Possibly hundreds of men larger.
The State Department stated publicly in 1973 that intelligence data showed the prisoner list to be starkly incomplete. For example, only nine of the 591 returnees came out of Laos, though experts in U.S. military intelligence listed 311 men as missing in that Hanoi-run country alone, and their field reports indicated that many of those men were probably still alive. Hanoi said it was returning all the prisoners it had. President Nixon, on March 29, 1973, seconded that claim, telling the nation on television: “All of our American POWs are on their way home.” This discrepancy has never been acknowledged or explained by official Washington. Over the years in Washington, McCain, at times almost single-handedly, has pushed through Pentagon-desired legislation to make it impossible or much harder for the public to acquire POW/MIA information and much easier for the defense bureaucracy to keep it hidden.
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