Come Wednesday I think you’ll be seeing many more people making their calls on how they think the great contest will end this November. I could do that too but it would be a lot less risky and hardly any sport compared to calling it right now.
The truth is that I have believed that Hillary will be the winner in 2008 since the mid-term election cycle of 2006. The opinion of congress, the president and Republicans in general had fallen so low for reasons both deserved and undeserved that I felt there was little to no chance that the next president would come from anywhere other than the Democratic party. I still feel that way, and although I thought there was some question as to whether Hillary would be the Democrats’ nominee at that time my uncertainty had faded by late last year. Obama has had a good run, but as I described earlier here, I don’t think the remaining primaries will do it for him. Florida was only the first evidence of my thesis. I believe that Tuesday will seal it for Hillary.
What then? As I’ve said before here, McCain is very likely to be the Republican nominee. Although free market and free speech conservatives are having fits over this, I believe the weakness of their sharply divided party will soon leave them with a stark choice. Back McCain for all you are worth or resign yourself to a second Clinton presidency.
Ironically, I don’t think their choice will matter. Regardless of whether they manage to muster a show of enthusiasm for their candidate, they will lose. Their hearts won’t be in it, and too many of their countrymen are against them. Every erg of fervor available to Republicans was spent in 2004 hanging on to the presidency against John Kerry, and even then only a small percentage of the vote in Ohio saved their cause. More on that in a minute.
Hillary will not coast into office. As is made plenty evident here and elsewhere, the Democratic party faithful have nearly as many misgivings about her as the Republicans have about McCain. My take on it is that the landscape of American politics and circumstance will occasionally yield the Clintons enough supporters to satisfy their ambitions, but their brand of politics nonetheless leaves them with few allies and no friends. They will successfully brass knuckle Hillary to the top of the pile in the primaries and then their party members will face the same choice that Republicans face – grudgingly line up behind your nominee or accept certain governance by your anathema.
In today’s political reality, a contest held between the nominees that each party is reluctantly left with provides the Democrats a decided edge over Republicans. Since the year 2000, Republicans have been compromised by a combination of historic circumstances their own bad choices. The combination has been disastrous.
A presidency and a congress simultaneously led by Republicans has left their party a smoking wreck. Bush has governed not like a Republican, but a Frankenstein combination of historic Democrats – Williams Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Lyndon Johnson. The unlikely combination of the disputed 2000 election and bizarre post 9/11 politics of the past seven years kept “W” from being burned alive by his own party. Had Bush not been so loathed by the left in those heated circumstances the Republicans would have turned on him in his first term. Instead, the Republican-led congress found it easier to forfeit the principles of their party in domestic matters than to fight Democrats on every front. They’ve acquiesced to growth in spending, growth in government and growth in debt. This failure of principle has left them so weak and broken, so without credibility or cause, so confused about their own identity that I believe it will take them a generation, a catastrophe of Democratic making or both to recover anything resembling their ascendant strength in the 1980s and 1990s.
I doubt that I will ever forget my astonishment on the day after the 2004 election when I listened to the commentary made by Bush and Karl Rove. From my point of view we had a sitting president during a time of war that had barely survived an election against an extremely weak opponent. What might have been a landslide victory for a better president was instead an electoral squeaker that was very nearly his second contested victory. Despite this, Bush’s so-called “architect” was blathering about a “permanent Republican majority.” Bush himself was making statements about how the results showed a clear accumulation of political capital that he planned to “spend.” I was stunned. These people were clearly delusional. Two years later the mid-term elections proved that the Republican party had not accumulated capital at all, but was instead operating its politics in much they same way that it was running the US Treasury. They were not accumulating political capital, but political debt. Four years on and it is obvious that they they are now bankrupt. I’ve heard that bankruptcy takes 7-10 years to clear off of your credit report.
Get ready to say “President Clinton” again.
