State of the Presidential Race, Part 2
Thursday, March 20th, 2008Well, a lot of candidates have dropped out since my last post regarding the State of the Presidential Race. The Republican nomination has been secured by John McCain, who is currently attempting to convince the party’s conservative base that he isn’t going to take direction from the DNC. The Democrats have narrowed their choice to two candidates, either one of which would have a historical run for the Office. Senator Hillary Clinton is riding in on her husband’s coattails touting her “experience” and Senator Barack Obama is riding the “I’m a Rock Star” wave to victory in primary after primary. However, the Democrat race has become interesting of late, as it appears that the campaign of the man they call “Obamassiah” is starting to implode.
JOHN McCAIN (R): Currently, McCain is in the Middle East meeting with various leaders to give them a feel for what a McCain Administration would mean for them. Fortunately for McCain, the conservative base is starting to come around to the fact that he will be the candidate of the Republican Party. They still don’t like him very much, but when they put him up against Clinton and Obama he still looks like like the lesser of the three evils. Since securing the nomination, McCain has been able to spend a lot of time shoring up his support from the conservatives instead of running against someone, so his campaign will definitely benefit from this. His best bet would be to appear as presidential as possible while the two Democrats slug it out all the way to their convention.
HILLARY CLINTON (D): Similar to McCain, Clinton’s campaign was written off as dead just a few weeks ago after having lost so many primaries in a row. However, now that the media is spending more time investigating Obama rather than fawning at his feet, Obama has started to struggle on the campaign trail, giving Clinton a shot to get back into it. It has been said that the only reason Clinton has not conceded the nomination to Obama yet is because she is waiting for his campaign to implode so she can step in and snatch the nomination from him at the last minute. Truthfully, only Clinton knows for sure, but given the history of the Clintons and their feelings of entitlement it seems like a logical conclusion. Clinton will not go quietly into the night, it simply isn’t her style. If she manages to stay close in the delegate race where it will be up to the Super Delegates to pick the nominee, she could have a chance. Nobody is better at the art of the back room deal then the Clintons, and you can bet your life that they have something on everyone of the Super Delegates.
BARACK OBAMA (D): Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Two weeks ago the Obama campaign was a unstoppable juggernaut, headed directly to the White House after the mere formality of a November election. Then a funny thing happened: The mainstream press, who had been literally fawning over him and pronouncing his every word sacred, started to look into his personal life, just like they do to Republicans on a regular basis. As expected, what they found wasn’t pretty. Apparently Obama and his family were members, for around twenty years, of a church whose pastor spends his sermons expressing racist sentiments and blaming white people for creating and unleashing the AIDS virus on the black community. Obama’s first response was that he was never in the pews when the pastor preached these sermons, and when that didn’t wash he said that the pastor was taken out of context. Well, that didn’t wash either, so Obama decided to give a big speech on Race to explain himself. At times, the speech was an insightful look at racism in America and the progress the country has made in addressing it. However, ultimately his explanation of why he refuses to distance himself from the pastor of the church was thin and unconvincing, especially in the context that he has been running as a racial uniter in this campaign. Also, his wife telling the country that she has never been proud of being an American until Obama was winning primaries didn’t help. Regardless of what her intention was, people perceived that as hatred towards this country, and combined with the pastor’s comments, these things provide a bottomless pit into which the Obama campaign can disappear if he isn’t careful.
I can’t lie; being a conservative I have watched with glee as the two remaining Democrats slice, dice, and beat each other in the media. In fact, I have particularly enjoyed watching the Democrats who support Obama come to the realization that the Republicans have been right for the last several years; that the Clintons are ruthless smear-merchants who will say anything and do anything to get elected. If the Democrats continue this fight all the way to the Denver Convention all bets are off. A decision will have to be made by the so-called Super Delegates to either heed the Clintons’ warnings and give the nomination to Hillary, thereby causing a degree of upheaval in the Democrat Party so huge that the party will not recover for years to come, or to give the nomination to Obama and to suffer the wrath of Billary, whatever that might entail. Either way, it would be one of those train wrecks that you just have to watch.
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March 25th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Obama’s campaign starting to implode?!? Which election have you been following?
You know, Nick, Obama raised five times as much money in February as John McCain did. If his campaign is imploding, what does that say about McCain?
I think Obama might have dropped a couple of points in the polls during the 24-hour-a-day onslaught of media-driven controversy over this issue, but he addressed the situation extremely well in his speech. To call it an implosion is a lot of wishful thinking on your part.
March 25th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Mike, it’s been more than a week and people are still talking about this pastor and how Obama could sit in the pews for 20 years and not object to the pastor’s racist sentiments until now. Now, he may very well have a good explanation but he has yet to give it. Also, it wasn’t good form for him to try to brush it aside by saying that he was never in the pews when he said any of this stuff. He was a member for twenty years and it would have been almost impossible for him to miss every singe sermon in which the pastor made these racist statements. Even if he did, by some miracle, manage to avoid each service that the pastor used to spew this vitriol, unless Obama was purposely trying to remain ignorant of what was going on he had to have known about the pastor’s statements.
Now, don’t get me wrong. It isn’t that I think he believes all of that crap about white people inventing AIDS and stuff; Obama seems to be an intelligent man who would know that its all bunk. However, as a politician and candidate for president, I need to know why he didn’t condemn these sentiments publicly a long time ago.
Now, first there was the controversy over what his wife said about not having ever been proud of this country until Obama started winning the primaries. As I’ve said before, what she meant to say is now irrelevant. She expressed herself so poorly that what she actually said means something else, and rather than admit that she tried to fight it with, “I was taken out of context” and all of that jazz. Then the pastor deal breaks, and Obama’s first reaction is to say he was never present when the pastor said these things, and then that the pastor was taken out of context, and now that he “strongly” denounces what the pastor said, but the pastor is still my friend. Objectively speaking, even you would have to agree that his campaign is stalling a bit over these situations. Now, luckily for Obama, he’s facing Hillary, who right now is pretty much doing everything she can to remind the public about how much they hated all of the Clintons’ lying and other shenanigans.
Is Obama finished? No, and I never even suggested that. What I did suggest was that he is going through a rough patch, and what was once deemed “inevitable” is now in question. With Hillary as his opponent, he should end up with a victory in the primaries, however bloody it turns out to be. However, the longer it takes for Hillary to quit the contest, the harder it will be on Obama to win the general election.
March 26th, 2008 at 8:11 am
However, the longer it takes for Hillary to quit the contest, the harder it will be on Obama to win the general election.
Cool. We agree on something!
March 27th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Yes, it seems we DO have something we can agree on here, at least in the last paragraph.
But I think you are being very unfair to Obama and to Rev. Wright by judging his entire 30 year career as a pastor based on parts of two different sermons. And even in those two objectionable sermons, it seems to me he is expressing more of a paranoia that the government is out to get black people rather than an outright hatred or racism towards white people in general.
You act as if Rev. Wright spewed racial invectives in every sermon he ever gave. He did not. I think he harbors some animosities and prejudices from his days growing up in a segregated country, but I don’t think it is fair to single him out for such harsh vilification based on some paranoid views that were expressed in a handful of sermons over 30 years. Obama has condemned those views, but he has refused to condemn the man and I think that is admirable.
Meanwhile, there is only one presidential candidate in the race who has actually used racial epithets in public and that would be John McCain. As recently as 2000, he referred to Vietnamese people as “gooks”. He later apologized.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:01 am
I don’t think I’m being unfair at all. After all, these sermons that are popping up on all of the video sites and television were not secretly recorded without permission; they were sold by the Church itself to anyone who wanted to buy them. Why sell them to the public if it isn’t representative of the church as a whole? If these views are not representative of the church, why not edit the tapes or use tapes from other sermons, rather than use the sermons with all of this junk in it? Answer: The church wants these messages in the public square, or at the very least doesn’t mind if the church is associated with these sentiments. Either way leaves a lot of questions.
As for Obama, as a Christian I can understand how he can “hate the sin but love the sinner.” However, the fact remains that for twenty years he sat in that church while the pastor expressed these types of views and said nothing. Now, because the pastor’s views have become well-known, all of a sudden he condemns these views. As a voter, I don’t think I’m out of line for asking him to explain why he is condemning these views only now, and what prevented him from condemning them at the time they were made.
As for the McCain swipe, I can understand why he used (and continues to use) that epithet. If someone had tortured me for six years I’d be more than a little angry about it.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:16 am
If someone had tortured me for six years I’d be more than a little angry about it.
But your empathy doesn’t extend to those that lived for generations under the thumbscrews of Jim Crow?
and what prevented him from condemning them at the time they were made.
How do you know that he didn’t?