“I can’t tell you how excited Rod Stewart is about this millennium concert. He’s gotten a little older but you’re gonna see how much he can still rock.” – Rod Stewart’s Manager
Barring a serious medical complication, and at his age it’s a real possibility, John McCain now has the Republican nomination sewn up. Mitt Romney has left the building and Mike Huckabee would need an awful lot of help from his fictional deity to surprise everyone again. Huckabee’s strong showing yesterday hopefully indicates that conservative displeasure with McCain is strong enough to withstand a couple of “Get behind McCain!” news cycles but it still looks safe for me to (happily) retire my “Go John Go!” tag.
On the other side of things, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still vying for the Democratic nomination. He crushed her yesterday, the closest she came was in Cajun country where she lost by a mere twenty-one points, and if those type of results continue for the next few weeks then Hillary is in serious trouble. The Clinton campaign is more or less openly talking about losing everything until Texas and Ohio on 4 March, I guess we’ll see if the Giuliani strategy works better for them than it did for its namesake.
In short, McCain is all but assured the Red nomination and many conservatives are pissed off about it while Obama looks like he’s in for a very nice February. It’s not black history month, it’s black, uh, present month, or whatever. Handicapping the race, while fun, isn’t the main topic today. What I want to do was add another pillar of support to the “Republicans are Doomed!” theory.
Speaking on a very general level, one thing in this heavily commented upon election that I haven’t seen commented on much is the difference of tone between the Red and Blue races. The Republicans have had a downer primary while the Democrats have had a very happy one.
If you add up the issues the Reds are talking most about it amounts to “Things are bad now, but they’re going to be catastrophically worse if we lose!” It has been, for lack of a better word, a very negative campaign. We can’t afford to let Hillary in the White House, we can’t let Democrats be in charge of the various wars, we can’t this and we can’t that. Bush’s tax cuts are the only thing holding up the economy and the Democrats want to repeal them! Illegal immigrants (read: brown people) are going to rape your daughter! But that’s nothing because all those terrorists we’re fighting in Iraq are going to kill us all! The general tenor is just plain depressing.
On the other side you have the feel good nominating process of the Democrats. Even before John Edwards took down his sign the overwhelmingly positive agenda has been remarkable. We’re going to pass health care reform, we’re going to end the war, we’re going do something about global warming, etc etc etc. Everyone likes patting each other on the back over the fact that the nominee isn’t going to be a white guy. Obama’s sales pitch fits more comfortably into this than Clinton’s, but both of them are pretty upbeat.
In the general election either one of them is more focused than any Republican on the things that the electorate seems to care about most. Iraq and the economy are the two big ones, obviously, but when you look at the second tier issues the Republicans seem to care most about illegal immigration and terrorism while the Democrats talk more about health care and global warming. Here in 2008 more people care about the latter pair than the former. The medical system in this country has deteriorated to the point that ordinary, working Americans are being squeezed, and global warming genuinely scares people. Illegal immigration and terrorism, while indisputably bad, just don’t seem as pressing.
The priorities of the American people are prone to shifting, and Red scare tactics are never to be underestimated, but at the moment one side is talking about things that the people care about and the other is talking about things that they wished the people cared about. Add that to the overwhelming popularity for ending the Iraq War and the Republicans just look out of touch. Nominating a septuagenarian senator who bears more than a passing resemblance to Abe Simpson doesn’t help. There is a lot of time left between now and November, but the Republicans seem to be operating as though it were still 2004 whereas the Democrats are happily living in 2008.
