oatney’s whereIstand Blog

For some time now, I’ve been touting the reality that it doesn’t matter whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, they are going to have to deal with a close election and possible defeat. A new Associated Press poll released yesterday reinforces that argument:

Republican Sen. John McCain has erased Sen. Barack Obama’s 10-point advantage in a head-to-head matchup, leaving him essentially tied with both Democratic candidates in an Associated Press-Ipsos national poll released Thursday.

 

The survey showed the extended Democratic primary campaign creating divisions among supporters of Obama and rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and suggests a tight race for the presidency in November no matter which Democrat becomes the nominee.

 

An AP-Ipsos poll taken in late February had Obama leading McCain 51-41 percent. The current survey, conducted April 7-9, had them at 45 percent each. McCain leads Obama among men, whites, Southerners, married women and independents.

 

Clinton led McCain, 48-43 percent, in February. The latest survey showed the New York senator with 48 percent support to McCain’s 45 percent. Factoring in the poll’s margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, Clinton and McCain are statistically tied.

Barack Obama is clearly more popular than Clinton among the Democratic base at this point, and for that reason he still has the upper hand if winning the nomination, but his national support among independents and cross-voting Republicans has now significantly waned. As I suspected, Barack Obama’s coalition is a Democratic one only, and the Red States that he is winning are not States he will be able to carry in the fall-period.

Obama will be able to carry those States that political analysts expect to “go Blue,” or that traditionally trend Democratic in national elections. In addition to having lower support among white voters, Obama needs independents to win, and McCain is likely to keep his lead among that group. At this juncture, I do not believe that Barack Obama will carry a single Southern State, including Florida. Further, Obama will do as his Democratic predecessors have done in the previous two election cycles and lose every State in the Great Plains and the Mountain West (Gore did win New Mexico in 2000, Obama may not). He will win the three West Coast States and their huge electoral vote haul, but that won’t be enough for him to win.

This means that once again, the General Election will come down (phrasing Tim Russert) to “Ohio, Ohio, and Ohio.”

whereIstand Tags

• BarackObama
• HillaryClinton
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• How will race affect Barack Obama’s candidacy?
• What impact will the early start to the 2008 presidential race have on the democratic process?
• Should Hillary Clinton drop out of the presidential race?
• How should presidential elections be decided?

 There is an interesting piece in today’s New York Times that discusses the influence that neoconservatives seem to have over John McCain:

Senator John McCain has long made his decades of experience in foreign policy and national security the centerpiece of his political identity, and suggests he would bring to the White House a fully formed view of the world.

But now one component of the fractious Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the so-called pragmatists, some of whom have come to view the Iraq war or its execution as a mistake — is expressing concern that Mr. McCain might be coming under increased influence from a competing camp, the neoconservatives, whose thinking dominated President Bush’s first term and played a pivotal role in building the case for war.

 I share the concerns of many of the so-called “realists” that John McCain does have a bit too much neoconservative influence in his camp-but I am very careful in my use of that word. It has become the new fad in many of the socio-political circles of the Left to label all of their conservative opponents as “neocons.” The New York Times will sometimes feature op-ed pieces which label conservatives as “neocons.” Liberal bloggers now use the term with reckless abandon, labeling nearly all of their political opponents as “neocons.” I am now labeled as a neocon by certain Leftist bloggers on a regular basis, which would seem to belie a fundamental misunderstanding of the strains of conservative philosophy: Not only am I not a neoconservative, I am nowhere near being one.  

Neoconservatives have their philosophical roots in the liberalism if the 1930’s-1960’s. Many neoconservatives became such because the radical Left took over the Democratic Party in the late 60’s and 70’s, forcing old fashioned liberals who were anti-Communist but who had a globalist worldview and who accepted a sort of “third way” approach to government (they have no problem with big government so long as the powers of government grow in the direction they are comfortable with), to redefine what it means to be conservative. The neoconservatives have been very successful, because they and their surrogates are now the dominant force in the national Republican Party.

 My own philosophy is what is now referred to as paleoconservatism. I believe in a very limited federal government, and support the idea that nearly all powers not granted to the federal government in the Constitution are to be reserved to the States or to the people. Paleoconservatives are fearful of the power of central government, but also fearful of excessive corporatism-which is why many paleoconservatives oppose the idea of the Federal Reserve and believe the United States should return to a standard of gold and silver as the means by which our money is backed.

Immigration should be limited only to those which can successfully integrated into American society with a minimum amount of federal and State spending-in other words, immigration shouldn’t be stopped, but should be placed at levels that are far easier for the established citizenry to control. Immigration laws which are already on the books must be rigorously enforced. Neoconservatives believe (along with many liberals) that it is the business of the United States to intervene around the world in situations where we deem it important to do so, though the sides may differ in what situations intervention is permissable. Traditional paleoconservatives believe that the United States should avoid excessive foreign entanglements like the plague, and believe that foreign aid should be restricted so that America’s needs are met with America’s money before the needs of the rest of the world. Nearly all paleoconservatives believe the Iraq War was a mammoth mistake, but do believe that there are situations which necessitate American military intervention-with a Congressional Declaration of War (the Constitution says so).

Labeling all conservatives as “neocons” is a rather cheap political move by the Left that is intended to paint their opposition with a broad brush, but that brush is not representative of reality. As for the Iraq War-it was a mistake, and a terrible one, but we are now there whether we like it or not. I personally fear that a unilateral withdrawal would send a signal to Americas enemies that we are weak and unwilling to fight if need be. This war should not have been started, but it must be ended when victory can truly be declared.

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• Based on the information available at the time of the invasion of Iraq, was it justified?
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• Should the U.S. go to war with Iran if it does not end its nuclear weapons program?
• Should the government allow undocumented immigrants to apply for driver’s licenses?
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• Should states play a role in enforcing immigration laws?

Barack Obama is gaining ground in Pennsylvania-Hillary Clinton’s lead is down to six points:

Two weeks before the Keystone State primary, the Quinnipiac University poll shows Hillary Rodham Clinton still out front among Democratic voters there. Fifty percent of those surveyed favored Clinton, while 44 percent said they were backing Obama.

Clinton’s margin in the survey has been shrinking over the past few weeks. In mid-March she had a lead of 12 percentage points. Last week, that had dropped to nine, and now it’s six.

Because of the Democratic Party’s pledged delegate allocation structure, Barack Obama does not need to win Pennsylvania at this point in the race to put the Clinton campaign on the ropes. The remainder of the primary calendar favors a slew of Obama victories, so all he needs to do is make a respectable showing and win enough pledged delegates to maintain his overall lead, and internal party pressure for Hillary to drop out in the weeks ahead will likely mount. A six-to-eight percentage point spread is all that Obama’s campaign would be compelled to obtain in order to accomplish that goal.

Obama is not likely to win Pennsylvania, but the closer he comes to doing so the more likely it is that Hillary’s engine will just run out of steam. If Obama really can keep Hillary’s margin of victory to within six points, he will maintain a sizable lead in pledged delegates, and if he can close that margin to something even closer, it will become mathematically impossible for Clinton to be nominated without superdelegates simply throwing her the nomination. If that is how Hillary Clinton is nominated, she will lose the General Election in a rout that could pay dividends to the Republicans in Congress.

My hunch is that the Democrats’ internal party brass (most of whom support Clinton) are calculating that scenario, and will flatly tell her that she must drop out or risk getting the minimum of their partisan support-they’ll shift their efforts under those circumstances to maintaining their majority in the House and Senate.

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• Should superdelegates be able to shift the balance to one candidate if the majority of voters favored a different candidate?
• Should superdelegates play a role in presidential primary elections?

The Democratic Party, despite public claims by its leadership of a desire on the part of their base voters to unite and sing Kumbuya, appears to be bitterly divided on the basis of race:

Add this to the divisive debate over race in the presidential campaign: Whites who said race was important in picking their candidate have been about twice as likely to back Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as Sen. Barack Obama.

Exit polls of voters in Democratic primaries also show that whites who considered the contender’s race — Clinton is white, Obama is black — were three times likelier to say they would only be satisfied with Clinton as the nominee than if Obama were chosen.

The Democratic Party loves to publicly make the claim that it has moved beyond race, that it is the champion of social equality. Its leaders may talk the talk-and a few of them may actually believe the public rhetoric-but Democratic voters are far from this notion of socio-political nirvana championed by the national party. Race is the monster in the closet of the Democratic Party, because the Democrats have spent the last 50 years (and in some cases much longer) creating constituencies based on race, and targeting demographic groups based almost solely on race and ethnicity. These same people express shock and dismay when the groups that they have politically played the game of isolate and segregate over the years are now voting so sharply according to race in a primary where there are two candidates who happen to be people of different races.

Evidence of the Democratic race monster has already reared its disgustingly ugly head in South Carolina, where Bill Clinton pointed out that Jesse Jackson made a good showing there-clearly indicating that Barack Obama is winning his victories because of black voters-and in saying so, attempted to heap a level of discredit upon Obama’s candidacy.

Many supporters of Barack Obama are making the grave mistake of believing that because Obama is doing well among college educated whites, this somehow equates to great levels of white support. Further, I’ve read and heard some Obama backers (by no means all, but a number of them nonetheless) subscribe to the hyper-elitist idea that whites who do not support Obama are only doing so because they are less educated and that the “intelligent” white Democrats are backing Obama. Most of the folks who have made that insinuation are college-educated white liberals-a group that tends to be notoriously elitist in the first place.

Both sides are playing the race card, but John McCain will not. Unfortunately for the country (Democrats, Republicans, liberals, and conservatives alike), the card will have been played like a fiddle by both Democrats, and the result will be a nasty election for surrogates. Because some group will feel alienated, the Republicans may likely win. As a Republican and a conservative, I can say that I’d rather win for a million other reasons than what may cause the GOP to win this year.

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• How will race affect Barack Obama’s candidacy?
• What impact will the early start to the 2008 presidential race have on the democratic process?
• What role will gender play in Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid?

 Several people that I know who have real political ground knowledge-what I would call “insider” status-have said repeatedly that they believe that Hillary Clinton will somehow hornswaggle her way to the Democratic presidential nomination. I have maintained the opposite belief, based on the notion that the longer the Democrats’ internal nomination fight goes on, the more this benefits Barack Obama, because in spite of her ability to win large States, Hillary Clinton is simply unable to put Obama away. Now Obama has a pledged delegate lead that can only be overcome if Hillary wins Pennsylvania by at least a 25 point margin (not likely at this point), and carries a State that Obama was supposed to win, and do so by at least 10 points.

The reason that I believe that such a complicated formula will be necessary is because an increasing number of Democrats do not believe that Hillary Clinton can win, and think that Republicans are voting for her in primaries because she is so unpopular (and therefore extremely beatable):

The Los Angeles Times looks at the superdelegates’ dilemma involving their own re-election. “One blunt question underscored how much lawmakers’ thinking is shaped not just by high-minded reflection about who would make the best president, but by the cold-eyed political assessment: What does it mean to me? Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), a freshman from a district that President Bush won in 2004 by 14 percentage points, asked Clinton to address concerns that in conservative districts like his she would not be ‘helpful’ at the top of the ticket, Pa. frosh Dem Rep. Jason Altmire recalled. Clinton responded by pointing to her success in GOP precincts in the New York and Arkansas primaries as evidence that the more people know her, the more support she draws — even from Republicans.”

”Republicans often seem to be rooting for Clinton because they believe she will be a bigger liability than Obama — both in the presidential campaign and in congressional races. That is why Altmire fears that a Clinton nomination would energize conservatives — not just in his district, but nationwide — who otherwise would be lukewarm about McCain’s candidacy.”

There is little question that a Clinton nomination would energize conservatives, but it would be unwise and untimely for Democrats to believe that an Obama nomination would not. Truth be told, I think that many Democrats underestimate the degree to which Barack Obama is disliked among Republicans and strongly distrusted among “traditional” Democrats. Even the most optimistic polls show that in a head-to-head matchup with John McCain nationally, Barack Obama’s lead is within the margin of error, and that effectively means that it does not exist. Even if one were to take polls at face value and presume that Obama does have a slight lead over McCain, John McCain has the advantage of not having to engage in a nomination fight at this point in the campaign with an intra-party opponent, whereas Obama must spend valuable resources trying to fend off Hillary Clinton.

It’s a long time until November, and the Democratic Party has yet to start its campaign, and at this rate they may not start it until September. Meanwhile, John McCain is already touring the country and campaigning for a General Election in which he does not yet have an opponent. Under those circumstances, it will be very easy for McCain to make up any lost polling ground long before the Democrats nominate Obama, assuming the trends will dictate the nominee. With every passing day, John McCain becomes the candidate with the upper hand in this race.

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• How will race affect Barack Obama’s candidacy?
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• Should superdelegates be able to shift the balance to one candidate if the majority of voters favored a different candidate?
• Should superdelegates play a role in presidential primary elections?

The latest CBS News/New York Times poll shows something that those of us who observe the political scene in our own home towns across America can already see-the people are in a bloody sour mood about the direction of the country:

 Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

In a normal election year, that would likely equate to victory for the party out of presidential power, presently the Democrats. There is one important reality of the poll that The New York Times tried to downplay in its coverage, however:

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

The poll confirms what I can see and hear with my own eyes. With diesel and gasoline prices climbing, drivers and truckers aren’t the only folks feeling the pinch, so are farmers. When farmers and those in related agribusiness industries begin to say that things are getting rotten, you can bet that the economy really is in bad shape. If people in rural America aren’t feeling the pinch, it can be assumed that any downturn in the economy that is being talked about in the press is a temporary thing-economic problems begin here in the sticks, and if we don’t have economic issues, the rest of the country won’t have a long-term problem.

I recall a discussion I had with my Grandfather when he was still with us about these issues. One thing I remember clearly was him pointing out that in the rural Southern West Virginia community where he grew up, they were feeling the effects of the Great Depression for several years before the 1929 Stock Market Crash-and he thought the notion that Herbert Hoover was to blame for the Depression was “a bunch of bunk” (a phrase he often used). The problems they had in those days were similar to what we are dealing with today. People borrowed money on good faith and credit, sometimes they made risky moves with the money-buying land, equipment, or supplies they could not pay for. People borrowed too much, invested without knowing what they were doing, and banks charged what in those days was considered excessive interest. The economic hardship caused by these bad decisions hit rural America first and hardest-and so it is today.

 While The New York Times says that people blame the government, a lof of people in the heartland of the country are very much aware that the problems with the economy we are now experiencing began back in the mid-90’s. While the economic downturn might be good political news for Democrats under normal circumstances, we don’t live in the 1920’s anymore. We have 24-hour news and communication, and the 82 percent who agree that the country is on the wrong track likely disagree about the means to get it on the right one.

Democrats would be politically wise not to count their chickens before they’re hatched.

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• Will the U.S. economy go into recession in 2008?
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• Are current consumer debt levels a danger to the US Economy?

I’ve been saying all along that this election was going to be another close one, and the numbers and the path for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to 270 Electoral votes would be very different. This is what we could expect if the election were held today:

Obama vs. McCain
Base Obama: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NY, RI, VT, WA (168 electoral votes)
Lean Obama: NJ, MN, OR, WI (42)
Toss-up: CO, IA, MI, MO, NV, NM, NH, OH, PA, VA (112)
Lean McCain: AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, MT, NC (81)
Base McCain: AL, AK, AZ, ID, IN, KS, KY, NE, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY (135)

Clinton vs. McCain
Base Clinton: CA, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI, VT (172)
Lean Clinton: AR, MN, OR, WA, WI (44)
Toss-up: FL, IA, MI, NM, NH, OH, PA (101)
Lean McCain: CO, LA, MO, NV, VA (47)
Base McCain: AL, AK, AZ, GA, ID, IN, KS, KY, MS, MT, NE, NC, ND, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, WV, WY (174)

Tim Russert broke down the numbers this morning on Today,and I must admit that I believe Russert is right on about how both Clinton and Obama would attempt to win the White House. Both of these candidates would pursue different strategies to victory, but the Clinton campaign’s latest salvo about how Obama could not win a General Election is nothing more than a scare tactic. The reality is that victory is no more or less possible for either Clinton or Obama, but one may carry some different States than the other (Clinton, for example, is assuming that she will win Arkansas-I wouldn’t count on that just yet). The one thing that is noteworthy is that many of the States Obama managed to win in the primary season will be written off by the Obama campaign in the General Election.

Those of you who think John McCain is going to get trounced in November may want to re-think that opinion, because much of McCain’s electoral base is made up of people who simply refuse to vote for Clinton or Obama-and there are a great many such people. McCain is very beatable, but so are Clinton and Obama-all McCain needs to do is carry two or three toss-up States and either Democrat is likely beaten.

There is also a serious possibility of a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. If that occurs, be prepared for the myriad of political ignoramuses, socialists, direct democracy advocates, and enemies of federalism and States’ rights to once again demand the abolition of the constitutional method of electing our president. If such a thing were to happen, Tennesseans should be prepared for the dillution of their votes so that people in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles can elect the president and void our say-and don’t expect to see many candidates here, either. Fortunately for us, the Constitution would have to be amended to allow for that, and I don’t expect for the little old Red States to declare en masse “yes, we’d just love to screw ourselves!”

If a tie were to occur, that would throw the election into the House of Representatives. “Well Oatney, since the Democrats control the House, wouldn’t that mean the Democrat would win under such a scenario?” The federal Constitution lays out the procedure the House would use to elect the president via the 12th Amendment:

But in choosing the President, the votes shall be taken by states, the representation from each state having one vote; a quorum for this purpose shall consist of a member or members from two-thirds of the states, and a majority of all the states shall be necessary to a choice.

Each State delegation has one vote-members of the House do not choose individually. That means that in those States where the Republicans still comprise a majority of the House delegation, those States are most likely to vote for the Republican nominee. In addition, there would likely be immense pressure on House delegations to vote the way their State did regardless of their partisan composition, which means that it is very possible for the candidate who carries more States in November to win the election in the House-and that scenario favors John McCain.

It is quite possible for the Democratic nominee to win an election in the House as well, but if the Democrat wins he or she would likely have to strike a deal with House Republicans to do so. As the Compromise of 1877 settled the 1876 election in the House by ending Reconstruction in the South, a Democrat in 2009 attempting to win the election in the House under such a circumstance would have to aquiesce to some major Republican initiative or series of programs.

While it is still most likely that the November election will be settled before January, the present political climate makes a House election a possibility. While many ignorant people may decry this as some crisis and malfunction of the system, were this to happen people ought to be reminded that the Constitution has a procedure for just such a circumstance. Every century or so, Americans need an education in the Constitution-and regardless of who won in the end, it might be good for the country.

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I will be the first to admit that my views changed-strongly so-about the nature of this presidential election. For those of us who are cultural conservatives, we now understand that we had an opportunity in this election to elect a candidate that was really our man, and we completely blew the opportunity. This was largely due to the reality that conservatives were divided. Beyond that, however, conservatives could not find a candidate that clearly articulated their values-or so they thought.

Many cultural conservatives now see what they should have done, and have great regrets:

Then, venerable Paul Weyrich—a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy (CNP)—raised his hand to speak. Weyrich is a man whose mortality is plain to see. A freak accident several years ago left him with a spinal injury, which ultimately led to both his legs being amputated in 2005. He now gets around in a motorized wheelchair. He is visibly paler and grayer than he was just a few years ago, a fact not lost on many of his friends in the room, some of whom had fought in the political trenches with him since the 1960s.

The room—which had been taken over by argument and side-conversations—became suddenly quiet. Weyrich, a Romney supporter and one of those Farris had chastised for not supporting Huckabee, steered his wheelchair to the front of the room and slowly turned to face his compatriots. In a voice barely above a whisper, he said, “Friends, before all of you and before almighty God, I want to say I was wrong.”

In a quiet, brief, but passionate speech, Weyrich essentially confessed that he and the other leaders should have backed Huckabee, a candidate who shared their values more fully than any other candidate in a generation. He agreed with Farris that many conservative leaders had blown it. By chasing other candidates with greater visibility, they failed to see what many of their supporters in the trenches saw clearly: Huckabee was their guy.

There are few men in this country with the credentials in the conservative movement that Paul Weyrich has. When the Catholic Weyrich supported Mitt Romney, many of us could not understand his reasoning-we wondered if the ole boy had lost his marbles considering Romney’s shady history. We now know that, like many of us, Weyrich simply refused to consider Mike Huckabee or give him a chance, even though Huckabee was the most clearly pro-life and pro-family candidate in the race. Adam Graham, Warner Todd Huston, John McJunkin, and myself spent virtually our entire Iowa Caucus Roundtable podcast blasting Huckabee for everything from high taxes to scholarships for illegal aliens. We brushed off the fact that the Minutemen endorsed Huckabee-and that group does not endorse immigration softies. We blasted Huckabee as a liberal, said he wasn’t really one of us, and that he was a phony (as if Mitt Romney were the real thing). We held out feigned hope that Fred Thompson would light a fire under himself and actually run to win. The truth was that his numbers were poor because he got in the race too late, and all he did was help John McCain (by blasting Huckabee instead of McCain in South Carolina) whether he intended to do so or not-and of course he endorsed McCain just days after his mentor Howard Baker did the same.

Then there was Huckabee, the pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, pro-public prayer, pro-God, anti-atheist, social conservative Southern Governor. We couldn’t endorse this man…why? We all called him the Huckster-I remember Frank Cagle and myself both calling him that in a conversation-but Huckabee survived and showed integrity while doing so. With guts and gusto, Mike Huckabee carried on until the end. He wasn’t the perfect candidate, but for years we’ve said the Supreme Court was the place where the future of the country would be decided, and there would be no question of the kind of justices President Huckabee would appoint. We’ve collectively said we wanted a real pro-lifer in the White House, and a “true believer” in the Second Amendment. Mike Huckabee was all of these things, and we all got behind him (myself included), when the proverbial Sherman’s Army was about to enter political Atlanta.

I should have gotten a clue when I talked to a few very good Catholics who told me they were backing Huckabee, and that they thought he was the candidate who best represented our values. I blew it-but we all did. We had a candidate in this race, and that candidate did not fail conservatives-conservatives failed their candidate.

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• What impact will the early start to the 2008 presidential race have on the democratic process?

Speculation about whether the Democrats lengthy primary fight will impact their chances in November has hit the Democrats’ flagship newspaper, The New York Times:

Robert Shrum, a longtime Democratic operative who wrote that speech for Mr. Kennedy, said a bitter extended primary challenge in itself did not doom the outcome.

“It’s not the going to the convention, it’s how sulfurous and negative this gets,” Mr. Shrum said of the Clinton-Obama battle.

“What would hurt is if we had three or four months of escalating negative attacks and a huge fight over Michigan and Florida,” Mr. Shrum said. “We could have a situation where we set gender and race against each other, and we could lose the unlosable election in the bonfire of the vanities.”

Some Democrats fear just such a trajectory.

“This contest will get even more contentious, and there will be more charges and countercharges,” Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s campaign in 2000 and is neutral in this race, said after Mr. Clinton told Democrats last week to “saddle up.”

“People were excited; now they’re exhausted,” Ms. Brazile said. “In the beginning, they liked one candidate and respected the other; now they love one and hate the other.”

A Gallup poll last week found that as of March, 28 percent of Clinton backers would vote for Mr. McCain over Mr. Obama, and 19 percent of Obama supporters would vote for Mr. McCain over Mrs. Clinton.

The longer this goes on, the more likely it becomes that the Democrats will lose the General Election. The reason is not Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama by themselves, since these are people with the political experience to know that for the sake of their own futures they cannot take what happens in the campaign personally. It is those who are supporters and surrogates of either candidate that could doom the Democratic ticket.

Not only has this been one of the most divisive primary season that either party has seen in many years, but the Republican Party has managed to nominate a man who, while strongly disliked by many of us in the base of the GOP, is a very popular man with independents and certain Democrats. It should come as no surprise that many of these folks would consider voting for John McCain. If the Republican nominee had been a good Republican, this might not be as much of an issue-but this is John McCain, and a divided Democratic Party could mean that the unwinnable election becomes winnable for the Republicans.

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• What impact will the early start to the 2008 presidential race have on the democratic process?

Barack Obama is showing that he isn’t giving up in Pennsylvania, and I have to admit that I find his re-introduction of retail politics into the race to be an ingenious move politically:

 Obama has launched a charm offensive in Pennsylvania, forgoing days packed with town halls and cheering crowds at rallies to make small unannounced stops that take the locals by surprise.

Case in point, trying not to strike out in Pennsylvania to Clinton, Obama went bowling Saturday night at Pleasant Valley Lanes in Altoona, five minutes from a hot dog shop that he had visited earlier in the day.

When Obama walked in with Sen. Bob Casey, who recently endorsed him, locals stopped munching mid-fry to stare. The presidential hopeful shook hands, posed for pictures and then joined local Roxanne Hart to bowl a few frames.

Everyone knows that he stands as a long-shot in Pennsylvania, but with 23 days to go there until the Primary, he doesn’t need to win to make it impossible for Hillary Clinton, he only needs to race her close. Even a 15-point spread would keep Obama in the overall delegate lead. The switch back to a “retail style” of politics could be good for the Obama camp, because we’ve already seen that Obama does his best in that kind of political setting.

Obama’s big problem is going to come in the General Election. The polls that now show him with a narrow lead over John McCain are not likely to hold, not only because his primary opponent’s former supporters may be inclined to vote for McCain, but because the McCain camp will use all of the unsavory elements in Obama’s background against him. They will do so in a way that makes it appear that they had nothing to do with it, and that John McCain is the honorable party-but the political hay will be very effective nonetheless.

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