There were twenty-two contests in which
more than 26 million people participated from coast to coast, which is more
than 20% of the record-breaking presidential election turnout of four years ago. Ten million Republican and sixteen million
Democratic ballots were cast. In the
popular vote, including delegate attendance, Clinton received 7.6 million to Obama’s 7.25 million, with more votes to be tabulated. Neither Obama nor
Clinton received a majority of the Democratic ballots. Obama carried 13 of
the states and Clinton carried 9.
Although Super Tuesday was the big event, from this point
on, the analysis of the presidential race will include all 27 contests. So far, 12.7 million Republican ballots and
18.5 million Democratic ballots have been cast.
In the Democratic primaries, Clinton is leading in the popular vote by
about 350,000. Obama
has won fifteen states to Hillary’s twelve, although all the votes have not
been counted and New Mexico is keeping its reputation for close contests.
Basically, the three leading contenders, McCain,
Clinton and Obama each command the support of about
20% of the electorate, with the other 40% going to Romney, Huckabee,
Edwards and others. The race to succeed
George Bush is still a horse race and will continue in that mode through
November. The tactic of the voters is to
give everyone, absolutely everyone, a chance to have his or her opinion heard. In order to do that,
the race must remain close.
Obama As JFK
When
Ted Sorenson, Kennedy’s speech writer, who actually ghost wrote the Pulitzer
Prize winning Profiles in Courage,
was asked why he was endorsing Obama, Sorenson said,
“Because he is the most inspirational candidate since JFK.” There is universal agreement that Obama is inspirational, and who should know better than the
wordsmith who crafted many of Kennedy’s inspirational speeches. But Obama’s
similarities to JFK do not stop there. Obama is running a virtual clone campaign.
Obama, like Kennedy, is
winning delegates in states that the Democratic candidate will almost certainly
lose in November. Four of Obama’s fifteen victories are in Kansas, his mother’s home
state, North Dakota, Idaho and Alaska. They all held caucuses, with a combined total
of less than 80,000 participants. Obama killed Hillary in these states with between 61% and
79% of the delegates. These four states
have not voted for the Democratic candidate for president since Lyndon
Johnson’s landslide in 1964, forty-four years ago. Yet, these four states will send 88 delegates
to the national convention, almost the same as Massachusett’s
93, which were chosen by 1.2 million voters.
Kennedy won the nomination in 1960 the same
way. Of the 806 delegate votes Kennedy
received to win the nomination, 354, or 43.9%, came from states he lost in
November. On the other hand, 105 of his
303 electoral votes, over one-third, came from states from which he received
not a single delegate vote at the convention.
Most of these states were in the south: Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana,
South Carolina and Texas. So, Lyndon’s
Johnson’s inclusion on the ticket was essential to Kennedy’s victory. Without Johnson, Kennedy would have lost. There were other states, too: Hubert
Humphrey’s Minnesota, Delaware, Stuart Symington’s Missouri and New Jersey.
And
Kennedy barely managed to beat Nixon, a sitting Vice-President when no sitting
Vice-President had been elected President since Martin Van Buren, 124 years
earlier. Nixon, like Hillary, was the
experienced policy wonk in the race.
Clearly, the Obama strategy is to give
inspiring speeches to win the nomination with the delegates from the states he
will lose in November, and count on the big, traditionally Demcratic
states where Hillary is stronger to carry him to victory in November.
Even assuming
this strategy is successful, what kind of presidency can be expected from Barack Obama.
JFK in the White House
Much
of JFK’s legacy has been colored by his assassination. In fact, Kennedy was a shockingly ineffective
president, who almost plunged the world into nuclear war over the Cuban Missile
Crisis, although he deserves high praise for the way he avoided it, and did, in
fact, deepen United States involvement in Vietnam. The Vietnam war was,
in fact, one of the commonly held policy threads during the Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon presidencies, just as the pro-Israel, anti-Moslem bias
is received wisdom in both the Republican and Democratic parties today.
His domestic agenda, like civil rights bills, were languishing
in Congress when the shock of his assassination and the master legislative
skills of his successor resulted in the passing of many of the cornerstones of
what became known as the Great Society.
These were the programs that Kennedy articulated in his inspirational
way, along with the space program goal of reaching the moon within a decade.
Inspiration is exciting, but policy is boring. Obama’s statement
that he would sit down with the Iranians sounds nice, but could easily make the
situation worse. Israel’s unilateral
withdrawal from Gaza, for example, actually made the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict worse. By not negotiating a
withdrawal, Hamas was able to claim that they forced Israel to withdraw through
violence. Fatah could not point to the
concessions they would have had to make to win Israel’s agreement to leave as
proof that the negotiation path, not the military path, leads to success.
The Democratic contest is, in a strange way, a reprise of the
1960 presidential election where Obama is the inspirational
Kennedy and Hillary is Nixon, the widely disliked but respected, experienced
technocrat. The fact that McCain, whose
campaign was smeared to death by Bush in South Carolina, has emerged with the
Republican nomination in his grasp may be an admission by the voters that they
erred eight years ago by not supporting the voters in New Hampshire by
validating their winner in that election.
Similarly, Nixon’s
winning the White House in 1968 after losing to JFK in 1960, and losing the
California governorship in 1962, may be testimony to the fact that, in the wake
of the carnage of Vietnam, voters regretted electing Kennedy in 1960 and
choosing Nixon was an attempt to rectify their error.
Good intentions is not the same thing as
competence. The United States still has
a president anxious to precipitate a conflict with Iran. This contest could easily end in an Obama or a Hillary Clinton presidency, and an Iran war
started in the ten weeks between the election and inauguration. At the moment, the Democratic voters are
clearly saying, by a small margin, they want a Clinton-Obama
ticket.
|
State |
Clinton % |
Obama % |
Dem Factor |
Last Win |
Winner |
C vote |
O vote |
|
Iowa |
29.00% |
38.00% |
0.33 |
1996 |
Obama |
737 |
940 |
|
New Hampshire |
39.00% |
36.00% |
0.33 |
2004 |
Clinton |
112,610 |
105,007 |
|
Nevada |
51.00% |
45.00% |
0.25 |
1996 |
Clinton |
5,407 |
4,805 |
|
South Carolina |
27.00% |
55.00% |
0.17 |
1976 |
Obama |
141,217 |
295,214 |
|
Alabama |
42.00% |
56.00% |
0.21 |
1976 |
Obama |
302,684 |
226,454 |
|
Connecticut |
47.00% |
51.00% |
0.58 |
2004 |
Obama |
164,831 |
179,349 |
|
Alaska |
25.00% |
75.00% |
0.08 |
1964 |
Obama |
103 |
302 |
|
Arizona |
51.00% |
42.00% |
0.08 |
1996 |
Clinton |
200,809 |
166,877 |
|
Arkansas |
70.00% |
27.00% |
0.42 |
1996 |
Clinton |
190,743 |
74,658 |
|
California |
52.00% |
42.00% |
0.50 |
2004 |
Clinton |
2,132,166 |
1,735,105 |
|
Colorado |
32.00% |
67.00% |
0.17 |
1992 |
Obama |
38,587 |
79,344 |
|
Delaware |
43.00% |
53.00% |
0.58 |
2004 |
Obama |
40,751 |
51,124 |
|
Florida |
50.00% |
33.00% |
0.25 |
1996 |
Clinton |
863,787 |
693,508 |
|
Georgia |
31.00% |
67.00% |
0.33 |
1992 |
Obama |
328,107 |
700,357 |
|
Idaho |
17.00% |
79.00% |
0.08 |
1964 |
Obama |
3,655 |
16,880 |
|
Illinois |
33.00% |
65.00% |
0.50 |
2004 |
Obama |
655,671 |
1,281,902 |
|
Kansas |
26.00% |
74.00% |
0.08 |
1964 |
Obama |
9,462 |
27,172 |
|
Massachusetts |
56.00% |
41.00% |
0.83 |
2004 |
Clinton |
704,591 |
511,887 |
|
Minnesota |
32.00% |
66.00% |
0.92 |
2004 |
Obama |
141,220 |
68,134 |
|
Missouri |
48.00% |
49.00% |
0.42 |
1996 |
Obama |
395,235 |
405,591 |
|
New Jersey |
54.00% |
44.00% |
0.58 |
2004 |
Clinton |
602,576 |
492,186 |
|
New Mexico |
49.00% |
49.00% |
0.42 |
2000 |
Clinton |
67,463 |
66,173 |
|
New York |
57.00% |
40.00% |
0.75 |
2004 |
Clinton |
1,003,623 |
697,914 |
|
North Dakota |
37.00% |
61.00% |
0.08 |
1964 |
Obama |
6,948 |
11,625 |
|
Oklahoma |
55.00% |
31.00% |
0.08 |
1964 |
Clinton |
228,425 |
130,087 |
|
Tennessee |
54.00% |
41.00% |
0.33 |
1996 |
Clinton |
332,599 |
250,730 |
|
Utah |
39.00% |
57.00% |
0.08 |
1964 |
Obama |
48,719 |
70,373 |
|
8,721,226 |
8,343,698 |
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