Untold Stories of Florida
David Weigel | January 30, 2008, 12:15am
Three things no one's discussed just yet...
Paul's Votes. There weren't many of them. This was never going to be one of Paul's best states, but he polled as high as 7 percent over the last month and wound up with only 3 percent of the vote. That made for his first dead-last showing, and now that Giuliani and Fred are both out, he's polling last in most of the big Super Tuesday states.
Still, the campaign is grinning about Rudy's exit. "It's gratifying to beat Giuliani," said Paul spokesman Jesse Benton. In Florida, he said, "we spread our message and let the other guys beat each other up."
Paul has the money to stay around: His campaign has bought ads in Arkansas and Tennessee, there are campaign appearances scheduled in Georgia, there are organizers working in Minnesota and and rules that help him in Alaska and Montana. The campaign also feels good about North Dakota and Colorado. But the tightening of the Romney-McCain race isn't good for him, nor are closed primaries. He's going to max out his vote in contests where independents can cast ballots and in states where the perception is that one candidate is already far enough ahead to cast a protest vote.
Clinton's Calvinball. It didn't work. Here's the short version of the Democrats' controversy:
The state governments of Michigan and Florida moved their primaries into January, defying a Democratic rule that allowed only New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina to have January primaries. The truant states were punished by being stripped of their delegates. Edwards and Obama pulled their names from Michigan's ballot; Hillary didn't. Edwards, Obama and Hillary signed a pledge not to campaign in Florida.
In the buildup to South Carolina—which looked like a sure loss—the Clinton campaign started bragging about a coming win in Florida. They complained that an Obama ad, which was running on national cable channels, was already airing in the state, and that this meant Obama was flouting the rules. They announced that Hillary would fundraise in the state before January 29 (the pledge allowed this) and that she'd be there on primary night to accept her victory. And they released this statement from Hillary herself:
I believe our nominee will need the enthusiastic support of Democrats in these states to win the general election, and so I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan.
So, basically, she welshed. Florida voters who were paying attention to the Democratic race—about 1.5 million of them, as it turned out—heard her promise to count their votes. Clinton planned a victory rally in the state to capitalize on the last sure thing before Super Tuesday. Polls showed her up by 20 and... she won by 17, with almost exactly 50 percent of the vote. She won 46 of 67 counties, which sounds impressive until you realize that Obama won all but two counties in hard-fought South Carolina. And the exit polls give a hint of what would have happened if they'd actually had to campaign: Obama won among voters who decided over the last week, 37 to 34.
Clinton still won, and Obama had to cede two states where black voters made up about 20 percent of the electorate. But between the anger she stoked in the pundit class (the liberal blogs are practically boiling over about this) and the slippage revealed by the exit polls, this looks like a bad move by Clinton.
Huckabee's Evangelicals. He only won 29 percent of them, tied with Romney and a point behind McCain.
Ebeneezer Scrooge | January 30, 2008, 4:45am | #
On net balance RP is better than anybody else in the running, and I will vote for him so long as he's in the race. But now that the flames of death are dancing around his campaign, I'll add my bah-humbug criticism.
Was it
really necessary to get up on the national stage and demand a return to the gold standard? A simpler pitch for financial accountability in government, and denying politicians the keys to the printing presses, would have made the point -- in a perhaps more politically astute manner.
Whatever the pro's and con's of a gold standard, you
know that idea is going to sound kooky to the mainstream. So why put it in just those terms?
And then we're going to just abolish the IRS. And then....??????
Cutting the size of government is one proposition. Defunding it is another entirely, and you can bet your life it isn't going to fly on the national stage. How about if we pitched for scaling government back some? You know, a step or two at a time here?
And then the real kicker. RP at least implied -- maybe even said explicitly -- that 9/11 was our own fault for messing in the ME.
He said that while running on the
Republican ticket while Bush was
still in office.
Not only is this theory simply untrue (nobody held a gun to the heads of the suicide bombers and made them kill thousands of innocent civilians), you also know this line is sure to be political suicide.
Libertarians are not politicians, which is why they simply aren't going to get elected. No matter how righteous their indignant rage may be....some of which I now expect to catch.
Libertarains seem to labor under at least a couple of delusions:
1) People may now agree that we never should have gone into Iraq, but that doesn't mean they're in favor of 100% pull out asap. Iraq may have made Bush unpopular, but that isn't what sank him within the Republican ranks. His overall spending habits and general expansion of government, just perhaps, were slightly bigger concern.
2) The majority of Americans are not in favor of just opening the Mexican border to the whole horde, no matter how many articles Reason publishes.
Mexican migration is just not the same thing as past waves of immigrants. Past immigrants left their home countries behind, and could not return without great effort and expense. They either assimilated or isolated, and then their children assimilated.
Not so with Mexicans. Coming and going are about the same, and Mexicans don't
have to assimilate. Nor do their children. And in the southwest, they often don't assimilate.
Not that walling off the border makes sense either, it would harm overall US-Mexican trade, and Mexico is one of our biggest trading partners.
But the fact is, while the American mainstream is not necessarily in favor of walling off the border, they also aren't on the "Welcome Mexican Migrant! Happy Train" that Reason is.
But whatever anyone cares to believe, fact is that we won't do anything serious about the situation unless the drug violence really moves north of the border. This has been the historical norm. If the violence does come north much more -- and it's starting to -- then expect to see some kind of US reprisal.
And give it up -- we aren't dumping the welfare state, and we aren't doing the one thing that would permanently stem the violence -- legalize drugs.
Anyway, these are genuine issues that matter (sorry, gay rights is also not at the top of the list for most Americans). The deal about RP having "race baiting" stuff ghost written for him is, in the big scheme, a flea bite on an elephant. Other front runners have done worse -- so deal with the fact that this is how politics works.
So that's what I've concluded from this election: libertarians just aren't politicians, and that's why they're never getting near the White House. I also conclude that if we ever got a principled libertarian candidate in the running who was also a politician, then the libertarian rank and file would probably find a reason to burn him/her at the stake anyway.
Burned, for the crime of standing entirely too far from The Tree of Truth and Purity.
Now, if someone would please begin ranting about Ayn Rand.....
