John Gizzi from Human Events takes a look at the VP short-list for Senator John McCain and has a breakdown of each person.
Our choice: Michael Steele.
Archive for March 5th, 2008
This is what you get with the screwed up system the Democrats came up with to nominate a Presidential candidate, one designed to make everyone “feel” like their vote counts, but it really doesn’t.
Right now Senator Clinton has 1449 delegates.
Right now Senator Obama has 1556 delegates.
They need 2025 to win, but both need a miracle to get there by the normal primary process. In fact, for Senator Obama to win outright he would have to win 77 percent of the outstanding delegates, a pretty daunting task. More daunting is what Senator Clinton needs to do in order to win, she needs to pull 94 percent of the outstanding delegates.
So it will clearly come down to the super-delegates, unselected party officials who can and will change their mind based upon anything. It’s a good time to be a Democratic super-delegate, just think of all the promises and campaign money flowing right now, but it’s not such a good time to be a Democrat voter…not that it ever is.
People are crying foul on both sides of the issue of whether or not the Clinton campaign has played racial politics (again) by “darkening” video of Barack Obama for an ad. Did they or didn’t they? You can decide for yourself here. Though we’re always suspect of anything coming out of the Daily Kos.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are in near tie on the delegate count in the race for the Democratic nomination, thanks entirely to the completely screwed up way in which delegates are awarded (think participation ribbons), with Barack in a slight lead. But that slight lead and the insane, winner only takes some way in which delegates are allotted make the gap nearly impossible for Hillary to make up the difference. It also makes it nearly impossible for Obama to pull away and win outright. As of right now, the Democrats are looking at a nominee chosen by superdelegates, one way or another. Unless one of them drops out, neither can get to the magic number of 2025 to win without them.
So Hillary has floated the idea that has been in the dreams of liberals since the beginning, getting the two of them on the same ticket. The reason liberals think this is a “dream ticket” is because they tend to only see race and gender, and they get pretty excited about both. So if you could get Clinton and Obama on the same ticket, in their twisted minds, they would win in a landslide. Not so fast.
Traditionally, VP selections are made to bring balance to a ticket, bring something missing in the person on the top of the ticket. Since Hillary and Barack agree on 99 percent of the issues, what is the balance? Gender? Race? Only in the mind of a liberal would that make sense, it wouldn’t bring any new votes in the general election.
But the more interesting question is “who would be on top?”
There is not a scenario in which we can envision Hillary being number 2, she already did that for 8 years. But Barack has the stronger hand, he can walk into the convention with a lead in delegates and make a better case that he should be the nominee.
This is far from over, especially since they’re charging each other with everything under the sun, and will be very interesting to watch.
