Observations

Oh No! Now What?


A lot of non-Democrats are taking a pleasure in watching the Dem’s struggle to stand up in the mud puddle their primary election season has become. Originally set up as a coronation of Hillary Clinton after Super Tuesday’s contests gave her an overwhelming margin, the Dems now find themselves up a tree, with two significant states disobeying Howard Dean’s rules and moving their primaries forward on the calendar, and Barack Obama having the audacity to actually run a good campaign against Sen. Clinton.

Such unplanned events do not bode well for the peaceful and triumphant crowning of Sen. Clinton that party bosses had envisioned for the August convention, but they may be good news for the rest of us who long for the more interesting conventions of yesteryear, when the nomination often was decided in smoke-filled back rooms during that event. One difference, however: You can’t smoke in the back rooms anymore.

Instead of Sen. Clinton spending her time between Super Tuesday’s assumed massive victories and November’s General Election convincing the American people to buy her snake oil socialism and beating the Republican nominee over the head with a bat labeled “George Bush,” she first has to convince Democrats that her deep and broad experience attending funerals and dinners overseas is superior to Sen. Obama’s experience doing whatever he did for the last 16 years. Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd had it right when he noted that Sen. Clinton’s eight years in the White House as first lady amounted not to experience, but to “witnessing experience.” The fact is that neither Clinton nor Obama has any special experience that qualifies them for the presidency beyond being American citizens over the age of 35 with a little ho-hum time in one or another legislative body.

While Senators Clinton and Obama grapple in the mud, John McCain has an opportunity to go through his desk drawers and find the Cliff Notes on “Being a Conservative” and read it through a few times. He can try to rationalize his positions on limiting free speech, enabling illegal immigration, encouraging economy-busting solutions for man-not-made global warming, and maybe even study up on economics, and be tanned and rested and ready for the battle starting in September, or when either Obama or Clinton throws in the towel, whichever comes first.

Anything that gets in the way of the Democrats’ effort to further socialize the United States and give more power to the federal government—as either a President Clinton or a President Obama would surely try to do—needs to be watered, fed and nurtured.