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Saturday, January 19, 2008
No clarity for GOP. Praise Reagan — oops, there goes Nevada.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mitt Romney wins Nevada, John McCain South Carolina.
Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani sits in Florida, awaiting his moment to muddle into the Republican Presidential contest.
While it’s pretty clear now that the Republican battle will go on without a clear front-runner at least through Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, McCain pumped life into his prospects by demonstrating in South Carolina that he could win against a former Southern governor who has great appeal among evangelical Christians. Mike Huckabee did well in South Carolina, but a near-win in South Carolina is a defeat for him. As he noted though in conceding first place to McCain, winning the Republican nomination is “not an event; it’s a process and the process is far, far from over.”
Nevada had more delegates at stake Saturday — 31 to 24 — but South Carolina drew more attention. It was the first test for Republicans in the South and the winner there has become the party’s nominee since 1980. Giuliani skipped Nevada and South Carolina, while pursuing a high-risk strategy of taking Florida followed by a big show on Super Tuesday a week later. Florida is the first of the big states to vote with a winner-take-all primary on Jan. 29.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton had an impressive win in Nevada — impressive because the state’s largest union, the 60,000-member Culinary Workers Union, Local 226, had endorsed Barack Obama and several of the party’s caucuses were held in casinos in Las Vegas. The union represents maids, bartenders and other hotel and casino workers and is the state’s best-organized. He’d also been endorsed by the Nevada chapter of the Service Employees International Union.
Obama committed a terrible transgression in the lead-up to Saturday’s voting, though. He spoke favorably of Ronald Reagan.
He told the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal that “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating,” Obama said. Reagan, he said, “tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, ‘We want clarity; we want optimism.’”
“I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10 to 15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom,” said Obama.
While attempting to make the point that he, too, represented change and new ideas, any favorable reference to Reagan is poison in Democratic politics. John Edwards, who departed Nevada to campaign in Atlanta and in Missouri and Oklahoma, reacted.
“Ronald Reagan, the man who busted unions, the man who did everything in his power to destroy the organized labor movement, the man who created a tax structure that favored the richest Americans against middle class and working families, … we know that Ronald Reagan is not an example of change for a presidential candidate running in the Democratic Party,” Edwards said.
Democrats vote in South Carolina next Saturday — and that’s a state Obama should win. About half the state’s Democratic voters are black.
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