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Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Huckabee’s blowing it out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mike Huckabee blew it out in the counties just beyond Metro Atlanta and did extremely well in the areas of the “real Georgia” that have begun to trend Republican.
An example of the latter is Laurens County in Middle Georgia, which goes for Democrats in the Congressional and some state races, but voted for Sonny Perdue and for George W. Bush. With 19 of 20 precincts counted, Huckabee had 2,437 to 1,723 for John McCain and 780 for Mitt Romney.
An example of the former is Bartow County, just up I-75 from Atlanta. With 18 of 19 precincts in, Huckabee had 4,818 votes to 2,996 for McCain and 2,880 for Romney. On the other side of Atlanta about the same distance out, is Barrow County. There with 17 of 18 precincts in, Huckabee had 3,323 votes to 1,947 for McCain and 1,960 for Romney. These are the “real Georgia” — as one of the blog contributors wishes to have them described. That’s the area sominated by life-long Georgians.
The trend was that Romney dominated in Metro Atlanta — though not by margins large enough to offset Huckabee’s support among evangelicals and more conservative Georgians. The counties starting 30-40 miles from the State Capitol were big for Huckabee. And beyond that, Huckabee and McCain split. with Romney usually in third.
It was a big night in the South for Huckabee, who won Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee and for McCain nationally. If both Romney and Huckabee stay in the race, the nomination will go to McCain.
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McCain, Huckabee gang up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bring on the back-room dealing, the old smoke-filled vote-trading politics that gets both parties a candidate with the broadest-possible base of support.
It worked in West Virginia today. It’s not a winner-take-all state, but Mike Huckabee picked up 18 of the state’s 30 delegates in a just-concluded convention process. On the first round of voting, Mitt Romney led, followed by Huckabee, then John McCain and finally, Ron Paul. The last-place finisher was dropped.
Then McCain forces, realizing they had no chance to win, opted to keep Romney from winning. They threw in with Huckabee, giving him a 52-47 win over Romney — and 18 delegates. Fair enough.
Huckabee is the spoiler. He has no chance of getting the nomination, but he’s certainly useful to McCain — as today’s alliance indicates.
If McCain winds up as the party’s nominee in November, I’d certainly do as his mother suggests and vote for him over the save-face and take-flight-on-Iraq Democrat. But I’d have to rethink that if, by chance, the spoiler becomes McCain’s running mate.
In today’s 15 Republican primaries, six caucuses and West Virginia state convention, 1,023 delegates are at stake. After the West Virginia outcome, McCain has 102, Romney 93 and Huckabee 61. Ron Paul has four. Needed to win the nomination: 1,191.
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Headlong rush to endorse McCain is risky
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The political herd’s rush to John McCain is intended to create a stampede of inevitability before the obvious becomes evident: Most Republicans are not buying.
On the last weekend before today’s Super Tuesday primary in Georgia and 20 other states, an InsiderAdvantage poll in Georgia and Tennessee revealed that more than half of Republican voters want a conservative. In Georgia, 58 percent pick one of the two GOP candidates who have fashioned their campaigns to appeal to conservatives.
In Georgia, 30 percent preferred Mitt Romney and 28 percent Mike Huckabee. McCain got 29 percent. In Tennessee, Huckabee (30 percent) and Romney (22 percent) split the conservative base. McCain gets 32.
The actual results are just hours away — and indeed the stampede that included Georgia’s two U.S. senators, Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss, may well succeed. So far, however, it has succeeded in getting them accused of clubbiness in endorsing a colleague. U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey of Marietta, one of the four Georgia congressmen endorsing Romney, brushed it off as a reflection of “a close-knit club on the Senate side.”
Added Romney’s Georgia campaign co-chairman, Eric Tannenblatt: “I look at this as an endorsement of someone they serve with rather than someone who shares their values.”
Their endorsement does involve some risk, especially to Chambliss, who is up for re-election this year. McCain has plenty of time to convince conservatives that he is the more electable and that he will be true to the promise he made to supporters Saturday at the Cobb Galleria. That promise, second in importance only to a promise not to beat a hasty retreat from Iraq, is this:
“I will try to find clones of [Justices Samuel] Alito and [John] Roberts,” McCain vowed. Since Justice John Paul Stevens will be 88 when the next president is sworn in and Ruth Bader Ginsberg will be 75 — in fact, six of the nine will be 69 or older — President Bush’s successor is likely to fix the direction of the next court for decades to come. Of the current 5-4 majority, 75 is the average age. Of the minority, it’s just over 60.
A pledge to find clones of the Bush appointees, combined with late October evidence of electability, would sweep away most conservative objections to McCain — and therefore any ill will remaining among Georgia Republicans to Chambliss’ decision to weigh in with a McCain endorsement before Super Tuesday.
If all does not go well and McCain either doesn’t get the nomination or shows poorly in the general election contest, Chambliss will find himself in a serious race — assuming Georgia Democrats nominate a mainstream candidate, a fairly wild assumption at the moment.
Hillary Clinton can’t carry Georgia either in November or, based on the polls, today. Obama, however, would have a shot. Over the past seven years, more than 200,000 blacks have registered to vote, compared with about 95,000 whites. Whites were 72 percent of the electorate in 2001, 66 percent today. More than half of the 42,000 new voters who registered for Super Tuesday are minorities — 37 percent of them blacks.
While there’s a near-zero chance that Democrats could retake the state House and Senate, Obama as the nominee would make Georgia very competitive. The possibility of electing the first black president would most certainly swell turnout among Democrats. Chambliss needs every voter he can get, and especially those drawn to Huckabee and Romney, the two presidential candidates he didn’t endorse.
While Senate collegiality and a desire to wrap it up quickly may have prompted both Chambliss and Isakson to embrace McCain over the weekend, those on the ballot in November would be stronger had they all allowed the primaries to play themselves out.
It may be tidy to wrap it up in February. It may serve to distance February’s ill will from November’s turnout-crucial election.
But as the nation saw with an abortion conflict never satisfactorily concluded because of premature court intervention, it’s rarely wise to stampede the political process.
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