GoldbergBlog

I know the Republican South Carolina primary was last week but I didn’t care. Whoever wins, we lose. It’s really just a matter of degrees, with Ron Paul being “Unfeasible but interesting,” at one end of the spectrum and Guiliani or Huckabee being “Emigrate as fast as you can,”. John McCain ended up winning South Carolina and if I had to place a bet on who will be the Republican nominee, I’d say McCain. That’s still a pretty spooky proposition when you consider that he’s running as a war candidate for an increasingly war-weary nation. How war-weary, how the war in Iraq continues over the next ten months, and how much it matters in relation to our failing economy, will all figure into McCain’s chances for winning the Presidency. But a man who has seen the horrors of war warning that “there will be other wars” when we barely have the troops to fight the ones we have now, is something I would expect a man in a padded room to say, not a serious contender for the highest political office in the country.The primary I do care about was last night’s Democratic Primary. Barack Obama was tipped to win and Hillary Clinton had basically given up on the state and left Bill Clinton to try and chip away at Obama’s margin of victory. That didn’t work because Obama won BIG. Twice as many votes as Hillary big. More votes than McCain and Huckabee, the top two candidates in S.C., big. Of course, the Clinton camp tried to spin it away as Obama being nothing more than a “black candidate” and I’ll let Mr. Glenn Greenwald over at Salon handle the revulsion of those comments.

The next major contest for the Republicans is the Floriday primary on Tuesday. There Rudy Guiliani will make his last stand, must like Custard’s Last Stand in that he will be fucking destroyed and deservedly so. Then we’ll never have to hear from his 9/11-capitalizing ass again. Then on Super Tuesday, one of two things will happen in the Democratic primaries: Hillary takes most of the states and I contemplate leaving America. That’s the nightmare scenario. The scenario I’m hoping for is that Hillary and Obama keep running neck and neck. Either case, contrary to the claim that he’s “in it for the long haul,” John Edwards will drop out of the race. There’s just not enough money to go further when you keep coming in third. South Carolina was his last gasp and while he’ll continue on to Super Tuesday so he can exit the race with some dignity, we all know that his part in the story of the 2008 Election has come to a close unless he’s needed to play Kingmaker. If that happens, we’ll find out if he really did believe in change or if he just believed in John Edwards.

Tags: politics //