From the home office in Burlington County, New Jersey. I give you the top 5 lessons learned from the presidential election so far. The results are determined through a completely arbitrary process of my own creation.
- Super Tuesday -- The mother of all primaries produced plenty of drama -- for political junkies like me -- and not much clarity. As expected, Republican John McCain pulled ahead of rivals Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama won more states, but Hillary Clinton won some major contests including California. The big question is what happens next.
- Money isn't everything -- Romney is discovering that buying an election isn't as easy as it looks. Chances are that he will be exiting the race within the next few weeks. It remains to be seen whether the conservatives who are throwing temper tantrums at the prospect of a McCain victory will -- as his mother suggested -- hold their nose and back the Arizona senator.
- The debates -- Good lord, how many debates were there? A thousand? A billion? The cable networks had too many of these yack fests and allowed too many fringe candidates with little chance of winning to participate such as Duncan Hunter, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Alan Keyes.
- MSNBC VS. CNN -- CNN Keeps repeating that it has "best political team" about every five minutes or so as the returns come in. It's almost as if the Time Warner Inc. (NYSE: TWX) channel is trying to convince itself that it's true. The problem is that MSNBC's coverage -- even with the highly annoying Chris Matthews --- has been better. It seems like CNN's pundits talk down to viewers while MSNBC's are a bit more down to earth. Of course, Fox News continues to attract more viewers than MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE ), and CNN combined.
- Conventional Wisdom -- The conventional wisdom espoused by the pundits has proven yet again to be spectacularly wrong. Wasn't Rudy Giuliani supposed to be the candidate to beat? Wasn't Fred Thompson going to shake up the race? Wasn't this supposed to be cakewalk for Clinton?
Finally, remember that presidential candidates make loads of promises that they can't possibly keep. Figuring the difference between fact and fantasy is what makes politics so interesting.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-06-2008 @ 7:10PM
r. kuwalik said...
We know that muslims attacked us 9/11.
We know they come from the near east.
We have lost over 4000 troops to the muslim Al-Qaida in Ireq.
I am not about to applaud those muslim nations by voting to put a muslim name into the White House.
That would be just a slap in the face to 4000 people.
2-06-2008 @ 10:54PM
L O Bird said...
Gi'mme a break. What ancestry was Eisenhower whom we elected a few years after Germans killed a lot more than 4000 Americans. A relevant characteristic might be ability with the English language which we can't even get our Congress to approve as the official language and at which Barack Obama is superb. L O Bird
2-07-2008 @ 9:05PM
pete said...
2008 GOP Ticket:
Felipe Calderon and McCain!!!
by the way LO Bird, at least Eisenhower fought for our country in war and would be proud to slaute our flag and wear the lapel.