Mea Culpa

A person of whom I am fond pointed out to me that I once said this:

My money is on Romney. He is made of plastic, has no actual positions or beliefs, and if you squint hard enough in low-light conditions he kind of looks like Ronald Reagan. He also has the support of the party elite, which counts for everything in the GOP, probably to the extent of making his coronation a near inevitability.

If my money was on Romney, all that money is lost now, because I was wrong and dead wrong about him. Silly me.

John McCain, eight years too late, has secured the nomination from the Grand Old Party and run Romney right out of town. It remains to be soon who Johnny will choose as his running mate. But, dammit, I'm not afraid to make assertions based on my own analysis and gut impulses, and I'm not afraid to later admit that I was quite completely wrong, as I was about Romney and I was about Thompson. In both cases I was bamboozled. So what? I'm going to say right now that... I have not the least idea who will be the second half of the Republican ticket. Probably some odious mound of flesh to balance McCain's ticket without being able to demand too much on the platform. McCain isn't one to share the power or the limelight. Perhaps he will be some creature belonging to Mike Huckabee, to draw the evangelical vote. Perhaps he will come from the Romney end of things, the better to pull in money. In any case there are holes in McCain's appeal. He is strong among moderates, but I think that when Obama takes the Democratic nomination, Barack will stomp his ugly old-man Naval aviator guts out in that section of the electorate.

In my admittedly poorly founded opinion (see the above for some errors I have made!) I think Obama is a super candidate the likes of which America has not seen in a long time. He is charismatic, a superb speaker, and I think behind his facade of the "last honest politician" there lurks a very canny and very dangerous street-fighter. I think Barack Obama is my generation's Bobby Kennedy, only this time he's going to make it through alive. I think (and this is the time on my blog when I begin to use weasel words!) that he is going to win the Democratic nomination. After all, it is now virtually a mathematical impossibility for Hillary Clinton to catch up to him in either delegates or the popular vote, and I hope to Jeezis that I won't be proved wrong this time. But I think that, when it comes down to Barack Obama and John McCain, Barack will turn poor Johnny into hamburger. All you need to do is watch any of Obama's appearances, and then imagine the gloves coming off, as they would against a member of the other party. The old man hasn't got a chance, frankly. He's weak everywhere Obama is strong, and Obama isn't really that weak anywhere. Barack will eat him. I look forward to it.

Additionally, I've always wondered why the Republican Party is called the "Grand Old Party." The Democratic Party, as it is descended directly from Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Federalists, is something like 70 years older. This does not make sense to me. Then again, the actual structure of parties is meaningless, as their standing changes fluidly. For a long time the Democrats were the conservative party that dominated the South, and the Republicans had a stranglehold on the African American vote. Things are always changing.