With Senator Barack Obama’s late surge of delegates yesterday, the inevitable has been realized:  an Obama-McCain race to the finish line.  I’m on the team with all three candidates that the result of our choices in November must mark a comprehensive, seismic shift in America’s policies, actions, and resulting influence around the world.

The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy analysis of what went wrong with Senator Hillary Clinton’s run for the nomination (can’t link it as it is a subscriber-only article).  They cite Mismanagement, a Flawed Message (experience vs the change movement), Failure to Mobilize, and Clinton Craziness (i.e., her spouse).  Fundamentally, I don’t think she and her team understood the deep, lingering resentment and ill feelings that many of us normal Americans felt toward she and her husband.  I think it was always going to be a huge battle between Senator Clinton and whomever emerged as the alternate, anybody-but-a-Clinton candidate.  That the finalist just happened to be a charismatic, fresh-faced outsider made it even tougher to head toward her.

Senator John McCain, in my opinion, should be completing his second term in office rather than preparing for a bitter race toward the November elections.  It was during the South Carolina primary in the 2000 campaign that Governor George W. Bush brought out all the stops to cast doubt about McCain in the eyes of my wife’s home state.  The specifics of the assault I’m not exactly familiar with (here is a laundry list of either accurate or inaccurate information), but this summary from Richard Davis in a 2004 Boston Globe article has a nice synopsis.  I’m pretty sure I would have voted for McCain had he won the GOP nomination, and I am absolutely certain that America and the world would be significantly different had he been our President in 2001.

There will be a sizable groups who will blindly head to the polls in November with their minds made up without much thought.  Obama won this race partly due to his race and the dramatically high percentage of African Americans who voted for him.  These large percentages should be repeated in November, just as a chunk of America will vote against him due to his skin color.  A chunk of America will salute the donkey and elephant flags and line up behind them.  Some states are decided basicallly, so it falls to our brains hopefully to dive into these two, see into the future as much as possible, then make our decisions.

CC, officially Undecided.

Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 7:52 am and is filed under Governing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.