Luckiest Man in the Race
BARNES, FRED
Luckiest Man in the Race For McCain, the best may be yet to come. BY FRED BARNES John McCain is one lucky fellow. Of course you can make your own luck, as the saying goes. That’s what McCain...
...Conservatives inadvertently aided him by failing to line up behind a single rival...
...Are they really capable of it...
...For Clinton, winning the popular vote won’t be easy...
...The most likely—and the one that helps McCain the least— is that the primaries end with Obama leading in both delegates and popular votes, prompting the super-delegates to tilt his way...
...But rather than concede, Clinton contends that, since she’s won most of the fi nal 10 or 12 primaries (assuming this is the case), she’s the real favorite of Democratic voters...
...In other words, all the bad things you’ve heard before from Clinton central...
...The result, for the moment anyway, is that McCain is inching ahead in polls matching him against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton...
...It’s not...
...McCain shouldn’t count on that big a gift from Democrats...
...Obama picked up 100,000 more votes than Clinton in the most recent contest, the Mississippi primary, and his lead is now 700,000...
...The second scenario is Clinton’s favorite...
...And through no machinations of his own, McCain’s chances of winning will have improved...
...With no significant ideological differences between Clinton and Obama, they’ve focused on his personal shortcomings: inexperience, habit of saying one thing while believing the opposite, unimpressive Senate record, lack of appeal to white working class and Hispanic voters...
...Thus he wins the nomination, and the party unites behind him...
...And then there’s the Reverend Wright business...
...In winning the Republican presidential nomination, however, McCain has mostly been just plain lucky, no thanks to his own fortitude or foresight...
...No matter who ultimately wins the nomination, the prospects for electing a Democratic president this fall will have declined...
...He currently leads by roughly 130 delegates...
...Given the eagerness of Democrats to capture the White House after eight Bush years, that may seem farfetched...
...There’s a saying in baseball that it’s better to be lucky than good...
...It’s a real possibility...
...Luck can only take you so far...
...Presidential campaigns operate a bit differently...
...They are eating their own,” says Dick Morris, the onetime adviser to the Clintons...
...But if they pulled it off, and Clinton swiped the nomination from Obama, the consequence is not hard to fi gure out...
...So long as Clinton stays in the race, the bitter divide among Democrats will widen—to McCain’s advantage...
...That’s what McCain did with great courage to survive five-and-a-half years at the Hanoi Hilton...
...Calling this a desperate and partyshattering tactic by the Clinton forces would be putting it mildly...
...What if Obama prevails...
...Those are the rules...
...Should the superdelegates side with Clinton, the entire Obama movement—and especially blacks—would feel cheated...
...And Rudy Giuliani helped by pulling out of New Hampshire and fading in Florida, allowing McCain to sneak ahead and win primaries in both states...
...To win, a candidate has to be lucky and good...
...The Clinton attacks have begun to transform the popular image of Obama from that of an inspirational leader above the grubby fray of party politics to that of a normal politician...
...Maybe not...
...Obama’s response is preordained: The primary campaign is about winning delegates, and I won the most...
...He’ll have been weakened by having had the “kitchen sink” thrown at him by the Clinton forces...
...And since Clinton still has a chance of winning, she’s bound to continue her campaign at least through the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 and the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6—and probably until the verdict of Democratic super-delegates becomes clear sometime this summer...
...Mike Huckabee ruined Mitt Romney’s strategy by beating him in Iowa...
...Three scenarios are possible in the Democratic race...
...This should largely spare McCain from criticizing Obama on personal grounds and free him to concentrate on Obama’s leftwing political views...
...Now Democrats are boosting McCain’s chances of winning the presidency by prolonging the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...Besides, she’ll say, Obama can’t win the big states and who knows what will emerge once he’s been fully frisked by the media, and (assuming no do-overs) that she won in Michigan and Florida...
...Indeed, they would have been cheated...
...Scenario number three is similar to the fi rst in that Obama wins the most delegates and votes...
...There’s a name for that happenstance: luck...
...It’s President McCain...
...But there are enough big primaries left that it’s achievable, all the more so if Michigan and Florida schedule doover primaries...
...Obama is to surpass him in the popular vote, then declare herself the true choice of Democratic voters despite trailing in delegates...
...If Clinton manages a come-frombehind victory over Obama, that could produce the dream election for McCain, one in which the Democratic party fails to unify behind its presidential candidate...
...And he made his own luck again by advocating a surge of troops in Iraq that later proved to be successful...
...The likelihood of a party split would be signifi cant...
...Her best chance of defeating Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...She has practically no prospect of overtaking him in delegates in the closing primaries...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 28
