One thing notable about the recent election was that there really was no real frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Instead, we got what seemed like the last person to self-destruct. In 2006, there was a lot of talk about George Allen being groomed to be the next republican nominee until he had his macaca moment.
Now, looking forward, there still doesn’t seem to be anyone from the Republican side who can be singled out as a strong contender for the 2012 race. The Bush administration seems to have singlehandedly sucked all the talent out of the Republican party. Palin seems like the top pick but I could not fathom what the Republican party would have to become to seriously back her as a candidate. There’s talk of Jindal and Pawlatawny but neither of them seem to have yet made it as serious contenders.
Looking back at previous elections, at what point was it fairly clear that there would be at least one strong contender for the nomination? I know Clinton in 92 came out from relative obscurity but my understanding was that there were already several credible candidates on the ticket but a combination of blundering and not wanting to face a strong sitting president essentially landed the nomination in Clinton’s lap.
So my question is, based on history, at what point would it be reasonable to say that the Republican party is forked if no credible candidate emerges?
Bobby Kennedy wasn’t a declared candidate until right after the New Hampshire Primary in 1968, and there is the distinct possibility that he would have been nominated had he not been assassinated.
Somebody will become credible, if for no other reason than the volume of media coverage will make them seem credible.
How credible did the Democratic candidates look in 2004? At the end of 2003, Kerry’s campaign had little money - I think he took out a mortgage on one of his houses - and Dean was kind of coming out of nowhere. So that might be a good comparison.
Umm…nitpick. John McCain seemed like the clear frontrunner very early on to me. I have no idea what you’re talking about. The Democratic race was down to the wire.
McCain had lots of name recognition going in, and so did Giuliani, who was doing the best in some of the earliest national polls. Huckabee came from nowhere, but those two at least were considered viable going in.
Yeah, but even assuming predictability, there’s a difference between outlasting a weak field in fits and starts and charging ahead or narrowly winning in a strong field.
McCain’s campaign was written off a number of times for obvious reasons, and I think you can argue correctly that but for a particularly weak field it is unlikely he would have been in any position to close as he did - and thus assume the post-facto aura of victory. The base was never as enamoured as him as the press and broader public were.
The fact that Obama and Hillary fought a hard and prolonged contest, by contrast, wasn’t an indication of public indecisiveness in the face of two weak candidates, it was an validation of their strengths.
No it wasn’t. That was just the spin Obama supporters wanted everyone to believe.
As for McCain, he dominated the field early on. What pundits say and what actually happened in the race are two different things. Giuliani was never a real contender once they actually started polling. Huckabee, Paul and Romney outperformed expectations, but McCain was presumptive nominee clearly and obviously months before the Democratic field was decided.
That being said, Hillary Clinton remains a terrible Presidential candidate. Her campaign was a shambles, that’s a testament to her abilities as an executive. The Obama vs Hillary election was purely about identity. Obama won a hard fought race and barely won, because he was simply better organized than Hillary.
I’d argue that the Democratic field in this election is probably the single best example of what the OP is looking for.
Because of the system the Democrats used, it really would have been very very hard for her to catch up after he won his string of 11 in a row. It’s not hard to see why she didn’t quit, but it was an extremely tall order for several months.
No, it was simple arithmatic. Obama had virtually clinched a majority of elected delegates well before June, and it would have been politically impossible for the supers to override the majority will of the voters and take the nomination away from him.
Hillary was basically playing for a turnover – she couldn’t win conventionally, but she stayed in until the end on the off-chance that some kind of unforseen event – a scandal which might make him unelectable or something darker (remember the RFK remark? I believe the thought crossed her mind, even though she probably wouldn’t want to admit it evn to herself).
Her chances weren’t zero, but they were very slim and something very dramatic would have had to happen to the Obama campaign (thank Allah it didn’t).
I think Palin was prematurely dismissed from the field.
Put aside personal opinion for a moment and consider pragmatics. Every interview and incident that went wrong had a post-fiasco assault/revision to it. She knew what the Bush Doctrine was. The VP really is in charge of the Senate, technically speaking. Those were not the droids she was looking for…
She has four years to make carefully controlled public appearances at campaign events and the like, four years to be consulted as a pundit (especially if there is a gender, energy, or other issue that she’s remotely connected with) bolstering her image.
She has four years to take a couple basic civics courses and start subscribing to The Economist so that she’ll be able to talk about a range of issues while maintaining a sense of awareness.
She has four years to listen to advice about honing her image and political stance, to learn what went wrong in '08 and improve her public persona.
Of course, she could easily implode in a fury of Anne Colter-like partisanship, decide it’s all not worth it, get the wrong advice, screw up, etc.
But after every incident there was (and will be) a campaign to rewrite what happened, and a significant segment of the public already wants to find a reason to vote for her. Add to that a significant segment of the public that has a frail memory and will believe the revision. Finally, in most of the Republican Obama endorsements, note that they didn’t quite say SP’s policies are crap and we disagree with her, but that she was unprepared and underqualified. I’m not suggesting she’ll suddenly get Powell’s endorsement in a few years, but she can certainly lay that criticism to rest.
Palin has no crossover appeal outside the conservative, religious base. The GOP isn’t going to win with simple religious bigotry anymore. It needs to branch out.
Also, Palin isn’t smart and she has no potential to get any smarter.
I was there too and I remember the arguments at the time. It’s just a simple form of confirmation bias. Hillary was presenting a counter argument at the time. The basic fact is that the superdelegates decided ultimately who was going to win.
I remember the silly forking threads too, just as people thought the forked McCain threads were also meaningful. Ultimately, it APPEARS inevitable in retrospect because your bias was ultimately confirmed, but it certainly was not that clear at that point otherwise Hillary would have given up rather than spending a ton of her own money on the campaign.
It was clear to EVERYBODY but most Clinton supporters that she could not get the nomination unless she overwhelmingly swept the remaining primaries, and that could not happen. And the superdelegates did not decide who would win, as I’m pretty sure that Clinton had the majority up until the convention.
Your inability to understand the different between containing information (knowledge) and the ability to absorb information (intelligence) is uncompelling.
That could not happen based on retrospect. You say it could not happen because it did not happen. Obama supporters wanted a certain outcome and were rewarded so they feel all chuffed about their prognosticatory abilities, but ultimately those abilities are not worth squat, they just happened to be right this time. The superdelegates were already starting to jump ship before the convention. The big shift was when Bill Richardson threw his weight behind Obama. That’s about when it began to seem inevitable. I am not saying he made it inevitable, only that he aligned himself with Obama when it started to look inevitable. Like I said, confirmation bias.
I saw some headline just the other day that indicated he’d consider running again. The main factors against him would be the same ones that hurt him in 2012, plus the track record of mistakes he made in 2008 while running as the initial leader in name recognition. He’s an awful national campaigner (everywhere he went, his poll numbers went down), he wasn’t disciplined with a message (and the message he did have got lampooned as “a noun, a verb and 9/11”), and as the space between the present and September 11 widens, it gets harder and harder for him to campaign on the ‘America’s Mayor’ thing. Same problems as before, and he’s still too socially liberal for the religious right - that’s how he got elected in New York - while the left mostly hates him for civil rights reasons.
I said it couldn’t happen at the time, too, and so did many other people. Look, here’s the deal: at some point in March, I think, it was determined that in order to win a majority of the total delegates, Senator Clinton had to sweep all of the remaining primaries overwhelmingly. The polling indicated that she would not win all of the primaries, and the ones she did win were mostly narrow victories. She won Pennsylvania, for example, by less than she needed to, and it was one of her largest margins of victory.
