The Run-up to US Presidential election 2008
Dear Fulbright Grantees and other interested parties,
Please feel free to post your thoughts on the run-up to the US election here.
Best,
The Fulbright Commission
Explore posts in the same categories: Uncategorized
17 January 2008 at 4:01 am
With news of Mitt Romney’s win in Michigan filtering through yesterday evening, for the Republicans it was three primaries down, three winners, nothing resolved. On my way to South Carolina I sat next to a McCain volunteer. He was confident that McCain would take Michigan, followed by Nevada and South Carolina at the weekend. That scenario would in all likelihood have wrapped things up for McCain by the night of Super Tuesday (a welcome relief for his cash-starved campaign). But it now looks as though both the GOP and Democratic race will run well beyond “super-duper Tuesday” on 5th February.
As for Charleston, South Carolina, it’s just as you’d imagine: warm yet breezy, laid-back, friendly. When canvassing on the phone, the response, if you ask for the person who picks up, is “This is she” (”she” to rhyme with “day”). Most I’ve spoken with are courteous; they intend to vote and many have already made up their mind. For the Republicans it is likely to be McCain or Huckabee (despite the many Fred Thompson posters skirting the roads from the airport). Meanwhile, John Edwards is unlikely to repeat his victory of 2004, when he picked up 45 per cent of the vote. Instead, we will see the resolution of part IV of Clinton vs Obama.
http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2008/01/16/the-caravan-moves-to-charleston/
25 January 2008 at 1:32 pm
With Hillary Clinton once again the front-runner in the contest to become Democratic candidate in November’s general election, the focus switches – for the first time for the Democrats – to the South.
Much has been written on both sides of the Atlantic about the importance of race in this election. Comments by Senator Clinton on the respective contributions to the civil rights movement of the visionary Martin Luther King and the politician-president LBJ were jumped upon by Obama’s supporters as racially insensitive. Some even claimed that her husband’s description of Obama’s campaign as ‘the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen’ was racist. Although a truce was declared by the candidates in a televised debate in Nevada, the damage had already been done. The Washington Post reported a shift in support from Clinton to Obama among African-Americans. Certainly the exit polls from last Saturday’s Nevada caucus made for interesting reading: 83 per cent of African-Americans voted Obama while Clinton cleaned up among whites.
But something funny is happening in the factories, fields and faculties of South Carolina where African-Americans make up half the primary’s electorate. Far from conforming to the identity politics of race, voters of all backgrounds are undecided on whether to opt for the first genuinely electable African-American with his message of hope or for the arguably more experienced candidate.
I spent the last week in the beautiful seaside town of Charleston canvassing registered Democrats for the Clinton campaign. Although many have made up their minds, many more are – with less than a week to go – undecided. The sense of history here is palpable; apathy appears dead. I have only spoken to one person who said flat out that they were not intending to vote.
This is not to say that identity is playing no role at all. As in New Hampshire and Nevada, women of all backgrounds are likely to favour Clinton while those under 35 will probably follow Obama. As a local boy, Edwards should fare better here than he did in the ’silver state’ (where he scored just 4 per cent) especially among the significant unionised population.
And something else may be happening that favours Clinton. In Nevada, half the voters had made up their minds over a month before polling day. They favoured Clinton over Obama by a factor of nearly 2-1. Another 40 per cent made up their minds in the final days of the campaign and these mainly went to Obama. But a significant minority of voters (8 per cent) made up their minds on election day itself and voted for Hillary. In the public bear pit of a caucus with friends and family watching, switching sides can be a painful business (there were even rumours of a fist fight at one site). In the privacy of a polling booth, however, with only your conscience for company, more voters may think again. This phenomenon, after all, is what won the 1992 UK general election for John Major confounding the pollsters. The same thing may just be happening again.
http://www.progressives.org.uk/Magazine/article.asp?a=2393
6 February 2008 at 4:27 pm
my two cents on why John McCain has gained so much momentum
As an American living in England, I still find it rather strange to be at least five hours ahead of the action in the States. It’s a funny thing to go to bed and know that when I wake up, I’ll learn the exciting conclusion of Super Tuesday, the Super Bowl, or the People’s Choice Awards (okay, that last one is a joke :-) Today, as I sipped my morning cup of tea and perused the Washington Post, I read that Obama and Clinton remain neck and neck in the quest for the Democratic nomination. No surprise there, I suppose. McCain, on the other hand, seems to be forging ahead – or, at worst, inching his way ever closer to the GOP prize. No surprise there either.
I’m no expert on human behavior, but I can’t shake the nagging feeling that McCain’s apparently inevitable triumph is linked to name recognition, which, in turn, taps into something deeper in many a voter’s psyche. As much as we would like to believe that people select candidates based on informed decisions and considerable knowledge of the “issues”, this dream doesn’t always pan out (I’m certainly guilty of failing to keep up with the news). From a psychological perspective, I wonder whether ticking a box for McCain represents a yearning to amend the outcome of the 2000 Republican primary (and, by extension, the election) and thus steer the country in a different direction. A do-over, in other words. A chance to set things right with respect to that crucial juncture in American politics. My contention is not that anyone in his right mind would presume that we can erase or ignore the events of the past eight years, but the subconscious is a powerful force to be reckoned with. For many undecided voters and/or moderates who have grown increasingly frustrated with the Bush Administration’s policies and tactics, McCain presents a reassuring and comfortable choice. A vote for him is a vote for a man who perhaps should have won in 2000 (or so one’s intuition might proclaim). But frankly, if any voters do harbor those kinds of sentiments, they could instead take a ballot and write the name of a certain other former presidential contender to get their exonerative fix.
Joanna Friedman
Fulbright Scholar 2007-8
University of Oxford
9 February 2008 at 1:04 pm
Attended a ‘Super-Tuesday’ event at the embassy in London the other night. They had a panel of five pundits from news organizations and academic institutions, as well as a live feed from Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia, who was horse-of-voice from the relentness campaigning (and, therefore, commenting). The whole process seems unfairly exhausting. Anyway, consensus was this, in summary:
1. John McCain has the nomination, Mitt Romney having pulled out, and he will likely not choose Huckabee for his running mate, as he’ll need someone younger.
2. The republicans have the advantage of having a national candidate now.
3. Hillary will ask Obama to be her running mate, but not the other way around. The former would be seen as a liability to the latter in the case that he wins the nomination. Obama would be advised to pick a white southern governer.
4. The democrats are “doing what they do best” in the self-destructing process of campaigning for the primaries.
5. The rest of the world cares about this election, but American’s don’t care about the rest of the world.
6. It’s going to be a long, exciting year.
I for one, love it. Please let there be a democrat in the White House come next January.
Justin Sanders
Fulbright Scholar 07-08
University College London
9 February 2008 at 11:16 pm
The triumph of John McCain for the Republican nomination is truly remarkable. McCain won the nomination despite being the most moderate, being vehemently disliked by the Republican right, surviving the near implosion of his campaign, and supporting causes anathema to his base. He is a re-tread from eight years ago, has a reputation for crankiness, and let us not forget is 71 years old. It is impossible to find a parallel to this in British political history, and almost as hard to even imagine an equivalent situation in the future.
Yet McCain has won the nomination, and to my mind, now created the prospect that a Democrat Presidential win is no longer inevitable. When I arrived in the US it was near impossible to find anyone at the ultra-Democrat Harvard who would say they had any inkling of support for a Republican candidate. Mitt Romney, the Harvard Business School alum, former Massachusetts Governor, and general business guru, generated absolutely no public enthusiasm from any of my friends at HBS. If not here, at the West Point of capitalism, what chance did he or any Republican have, against Democrats seemingly in tune with the spirit of the times?
Yet McCain’s reputation for independence and moderation, are genuinely changing the electoral dynamics. At dinner a few days ago, many of my US friends seemed prepared to contemplate a vote for McCain, when they would not have done so for any other Republican candidate.
The challenge therefore now rests for the Democrats. Polls out today show how the two candidates poll against McCain. The verdict seems simple enough: McCain-Clinton looks close to a dead heat, whereas Obama leads McCain by 7-8 percentage points. So are the Democrats going to back the man who seems most capable of taking back the Oval Office, as the Republicans have miraculously achieved?
Yet the choice is not that simple. A large number of Democrat inclined voters have very real doubts about Obama’s lack of experience and substance (if not the appeal of his impressive oratory). A Southern Republican big-wig I met a week or so ago, was convinced that they could easily blow Obama’s campaign out of the water through multiple hardball tactics.
The prospect of a McCain presidency now looks real. Once this race was the Democrats to loose. Things now seem much more evenly balanced, and the more fascinating for that.
Chris Benson
Fulbright Scholar 2007-8
Harvard Business School