Hypocrisy: How John McCain sold his soul to become the Republican party nominee

“The challenges we face will not be solved with one meeting in one night. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones that we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be. Yes we can.” – Senator Barack Obama, Super Tuesday Night February 5th 2008, Chicago, Illinois

Last month I ruminated over why I thought it possible that within 30 days it would become clear who the Democratic and Republican nominees for President would be. I was partly correct. After a month of primaries and caucuses in 30 odd states John McCain has clearly emerged as the presumptive Republican nominee. At the time of writing he has amassed the support of 830 pledged delegates in his fight to become the GOP presidential candidate. He needs 1191 delegates to secure a majority and tie up the race. Almost all of the GOP primaries are winner take all states, which means that even though McCain won many of the states by relatively small margins, the Republican rules dictate that he receive all of that state’s delegates.

For example, even though Mitt Romney won 34% of the vote in California (to McCain’s 42%) and Mike Huckabee won 41% of the vote in Virginia (to McCain’s 50%), neither Romney or Huckabee was awarded any delegates. This winner take all mentality offers a very lob-sided analysis of how people voted in the Republican primaries and of course gives a disproportionate lead in the delegate count to whatever candidate can string together a series of close wins. While McCain has received some high profile endorsements since Super Tuesday, including that of his former nemesis George W Bush, there is a large minority of the Republican base that has yet to embrace McCain as their nominee.

Step forward the self proclaimed evangelical Christian conservative wing of the party. So called true blue conservatives are loath to back McCain because they believe that he isn’t really a true conservative. They point to his senatorial record, where over the course of the past 25 years he has continually bucked the party position on issue after issue, confirming in their mind his maverick status as a legislator and politician.

To conservative Republicans, McCain is a mass of contradictions. While they like his positions on the war and defense, they despise him for what they deem to be his abandonment of conservative principles on issues like the right to life, campaign finance reform (a bill he co-sponsored and which Republicans detest) and not least his position on illegal immigration. McCain, who is a Senator from the southern border state of Arizona, believes in a moderate, all inclusive policy of tackling the illegal immigration situation; a position which is in stark contrast to the majority of Republicans. While many Independent voters have been traditionally drawn to McCain, there is no doubt that his he lost the majority of them this month after he cast a diabolical vote in the U.S. Senate.

McCain is a genuine American hero, having spent 5 ½ years as a prisoner of war in the so called “Hanoi Hilton” in Vietnam in the 1960’s, where he was regularly tortured by his captors. All his life McCain has publicly stated that torture is illegal, is in contempt of the Geneva Convention, and in recent years has taken his own government to task over its use of the technique of water-boarding in attempting to elicit intelligence from detainees. My respect for McCain disappeared this month when he went on the floor of the U.S. Senate and voted against a bill that would outlaw torture. In doing so, John McCain sold his soul to the conservatives on the Republican right in a blatant, desperate attempt to win over the lunatic fringe of his own party. The man is a hypocrite, pure and simple.

When I predicted a month ago that the Democratic nominee would become clear after the February 5th primaries, I was wrong. As I write, Barack Obama has won 23 of the 34 primaries and caucuses held to date. In terms of pledged delegates Obama leads Senator Clinton 1139 to 1003. The first to reach 2025 will become the Democratic nominee. In what seems like a far more equitable system to me, Democrats award delegates in each state on a proportional basis, with each candidate being awarded a specific number of delegates based proportionally on the percentage of the vote received by that candidate. As a result, even though Obama has easily won more states than Clinton, and Clinton has won more of the bigger states than Obama, the two are practically tied in the delegate count.

After Super Tuesday, which in essence was a split decision, all the trends favor Obama moving forward. In the first 8 primaries and caucuses since Super Tuesday, Obama has won them all. By the time you read this the results will be in from two more primaries, Wisconsin and Hawaii, who go to the polls on February 19th. The results from those states will be important in gauging the momentum that is building for an Obama nomination and he may well become unstoppable. Obama as a candidate has demonstrated that he has broad appeal across all of the key demographic voting groups in America, including white men, African Americans, men and women under 30, minorities and better educated, more affluent voters. He is winning every demographic group under 50. Clinton has strong appeal to older, more traditional voters and has a bigger following within the Latino community.

The Clinton machine badly underestimated the Obama candidacy. Campaign officials expected to have the nomination locked up by February 5th (Super Tuesday) and it is clear that very little planning was done for the eventuality of a long delegate battle that may well go on until June. Hillary Clinton admitted this month that she has lent $5 million of her own money to her campaign, a staggering admission of financial mismanagement within her own organization when you consider that she raised in excess of $100 million in contributions in 2007.

The next big battle takes place on March 4th when the voters of delegate rich states like Texas and Ohio go to the polls. Should Hillary Clinton win there, the nomination is wide open again and may well go to the floor of the convention in the summer, where the party super-delegates may be called on to decide who the nominee is going to be.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

This country is flocking to the Obama message of hope. As I write, Michelle Obama has taken the stage to speak to a massive crowd at the University of California in Los Angeles. This is a powerful woman, who speaks with eloquence and passion, straight from the heart in a way that I haven't seen from the spouse of a presidential candidate in many a long day. In her own words, only in America could Michelle Obama, a woman who until a few short months ago was unknown the length and breadth of the country, be introduced as the keynote speaker by a trio of inspirational household names like Caroline Kennedy, Oprah Winfrey and Stevie Wonder.

This country is flocking to the Obama message of hope. This past week, one of the greatest politicians to ever grace the United States senate, Ted Kennedy, symbolically passed the torch from the generation of that of his slain brothers to a man who in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, understands the fierce urgency of now. Kennedy, a champion of the underdog and a lightning rod for minorities, the underprivileged, the poor and the mentally and physically disabled over the course of a 45 year career, sees the energy, wisdom and leadership skills in Obama that a similar fresh faced senator brought to the presidential discussion in 1960. Displaying the energy of a man half his age, Kennedy is burning up the stump across the Midwest and California, connecting with those voters who may be well prove crucial in the upcoming primaries; Latinos. The Kennedy name is beloved within the Latino community, ever since Bobby Kennedy broke bread and showed solidarity with Cesar Chavez during the great strike by the Farm Workers Union in 1968.

The country is flocking to the Obama message of hope. Independents and moderate Republicans are attracted by the olive branch that he has extended by asking them to concentrate not on the few things that they disagree on but rather on the many things that unite them - the ability to "disagree without being disagreeable". While it is hard to guage the impact that endorsements have on a particular candidacy, the diversity of public endorsements that Obama has received in the past month is proving that here is a man that IS NOW forming a coalition of people that are coming together across the politicial, racial and gender divide to unite in a common cause.

With 48 hours to go before people begin going to the polls in 22 states across the country, it is hard to call a clear winner between Senator's Clinton and Obama. There is no doubt that there has been a tremendous surge for Obama in the past couple of weeks and the wind is at his back. It is going to be fascinating to see if this forward momentum can edge him ahead of Mrs. Clinton after all Super Tuesday votes have been counted.