The Presidential race

My official position is it's WAY TOO EARLY for a civilized nation to begin discussing a presidential election more than a year away.

The Constitution ought to be amended to prohibit any candidate from receiving campaign contributions more than 365 days before the general election and prevent any primary from taking place more than 9 months before the general election, meaning the first primary or caucus would be held at the beginning of March. (I also have devised a sensible system for holding the primaries which respects the Iowa/New Hampshire tradition, while giving every state an equal chance to be influential in the selection of the parties' candidates.) We could then have several months of meaningful primaries, ending in June, leading up to a nice July convention/coronation. That would be followed by a little more than 4 months of campaigning for the general election.

That would make sense, but instead we have our current system wherein we are already talking about "frontrunners" and watching the first of the hopeless candidates drop out. Not a single vote has been cast, nor will any be for three months! The general election is still over a year away. This is insanity. The issues which the candidates are running on today are not likely to be all the same issues on the political agenda a year hence, and then what do you do if your presumptive nominee dies? Yes, it's all asking for chaos, and chaos is increasingly what we get. And there's no respite from the campaign bullshit for my fragile eggshell mind.

Anyhow, that's not the point of this post. The point of this post is to offer my predictions on who will take the nominations of the two major parties. This is NOT an endorsement on my part, and it's not even a wish list. But it's what I think will happen. About four years ago at this time, on my then-blog The Mighty Pen, I predicted John Kerry would emerge as the nominee, though the "smart money" was on Howard Dean or John Edwards. Kerry was a good candidate, ran a pretty good campaign (though he really bungled the Swift Boaters) and became a pretty darn good stump speaker by the end of the contest (I saw him at Joe Louis Arena a week or two before the vote, so I saw it firsthand). Anyhow, I called it, that's all I'm sayin'.

The Democratic nominee is going to be Hillary Clinton, a prediction which I know won't surprise anyone. She's smart, she's well-funded, she's disciplined as hell, and she's surrounded by a team of people who have been through this before. Obama is a compelling person and story, and I hope he'll be part of our political landscape for a generation, but he's just not experienced enough to overtake Hillary. It's not the B.S. lapel-pin issue -- that's just symptomatic of the problem: He needs to learn how to do one of these modern campaigns. He gets a B-. She gets an A. He's the student here; she's the teacher.

The Republican is going to be.... drum roll.... former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. I've thought and thought about it, and I think he's the only candidate with a prayer to win this nomination. Let's first dispense with the crap: Guiliani is NOT going to win the nomination. He doesn't deserve the nomination, he's rather unlikeable, and there's the problem that there's now video of him as NYC mayor explaining why he wouldn't attend the 1996 GOP convention (now THAT is an awkward clip to explain away). But that's not the real killer for him. The real killer is that he's pro-choice. I know a bunch of people have told him he can turn his fame from 9/11 into national office. But they're wrong. The Rudy show doesn't play all that well outside New York, nor does the liberal Republican motif. In a six-way race, Rudy can look like a front-runner, but as also-rans drop out the picture will become clear: Pro-life voters will not cross the rubicon to vote for Guiliani.

The other strong candidate is Romney. Again, he's a liberal northern Republican, only he's made a better flirtation with the paleolithic Christianist power brokers of the right. He's getting them to consider exchanging vows, but they haven't committed to the union just yet. His problem, you see, is that he's a Mormon. This is no small matter in a political party so thoroughly beholden to the Bible belt, and it is nothing like the problem JFK had trying to win the Democratic nomination as a Catholic. JFK appealed for religious tolerance (and certainly didn't convince everyone) but the GOP base isn't playing that game. While the base may be willing to swallow Romney's politics, they don't buy his religion, and that matters a great deal. Bob Jones III sort of endorsed Romney, but even as he did so felt compelled to remind voters that he views Mormonism as "a cult". Romney is wicked smart, and an enormously competent manager, but he's pretending to be a good ol' boy to appeal to the base. I just don't think the GOP base will embrace him.

That brings us to Huckabee. The first thing going for him is that, as far as I can tell, he's genuine. He's genuinely conservative, and he communicates very clearly. He says what he really thinks, and who he is puts him squarely in the middle of the Reaganite GOP. Fortunately for him, his positions allow him to appeal to the whole range of traditional Republican demographics. A former minister, he's a genuine born-again Christian. But he's no fire-breather; he's had to baptize babies and bury the dead, and I think his faith is more about conviction than condemnation. He's likeable. There are no flambouyant divorces or flip-flops on his record. He's pro-life, pro-gun, economically conservative, non-slick, amiable and genteel. None of the GOP candidates is another Reagan, but Huckabee is the best fit for that coalition, and he's comfortable in his own skin. So I believe that over the next couple months, he's simply going to appeal to the most Republicans.

The X-factor in all of this is Al Gore. He could conceivably announce his candidacy even as late as December and still give Hillary a fight. Even if he missed the ballot deadlines in a few states, he could clobber her in California and some of the other populous states and make a run at the nomination. But my feeling is that this is unlikely. He doesn't see his mission as being President -- he sees it as changing the world. He's happy now, in ways that he wasn't when he was a politician. And he's getting a whole lot done. It may be that as a person, he's moved on beyond politics. Maybe he's done compromising himself. I'd vote for him, but if he didn't want to run, I can't say I blame him.