Indecision 2008

The bromide says that the more things change the more they stay the same and this 2008 general election is the perfect delineation of that.

Although only the wild card super delegates can save Hillary this summer (it’s amazing to me that it still hasn’t sunk in with the press that even if Hillary runs the table between now and June she still won’t have enough pledged delegates to get the nomination), I have never once called for her to leave the race. This is still, after all, a democracy in theory. And as long as several hundred super delegates are sitting on their pledges, this side of the race will still be in a state of flux, the will of the voters be damned.

The Democratic party, as we saw two years ago, as we’d seen in all too many general and midterm election cycles, offers not so much diversity in a female and African American candidate as fractious division and confusion. Neither Clinton’s not Obama’s respective campaigns are offering a single, unified vision for how this nation ought to be led nor even an effective compromise. Instead of healthy debate, we’re seeing squabbling (here Camp Clinton has to assume most of the blame) on minutia ranging from flag lapel pins, patriotism and dissident pastors.

Clinton’s campaign, especially, has turned Decision 2008 into a sort exit poll-driven, electoral Iraq: A quagmire offering no clear vision, no workable solutions and ones that create dissent within the ranks and no exit strategy.

While I’ve always been dubious of the existence of an eponymous state that’s perfectly representative of the other 49, the exit polls taken in Pennsylvania last Tuesday night nonetheless resurrected some trends revealed by exit polls in previous primary and caucus states, such as 8% of Pennsylvania voters (presumably all white) admitting that they wouldn’t vote for a black candidate. When one factors in white voters’ reluctance to admit such racism and prejudice to exit pollsters, that number almost surely shoots up into double digits.

As Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote in this morning’s byline,

When the Pennsylvania returns rained down Tuesday night, the narrative became clear fast. The Democrats’ exit polls spelled disaster: Some 25 percent of the primary voters said they would defect to Mr. McCain or not vote at all if Barack Obama were the nominee. How could the party possibly survive this bitter, perhaps race-based civil war?

But as the doomsday alarm grew shrill, few noticed that on this same day in Pennsylvania, 27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.

This shows two trends: That while the Republican party may be fractured at the grassroots level with party voters defecting from McCain for reasons ranging from a legitimate dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq for which he’s still cheerleading to him not being conservative enough, the party itself is still supporting McCain. This is obviously because McCain had become anointed through process of attrition, of being fortunate or savvy or lucky enough to once again throw his hat in the ring during an election cycle that featured other Republicans that were so banal, stupid and outright loathsome that even the 71 year-old McCain looked like a legitimate and infinitely likeable contender for the White House. By implication, even Hillary Clinton said that we should elect the next president based on sheer amounts of experience. If we’re to follow her logic down the rabbit hole to its conclusion then our next president ought to be not the freshman Obama, not the two-term Clinton but the four term senator from Arizona.

By contrast, the Democratic party is fractured and divisive not only at the grassroots level but even at the national echelon. Howard Dean’s and the DNC’s draconian decision to deny Florida and Michigan of its delegates at the convention in Denver this August simply for moving up their primaries cannot be anything but harmful for the party. It’s an albatross that’s rotting around the necks of all concerned and only increases the likelihood of a brokered convention. In other words, it’s virtually impossible to get two Democrats on the same page about anything, whether it be Iraq, the war on terror, the economy, health care, high gas prices or the subprime lending and housing crisis.

Another factor that confounds the Democratic party and voters looking back and forth at each candidate as if watching some existential tennis match, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that Obama and Clinton are all too similar where they ought to be different (such as Iraq) and too divisive where they ought to be on the same page (national health care).

As the three candidates start slumming, remembering and reaching out to the blue collar voters, the one who comes off looking least like an elitist is John McCain. During his poverty tour this past week, potential Republican voters came out because they liked him. In other words, McCain’s the type of guy with whom they’d like to have a beer, an election year criteria that worked wonders for America and the world eight years ago. Obama’s too urbane to pull off “the common touch” and Hillary “Wal-Mart” Clinton on the eve of the Vegas caucus showed herself to be anti-union by trying to prevent pro-Obama union workers from caucusing.

The Republican party’s power structure, its rebellious constituents notwithstanding, is proving to be virtually as cohesive as ever. Granted, McCain’s not rallying and unifying the party as George W. Bush did in 2000 or Reagan twenty years earlier. But, Republicans being Republicans, they need to vote for the only guy who has that “R” after his name regardless of his flipflopping, regardless of his avowed ignorance of economics and recent astonishing pronouncement that, in the weeks after admitting his ignorance, he had become a master in matters economic.

For all his mantras about effecting change, for all the support he seems to be getting from young and African-American voters, Barack Obama has yet to come close to rallying either his party at the national level or white, middle aged-to-elderly and blue collar voters. If McCain pulls off the improbable and wins the presidency this November, it won’t be because he’s got the answers: It’ll be because the Democratic party has too few or too many of them. And just as McCain benefited from simply being in the right place at the right time, that same man, as stupendously unfit to lead this country as the idiot who preceded him, could benefit on election day both from a more or less united GOP that itself was forced to settle and a Democratic party still waiting for a Godot named Al Gore.