Thursday, February 28, 2008

Election Musings.

Today I went to a lunch where Kasey S. Pipes, a former speechwriter for politicians including Ah-nuld, spoke about the upcoming election in historical context. It was fascinating to hear him speak because the things he was talking about shadowed my general thought process of what's going to happen from a macro standpoint, as opposed to the low-level issues-based rationale. i.e., the speech was about how two-term presidents are usually followed by change agents, hence the Democratic offering is likely to be formidable this year, but he also cited some interesting statistics about voter turnout in the primaries thus far. I believe it was North Carolina, a predominantly Republican state, where approximately 400K voters showed up to vote for what was an extremely competitive race at the time. A week later, in this predominantly Republican state, more than 500K voters showed up to vote in an election where Obama was already the clear winner. The moral of this story is that the Democratic base is fired up right now and excited about what's going on in their party, and Democrats are showing up in droves to vote.

This is a really interesting article I was pointed to courtesy of TWM: Link.

The last part of that article is the real kicker, though. If Obama does indeed take down Hillary, what happens when we start comparing McCain to Obama? Honestly I think McCain has a more favorable chance against Obama because McCain presents the beacon of experience and patriotism while Obama is green and we're not sure what we'll get with him. McCain vs. Hillary is different, though - both bring the experience, but Hillary has a greater ability to be an agent of change, coming from a different party than the incumbent. One of the speaker's big points about the downfall of the Clinton campaign thus far was that Hillary mis-played her opportunity to present herself as a change agent, and rather stuck with the platform of experience, which doesn't give her a competitive advantage in a climate where historically the American people are likely to want someone who will create change.

I didn't get a chance to ask the question since we ran out of time, but I wanted to know who Pipes thought the VPs would be. I think it's pretty clear that McCain will have to be matched with someone young and vital to provide a contrast for his older-than-dirt disposition, whereas Obama paired with Hillary could potentially set up some sort of Super-Democrat, kind of like the Transformers that connected together to make a bigger robot.

Anyway, I haven't proofread this so I apologize for the scattered thoughts, but I wanted to throw this out there while it was fresh in my mind.

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