A Laughable Comparison
Ed Rollins is an old pro to GOP politics but he’s starting to sound a little incoherent. In this Washington Post article, he compared Huckabee hanging around to Reagan fighting Gerald Ford all the way to the convention:
Meanwhile, Huckabee’s campaign manager was gleefully proclaiming the possibility that the former governor could force an all-out fight at the Republican National Convention this summer. “It’d be great fun,” Ed Rollins said on CNN.
Rollins said in an interview that Huckabee is staying in the race out of an obligation to voters and because he believes in following the rules that have been laid out.
The veteran campaign strategist compared Huckabee’s long-shot bid to Ronald Reagan’s attempts to defeat incumbent Gerald R. Ford in 1976. Reagan lost that effort, but it paved the way for his conservative revolution four years later.
With all due respect to Mr. Rollins, that’s one of the silliest comparisons I’ve ever heard from a political operative. In 1976, Reagan kept the delegate count extremely close, to the point where there was still some doubt about who’d get the nomination. At the time, some reports said that there might be as little as 20-30 delegates separating Ford from Reagan. Both men could make credible claims that they could win the nomination. That clearly isn’t the case this year.
After tonight’s primaries, McCain leads Huckabee by just under 700 delegates. McCain has almost 950 of the 1,191 delegates needed for nomination while Huckabee was just 950 delegates short of capturing the nomination.
Let’s clarify this, though. I’m not calling for Huckabee to drop out. I’m calling for him to stay in so that the pundits have to devote part of their time to talking about Republicans instead of talking about Obama vs. Hillary all night. This gives McCain lots of air time to start honing his message prior to this summer’s start of the general election.
Polls right now are meaningless for the most part. When it gets to be a one-on-one matchup, that’s when things will start shaking themselves out. McCain will have the advantage of either painting Obama as too inexperienced to be Commander-in-Chief or painting Hillary as too polarizing. I doubt that Obama’s empty change message will play well beyond the Democratic base.
That’s if Hillary doesn’t drag this out to the convention. Pat Caddell brought up an interesting scenario tonight on Hannity & Colmes. He said that the Clintons wouldn’t be easy to push off the stage at this point. He said it’s a definite possibility that they’ll appeal to Obama delegates to vote for Hillary at the convention. He also said that Hillary is already trying to get Michigan and Florida delegates seated at the convention. Since she was the only top tier candidate on the Michigan ballot, she’d get a huge boost from that plus a big delegate count from Florida.
Should that happen, would we see the superdelegates side with the Clintons? There’s alot of things to be settled before summer. One thing that’s settled, though, is the GOP presidential nominee.
Technorati Tags: Hillary, Obama, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Commander-in-Chief, Media, Superdelegates, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Ed Rollins, Election 2008
Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog