Tuesday, June 05, 2007

A Semi-Random 2008 Presidential Prediction I Might Totally Repudiate
This came to me while watching chunks of the Republican debate Tuesday night: Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination next winter, and Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and she will defeat Romney in the November 2008 general election. Sen. Clinton will win something like 51.8 percent of the popular vote, with a slightly larger electoral college margin on the strength of her field operation tipping a few tossup states and the lack of grass-roots Republican enthusiasm for supporting a Mormon.

I said something like this to Annie while the debate was still on, adding that the question then would be whether Jeb Bush would defeat Hillary Clinton in 2012. I think she was cleaning the cat litter box at the time, and called back something about the considerable volume of cat shit in the box. I suggested this was the perfect metaphor for a second Clinton/Bush election five years hence, and she responded that this was why she'd made the remark.

Maybe I'm just pessimistic these days. But a 2008 general election matchup pitting the hyper-controlled, hyper-cautious Mrs. Clinton against the supremely packaged and almost endlessly slick Mittster would really showcase the miserable worst of our politics. It's extremely slight consolation that she'd very probably win such a miserable contest, presumably repopulating the executive branch with progressives and thus doing some good while her presidency foundered.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since this is the section for things we might repudiate, I think...... you know, I'm not sure what I think. I feel like it might be Giuliani after all, but I say that mostly because McCain can't stay up in the polls the way someone with his name recognition ought to if he had the support I thought he did. Plus the base hates Latinos, whoops, I mean has concerns about the immigration bill.

David said...

See, this is my problem with Giuliani: I simply can't believe, maybe in the face of all evidence from the last eight years about the irrelevance of logic in normative analysis about U.S. politics, that someone with all his problems, from the issues to the corruption to the personal slime, can get nominated. He's a trainwreck, and in some ways would be much more frightening than Bush.

But as I think I wrote awhile back, you knew that as soon as he made his decision to stay more or less "pro-choice" on abortion, he was going to bend over and lube up for the Grover Norquist wing. If they want him badly enough, they might be able to push him through.

Anonymous said...

Yeah there was a lot of cat-urd in the box.