Common Sense University

The highly anticipated second Presidential Election milestone in 2008 has come and gone. The players have left New Hampshire and have moved on to other territories within the United States. We know who the winners were at this primary, Hillary Clinton on the Democrat and John McCain on the Republican side. The biggest losers at the event were the polls and the media members. After the Iowa caucuses, the polls all of a sudden showed Barack Obama in double digit leads over Hillary Clinton and the pundits and talking heads on television were ready to write Mrs. Clinton off in terms of winning the Democratic Party nomination for President. The swooning over Mr. Obama was nauseating in that he was compared to Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. They spread their nonsense worldwide and we heard that Europe and especially Germany was falling in love with Obama.  Common sense or playing politics, I ask?

They also predicted that if Mitt Romney would not win the New Hampshire primary, he was finished and if John McCain would win New Hampshire he would have to be considered the frontrunner of the Republican Party. What nonsense! Do these people have no concern over losing their reputations as political commentators and analysts? Apparently not! Another interesting comparison that should be made is that the pollsters and pundits could not call the results of the Iowa caucuses since they were considered “too close to call”.

In reality, Barack Obama won over his competitors by huge margins of eight and nine percentage points. Mike Huckebee beat Mitt Romney by nine points. The opposite happened in New Hampshire. Mr. Obama was going to beat Mrs. Clinton by more than ten points while the race on the Republican side was tightening so much that a prediction could not safely be made. They could not have been more wrong. We like to refer you to an article we posted on August 30, 2007 entitled “The Uselessness of Polls”. We feel sort of vindicated in that now when the elections are actually taken place, they still cannot get it right, for that matter they are not even close. Furthermore, as it stands right now, Mitt Romney (considered ‘finished’ after his second place showing in New Hampshire) is leading the Republican candidates in the delegate count over all the others. He has 24, Huckabee has 18 and McCain has 10 while the other fellows have even fewer.

Common sense should suggest that it might be best if we all think for ourselves and compare the candidates and then decide by ourselves whom to vote for. After all, this is what primaries are all about. It is a selection process designed for individuals to select their favorite candidate, whom they believe to be best suited to become President of this country (and with it the leader of the free world).

It should not be that people depend on what polls indicate and what self-appointed political experts tell them. We can listen to what they have to say, but in today’s world where we all can visit the campaign websites of the candidates and compare our own personal beliefs with theirs; we can make up our own minds after what they have stated. We can also watch any number of the many candidate debates and see and hear for ourselves how they come across, how they answer questions, how they conduct themselves and so on.

The next primary will be held on January 15 in Michigan where 30 delegates are at stake on the Republican side and none for the Democrats. You might wonder, how can this be? The state’s Democratic Party in Michigan was penalized by the Democratic National Committee for moving their primary to an earlier date and decided to disallow any delegates at the National Convention in August of this year. The thing to look for in Michigan is this: It is allowed to cross party lines and vote for a candidate in another party during a primary. This could mean that since the Democrats votes are nullified when it comes to convention delegates, they might vote in large numbers in the Republican primary and can totally distort the results in this event. For this reason, do not pay any attention to polls and pundits leading up to the Michigan primary, there is no way that anybody can even approximate the outcome of this election since nobody can predict what will happen there. There is a precedent for this: In 2000, John McCain beat George W. Bush in Michigan with the help of a large number of cross-voting Democrats. With this year’s reality in this state, we could easily see a repeat of this happening again.

Finally, on December 8, 2007, we posted an article entitled “Antiquated Election Processes” wherein we described the voting procedures in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet, these are not the only states where other such things are allowed and how they in different states allocate their delegates to the two Party Conventions later this year. We will try and shed more light on this in our next post, stay tuned.

This article and others on Common Sense Author are designed to provoke further thought and investigation.   It is not the intent for the articles to be politically biased. Sources are referenced in each article to encourage readers to delve into the supporting material.  We welcome all readers to participate with their point of view either in support or contrary with additional information sources.

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