John McCain Gets Time to Prepare
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton Are Left Duking it Out
John McCain will benefit from his party's early nomination, which could mean big trouble for the Democrats come November.
John McCain is feeling great these days. After being written off nearly six months ago as a viable candidate, he has emerged as the GOP nominee. Now, his focus will turn from gathering votes to gathering support from the Republican base.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama continue to battle for the Democratic Party’s nomination, a process that could last until the party’s national convention in late August. This process, which may very well leave the winner battered, bruised, and out of money, might spell doom for the party that will be running against a candidate in McCain who now has eight months to prepare for a general election.
This actually could not have worked out better for McCain. Often seen as too liberal for the conservative base of the Republican Party, he now has the better part of a year to convince conservatives that he is the right candidate. What this means, in a nutshell, is that McCain will be doing everything he can between now and November to look presidential and sound like a conservative. He will go to Iraq or Afghanistan—in military garb, no doubt—, he will meet with foreign dignitaries, he will rail against higher taxes, and sprinkle his speeches with phrases like “family values,” all for the goal of whetting the appetites of conservatives.
In the interim, Clinton and Obama are doing everything they can just to win their party’s nomination. After Tuesday’s primaries, nothing is decided on that front. The only thing to be sure of is that everyone should get ready for another three or four months of more of the same—more rallies, more stump speeches, more fundraising, more attacks. Getting bogged down in the nomination process is a decided disadvantage for whichever Democratic candidate emerges. McCain has months of preparation time, and it should benefit him greatly.
Regardless of when the Democrats decide who they want, John McCain will be in a good position to claim that he is the right person for the job, not even necessarily touting his own policy and record, but by simply pointing to the length of time it took for the Democrats to decide on a candidate. That is, the question is always available to McCain of how Clinton or Obama can claim that they are the right person for the job when it took their own party more than half a year to decide on a candidate.
Another bump in the road for Democrats is voter turnout in November. This has been one of the most hotly contested primary seasons in history, and it will get only hotter. Will a staunch Clinton supporter vote for Obama if he is nominated? Will someone who was counting on Obama winning the nomination vote for Clinton? Perhaps the cure-all is an Obama-Clinton ticket, or vice-versa. Only time will tell.
There are many variables between now and November. So much is unclear at this point. What is clear, however, is that McCain will benefit in the long run from his early nomination, and that might pay off big-time come November. The Republicans have a head start, and the Democrats are playing catch-up.
