Solid candidates add diversity to race

The elections of 2006 ended just five months ago, meaning that it is now time to gear up for another race. In today’s world candidates are constantly campaigning, taking breaks only at victory parties. Nearly 20 months before a single vote will be cast for president, there are solid candidates shaping up as front-runners for their respective party’s nomination. For the democrats there is Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John Edwards. The republicans have Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
For the democrats to choose from, the field is quite liberal with most candidates adhering to the basic liberal platform. That platform would be socialized medicine, higher taxes, pro-choice, anti-Iraq War, greater role of government in everyday life, opposition to capital punishment, pro-gun control, and anti-Patriot Act. Since these three democrats have mostly identical stances on these political issues the debate between the candidates isn’t about message, but rather who’s best suited to carry the message.
And looking at just the top three democratic front-runners there’s a great amount of diversity for carrying the message. In Barak Obama the democrats have a distinguished African-American candidate that can out-debate practically anyone. In Hillary Clinton the democrats have a former first-lady that has been one of the most productive junior senators over the last six years. In John Edwards the democrats have a white, southern male that finished in second place in the 2004 democratic primary and ran for vice-president.
Realistically, any of these three candidates have a good shot at being our President on Jan. 20, 2009. If I were a Democrat that felt that the most deserving, distinguished person should be the candidate, I would be supporting Hillary Clinton. Her hard work on liberal legislation like federalizing health care in 1994, and all the dozens of pieces of legislation that she’s sponsored as a Senator make her a very deserving presidential candidate. But realistically, she has an unfavorable rating of 48 percent, the highest of any presidential candidate currently running in the country. It’s virtually impossible to win at that percentage. The democrat that I see has the best chance of winning would be John Edwards. He might not be the most popular democrat, placing a distant third behind Clinton and Obama, but in every poll against major republican candidates he’s doing as good or better than his democratic opponents. I know that America is ready for a black or female president, but the democrats best chance of winning right now is a white southern boy from North Carolina.
The republicans have the opposite problem in choosing their presidential candidate. The major issue in picking which Republican will run is figuring out what the message will be for 2008. The three republican front-runners are all very liberal politically. John McCain and Rudy Giuliani both support same-sex civil unions, a taboo issue for conservatives, and are pro-choice on the issue of abortion. John McCain announced a few weeks ago that he is switching to pro-life, but his voting record in the Senate hasn’t been. Mitt Romney is less socially liberal, but more economically liberal as he supports socialized medicine.
Out of these three republicans it would seem that Romney would be the most likely to pick up the “Religious Right’s” support, except for the fact that he is a practicing Mormon. The southern, Christian, conservative base that the Republican Party has been so dependent on since Reagan’s election in 1980 has no candidate to support in 2008. To bridge this gap many republicans are looking to Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the House from Georgia, to be a candidate that Christian conservatives can be proud of.
It is very ironic that the candidates that would do the best for each party are not the front-runners like Clinton, Giuliani, McCain, or Obama but the lesser known candidates like John Edwards and Newt Gingrich.

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Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 16 2007. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry