The 2008 presidential campaign is already shaping up as a doozy. And the next congressional elections will be shaped accordingly.
We now have a Republican White House and executive branch, a Democratic-controlled U.S. House and Senate, but come January 2009, that will all change after the November 2008 general elections. Who knows how?
The liberal-left is divided between former First Lady Hillary Clinton, the senator from New York, and Barack Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois.
Clinton is ultra-left. Obama seems more moderate but also is liberal-left.
They will duke it out in the California, Iowa, and New Hampshire primaries, and Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, because Obama is too young and unseasoned, albeit very attractive and articulate, and former President Bill Clinton is pulling out all stops for his wife. They want back in the White House so bad they can taste it.
On the Republican side, there is Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York during and after 9/11, who is a proven leader. But his views on cultural-social issues and messy marriage life cause serious problems with the conservative base of the Republican Party.
Same with Senator John McCain of Arizona, a proven hero in the July 1967 fire on the U.S.S. Forrestal who saved many lives, and his heroic service as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam for more than six years.
McCain ditched his wife who waited for him, married the daughter of a rich Budweiser distributor in Arizona-Nevada, and has a reputation as a mean-spirited man. He is. I know as a veteran news reporter and former staff member in the 1970s among the Arizona congressional delegation.
McCain has solved his antipathy with George W. Bush going back to the 2000 presidential campaign and has been a huge supporter of Bush’s Iraq war strategy, but therein lies the problem.
The American public is not going to elect a man as president who ditched his lovely waiting wife and is known as mean-spirited.
Also on the Republican side, there is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney who ideologically comes across as a Ronald Reagan-type but too soft as a leader. Maybe Romney is another JFK, but he has to prove it. The attacks against his Mormon religion are abominable, but another example of how low liberal-leftists will go to stop ideological opponents. Mormons are very good people. I know as many have been my friends and sources over a quarter century.
Then former Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, another actor who starred on “Law & Order,” and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich are sure to get into the race at some point on the Republican side. Thompson is certainly another Ronald Reagan, just listen to him. Gingrich is very smart and articulate on issues, and that may make up for his lack of character on the marital front.
Either Thompson or Gingrich would be great presidents, but they have to beat Giuliani who now has the momentum on the Republican side.
What a doozy of a presidential campaign it already is shaping up to be.
The cost for each of these campaigns is in the hundreds of millions. Watch who are the money-bags backing each of these candidates. That will tell us who might control our future.
A good place to go for this information is http://www.opensecrets.org/index.asp
But everything will turn of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration’s declared war against terror, and where we are going.
Historian Arnold Toynbee wrote about the irony that Britain and the United States defeated Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II and wound up in a stand-off in Korea.
“This anachronistic colonialism in an age of de-colonialism has involved the United States in a war in Korea that has ended in a stalemate, and another in Vietnam,” Toynbee wrote in 1971.
“The Soviet Union has managed, so far, to avoid involvement in such serious hostilities. Insurrections in East Germany and in Hungary, and her military occupation of Czechoslovakia met with no military resistance. Yet the Soviet Union’s East European empire is proving increasingly indigestible, and the belief – held by both Russians and Americans – that communism is ‘monolithic’ has been refuted by the successful succession of Yugoslavia and the breach between the Soviet Union and China.”
Well, we now know twenty-five years hence how wrong Toynbee was. Another left-liberal ideologue whose analysis of history was dead wrong.
It all comes down to leadership. And we surely need it.
Winston Churchill. Prime minister of Great Britain during most perilous times of World War II and the Korean War, was a marvelous leader but shoved out of office by an ungrateful electorate after carryjng Britain to victory against Hitler and Japan and in the Korean conflict.
Churchill was magnanimous. He wrote on July 26, 1945: “It only remains for me to express to the British people, for whom I have acted in these perilous years, my profound gratitude for the unflinching, unswerving support which they have given me during my task, and for the many expressions of kindness which they have shown towards their servant. FINIS.”
But it was not FINIS, and is not today. Leadership is what we need, and our people will mull through the crowd of contenders and choose a leader, hopefully someone like Churchill, who came back and led Britain again after winning the wars with ultimate help from Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, both Democrats.
The lone Democrat today carrying that standard is U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, kicked out of the Democratic Party and now officially an independent member of the U.S. Senate.
The 2008 presidential campaign as it unfolds is already a doozy. Let's fasten our seat belts.
