Dirty Harry’s Place…

Harry here…

Let’s take a snapshot of the presidential race. Let’s do that because things look good for our side right now and we can all use a little boost to the morale heading into the weekend. Things won’t always look good. At times, things will look dire. So, this is me gathering rosebuds…

1. McCain. As of right now in head-to-head match-ups McCain is beating Hillary and only a few points behind Obama, 42-47%. This is better than any other Republican candidate would be doing at this point.

McCain’s a known factor. He can beat Hillary because she’s a known factor and nobody likes her. The Clinton machine lives in the nineties and has been nearly destroyed by the unshakable poise of one Barak Obama. In other words, the lauded Clinton Machine suddenly looks pretty vulnerable.

Obama will be tougher to beat but right now he’s at the height of his self-written mythology and can’t break 47%. That’s a stunning fact which makes you wonder how much further his rhetoric will take him, and what will happen when his promise to lose in Iraq and his record as the most liberal Senator in the United States starts hitting home. And don’t forget he’s cool with the whole giving drivers licenses to illegals thing.

To be clear, this is going to be a very, very tough race where we could lose. Obama has earned my respect and even a touch of awe for his coolness and tougness under fire. This is a formidable individual I sure wish was on our side. But he has a record way outside of the mainstream of America…

2. We have our nominee. They don’t. There are some vocal outliers refusing to come around but the conservative base will come home if only to defeat Obama or Hillary, and according to Rasmussen they already have. While we’re coalescing and celebrating our guy, while no one’s running against him and beating him up, it’s just the opposite for the Democrats –who have a long hard road ahead of them.

Once McCain gives major policy speeches on immigration, taxes, and some of the areas where conservatives are skittish, he’ll ease their minds and end the small rebellion still out there. McCain will also pick a great VP. Wait.

3. Hillary might win the nomination. The storyline in the liberal media is tinged just a bit by their infatuation with Obama. The remaining primaries actually favor Hillary slightly more than Obama. He does well organizing a caucus, she does well in actual voting primaries. The remaining states are voting-primaries for the most part. She also has the Super Delegates on her side and the fact that she won both the delegate-rich Michigan and Florida primaries. Because those states moved up their primaries, the DNC refuses to count their delegates, but Hillary’s fighting that and could win. The other option is to do a re-vote in those states, an idea Obama’s agreed to, and she’s still likely to win.

Karl Rove agrees with my assessment that the future looks slightly better for Hillary. You can’t discount Rove may be saying this to give Hillary a boost in fundraising because we’d prefer her to Obama, but his logic is sound.

It’s also time for the media to fisk Obama. They’re out of stories. They’ve fisked Hillary to death, told the story of Obama’s rise, and she’s remarkably survived. I now believe Obama’s about to be scrutinized, which can only hurt him. He’s all image and has no place to go but down.

4. The Democrats are likely not to have a nominee until their convention. With Hillary and Obama virtually tied for delegates and the upcoming primaries a series of potential squeakers, these two could be battling it out hammer and tong straight through to June when the final primaries take place in Montana,  South Dakota, and Puerto Rico.

As they’re firing their guns at each other, we’ll be firing at them. And bit by bit they will be trying to out-liberal each other for those all-important votes which come from their hard-left base, and this will haunt them in the general election.

There is no way a lingering primary helps the Democrats. The irony is that by punishing Florida and Michigan the DNC has made this nightmare scenario of a brokered convention a very real possibility, because it’s the lack of those delegates that makes both candidates coming up short with the winning number possible.

5. The long primary will cause resentment within the Democratic party. The other story not being told in the liberal media is how fractured the Democrats are right now, not along ideological lines, but race, gender, and economic lines. Ideological differences can be overcome, but other animosities are much more difficult to mend.

Obama would have a much easier time bringing his party together because he’s simply a better human being than Hillary. On the other hand, what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina to ghetto-ize Obama will not be long forgotten. Believe me, there are deep and dark resentments growing among Democrats unlike anything McCain’s dealing with in the conservative movement.

6. The long quiet period between the final Democratic primary and the convention. It’s very likely we won’t know the Democrat nomineee until the convention on August 25th. That’s more than two-months after the last primary, which means two-months of no campaign of any kind where the Obama and Hillary camps seeth over how one side’s going to cheat the other out of the nomination.

Remember those few seconds of radio blackout in Apollo 13 where time stopped? Now, imagine two-months of that with the Democrat base. Paranoia, resentment, anger, frustration… Will blossom.

7. A brokered convention means only 9 weeks to campaign for Democrats. With Democrats moving their convention up to August 25th, that means the nominee won’t be chosen until  there’s only 9 weeks before the November 4th election. That’s just not good. Certainly, both Obama and Hillary will prepare the best they can, but money will freeze and powders will have to be kept dry until a final choice is made.

8. The super-delegates are Clinton delegates. Super delegates are party faithfuls who can vote however they want for a nominee. Generally, this isn’t a problem because primary voters go overwhelmingly one way or the other and there’s no way a Super Delegate will make trouble, or at least, not enough of them.

This time just a few of these Super Delegates could make all the difference and with this being their last hurrah, the Clintons will pull every nasty trick in the book to win ugly if they must.

Again, this will cause resentment and fractioning in the party.

9. Things are going well in Iraq. The American people, at least most of them, do not want to lose in Iraq, and McCain is exactly right when he says Obama and Hillary are pledging defeat by promising a troop withdrawal within 60-days of taking office.

The American people turned against the war because we weren’t winning, not because we weren’t losing. They’re angry at Bush for perceived and real mistakes but McCain is seen as the guy who was calling for a winning strategy (more troops) long before it was implemented and turned things around. In other words, McCain is not tied to the war’s failures, he’s tied to what worked. This is going to be a huge advantage for him — a perfect one, in fact, for an American people who do want “change” but don’t want to lose in Iraq.

The “more of the same” label will not stick to McCain.

10. 2008 will be about the war. Because our nominee is in place and he’s a war hero to boot, we can set the agenda and make it about the war. McCain has already set the table with his CPAC speech yesterday and the war was number one. I say again, both Hillary and Obama have pledged to lose the war and unless things get ugly again in Iraq, it is here where they will lose the election.

McCain need only use the many quotes from his opponents to tie the “defeatist” can to their tails and should they try to hedge, suddenly they become flip-floppers — weak Commanders In Chiefs.

2008 will be about the war. About whether we want to win a war we’re presently winning, or lose a war we’re presently winning.

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So, this is the lay of the land as it stands today. Could change tomnorrow. Enjoy these days while we can, because there will be many bad ones coming.

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