Huckawhynot?
Sometimes I trip over something expressed in the Media, or Medium, where they display — unknowingly — a bias which tells us about what is off with Politics. As with this idea —
a clear winner in McCain, but he continues to be embarassed by his main remaining challenger, Mike Huckabee, whose strong showings underscore McCain’s weakness with the religious conservative base of his party that doesn’t seem willing to accept the new reality.
Electoral politics thus becomes a sick psychotic game, personalities and individuals stripped, herded into one mass, and then herded again into another mass. My question for this analysis: Would it have been better for the Republican Party and John McCain’s campaign had the Mike Huckabee voters not voted at all, which would have given McCain a higher percentage showing in those primaries? I for one suspect that the Mike Huckabee voters were more than willing to accept the reality of the moment they were voting: a ballot with the name of one candidate they preferred to vote for over another candidate.
The peril of democratic electoral politics is that voting in a primary for someone other than the designated and on-the-trajectory to nominee becomes a spoiler by mere inference — a sign that they are not behind that candidate one hundred percent. And, indeed, the trouble is, it is a spoiler, because these things are decided off of margins of margins.