Why McCain Will Win

By Alan Caruba

The nice thing about politics in America is that everyone can have an opinion and even the experts are often as wrong as the rest of us.

Take, for example, the way the Democrat Party has selected an astonishing bunch of losers to run for President since the days Harry Truman exited the White House. Republican Dwight Eisenhower took over.

Here are the Democrats who won: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton.

JFK was canonized by assassination, but did well handling the Cuban Missile Crisis and he launched the space program. It was, however, JFK that took over the Vietnam conflict from the French. It was Lyndon Johnson who compounded that mistake to the tune of some 55,000 dead American soldiers. Despite civil rights legislation, LBJ is mostly recalled for making such a hash of things he declined to run for a second term on his own merits.

If Richard Nixon, a Republican, had not been totally paranoid, he might have left office a hero for ending the Vietnam War and opening up China, but instead he gave us Watergate and set us up for Jimmy Carter. People tend to forget how utterly incompetent Carter was, but the Iranians made the point by holding U.S. diplomats hostage for 444 days until Ronald Reagan ushered in two of the best terms of the Presidency America has known.

Bill Clinton much-touted charisma did nothing for his wife’s run for the office. He can count himself fortunate that his first term cost the Democrats the loss of Congress. The legislation the Republicans passed was some of the best in years for which he, of course, took credit. When you say Clinton these days, the only thing that comes to mind are endless scandals.

Let’s look at the Democrat nominees for President since 1972 starting with George McGovern, 1984's Walter Mondale, 1988’s Michael Dukakis, 2000’s Al Gore, and 2004’s John Kerry. It is hard to imagine are lamer bunch of candidates. Voters looked at them and went “ugh!”

This brings us to Barack Obama. Thus far he has been unable to convince at least half the registered voters to give him the nod. The bounce in the polls that followed his triumphal tour of the Middle East and Europe disappeared within a day or two after he got back to the U.S.

Who will not vote for Barack Obama? The first and most obvious answer is, of course, Republicans. Lots of Republicans.

When you begin to look at various demographic groups, Obama will not do well among senior citizens. He has already touched the third rail of politics by suggesting he wants to mess around with Social Security. Bad move. Moreover, he wants to tax all those forms of income that old people depend upon to pay the mortgage, rent or groceries. Most importantly, old people come out and vote, and they are a large portion of the population these days.

Veterans vote too. Veterans don’t like what they hear and see in Barack Obama. They don’t like the people who he hangs out with like former Weatherman terrorists, convicted real estate developers, and ministers who say bad things about the U.S.A.

Evangelicals, still a potent voting block, are aghast at the brand of Black Liberation theology Obama listened to for twenty years. The anti-American views of Rev. Jeremiah Wright are a drag on his candidacy.

The days when the unions wielded any clout are over, but the Democrat Party which depends heavily on their money and manpower may discover on Election Day that a lot of union members will have voted for McCain. Obama simply does not resonate among working people. He lacks the common touch, if, indeed, he ever had one.

Let’s also throw in the gun-owners too, 80 million of them, who did not take kindly to his “clinging to guns” remarks.

There are also all those people in “fly over” America who don’t much care what those on the East and West Coast think.

There’s not much point getting into the various religious groups, but it is safe to say that Jews, traditionally Democrat, may find it difficult to vote for anyone named Barack Hussein Obama. That could cost him Florida.

Too much parsing of various ethnic, religious, and racial groups is essentially useless with the exception of Afro-Americans. They will surely vote for Obama. Not generally known, however, is that Hispanic-Americans outnumber blacks in America these days and how they will vote remains to be seen.

Obama’s biggest problem is that the majority of Americans racially are white. Even Hispanics, racially, are white. Once you get by all the usual politically correct blather about race, the likelihood that whites will vote for Obama is slim to none when they get in the privacy of the voting booth.

That is why John McCain, unless he selects a serial killer as his vice president running mate, is likely to be the next President of the United States of America.