History Lesson
By Rodger at the Duck has some thoughts about the Pennsylvania primary:
Pennsylvania [in 1980] didn’t stop the inevitability of front-runner Reagan capturing the Republican nomination. Like Reagan, Obama has sometimes won the delegate count even when he lost the popular vote: Nevada and Texas may be joined by PA.
Pennsylvania was an unfortunate speedbump for the frontrunner, but it did not seriously slow the campaign. Will 2008 be like 1980?
I suspect so, but I also suspect the comparisons end there. We shouldn’t forget that Ted Kennedy wound up defeating Carter that same day, as well as in several subsequent primaries before trying to have Carter’s delegates released at the party’s convention in New York. Making matters worse, of course, was that in the general election Reagan had the luxury of facing a candidate who actually was (as Rodger puts it) an “unpopular president brought down by economic insecurity and foreign policy disaster” — instead of a candidate whom the corporate media are bound to portray fallaciously as an intra-party alternative to the least popular president in modern American history. It’s beside the point that McCain won’t actually be offering much of an alternative on significant issues like the Iraq war or the Bush economy; the dominant narrative in the general election will center on what kind of “fresh start” voters will be seeking.
Meantime, I’ve decided the campaign will be a rousing success so long as it doesn’t resemble my favorite campaign in North American political history, the 1838 run for the presidency of Texas. In late June of that year, James Collinsworth — one of the republic’s founders who had served (simultaneously) as Secretary of State, as Supreme Court Justice, as Attorney General and as Senator — ended a week-long bender by jumping into Galveston Bay. Two days earlier, his friend Peter William Grayson — also a candidate for the republic’s highest office — had killed himself in Tennessee after a woman humiliated him by deflecting his marriage proposal. Running a campaign that was suddenly unopposed, Mirabeau Lamar predictably coasted to victory. Though Lamar would go on to die of natural causes two decades later, his brother Lucius — a judge in Georgia’s superior court, had killed himself on Independence Day 1834 after realizing he’d condemned an innocent man to die.
Anything short of that, and I’ll be pleasantly surprised.