The Common Enemy

The Common Enemy

By Bill Boyarsky

A nightmarish vision of a McCain-Huckabee ticket haunted me as the votes came in on Super Tuesday night.

It was too much to contemplate, this Stone Age combination of Sen. John McCain, who envisions us staying in Iraq for 100 years, and former Gov. Mike Huckabee, a believer in creationism.

The next morning, a closer examination of the exit polls cheered me up. Improving on a trend that was evident in his South Carolina primary victory, Barack Obama increased his share of the white vote, confounding skeptics who have maintained whites won’t vote for an African-American. As Gary Langer of ABC News noted, “Obama won white men in five of the 16 states where exit polls were conducted.” In California, white men favored Obama over Sen. Hillary Clinton 52 percent to 34 percent.

This was the best news of a night when Clinton and Obama battled to a tie that will extend their struggle to future state contests, perhaps all the way to the Democratic National Convention. Is it possible the country is moving beyond the racial divide, with younger voters no longer trapped by the prejudices of the past?

After Super Tuesday, Democrats worried that a long Clinton-Obama contest might irreparably damage the party’s prospects in November. Actually, the bigger threat is McCain winning the GOP nomination—as appears almost certain now with the exit of Mitt Romney—especially if the Arizona senator decides to appease the Republican right by choosing Huckabee as his running mate.

The states Huckabee carried Tuesday—his own Arkansas plus Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia—encompass the heart of the South, pretty much Republican country since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts more than 40 years ago.


Full article: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080207_the_common_enemy/

That'll make him that much more formidable to beat because of the large size of the Christian Right voting bloc. They helped put GWB back in the White House in 2004 when he should've lost.

Here in Republican Northwest Arkansas, I've seen no Huckabee signs and one ANTI-Huckabee poster at the local laundromat. The conservatives here don't like Huckabee any more than they do McCain. There is a distinct possibility that they will either sit out the election or vote Libertarian.