CQ Politics: Long Primary a Good Thing for Dems

This is closer to my own take on this primary. I find little problem with these two heavyweights battling it out on the national stage. Why not? This is a battle for the Presidency. McCain/Bush will not win the GE in the current political climate. But that's a theme for another OP. This is a fairly long essay and I'm posting a small but relevant snippet. More at the link:

"But, just for fun, let’s throw out a few reasons why the prolonged nominating fight might not turn out to be the end of the world for the Democrats.

• Obama and Clinton are dominating the news. Sure, not all of the news is good for either or both of them. But the two Democratic candidates have been able to maintain a much higher profile than McCain.

• They’re getting some of the bad stuff out of the way early. It is absolutely certain that Obama’s past close ties to Jeremiah Wright will dog him through to November if he survives it now and captures the Democratic nomination. But anyone who thinks Republican opposition researchers were not aware of the raging reverend and would not have done a well-timed publicity blitz about him aimed at undermining Obama this fall is nuts. At least the early hammering of this issue and the repeated airings of those fiery video clips may make the Rev. Wright a bit of old news by then.

• Polls still paint a Democratic landscape. Most national polls show McCain running neck-and-neck in hypothetical matchups with either Obama or Clinton. But if the controversies that have hit the Democratic candidates during their nominating campaign are inflicting the long-term damage predicted by many pundits, why isn’t McCain leading?

A big part of that answer is that the overall political atmosphere, which turned toxic for the Republican Party in 2006, is no better, and possibly worse, this year. President Bush’s job approval ratings remain as low as they were two years ago; the U.S. military intervention in Iraq remains no more popular, despite claims of progress by Bush and McCain; and the economy, still growing when voters turned out the Republican congressional majorities in 2006, has gone in the tank."

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docid=news-000002716119