Bret's Blog: Predictions
POSTED: 4:33 pm CST January 9,
2008
With the New Hampshire primaries a day away, my predictions for the presidential nominees are starting to look more accurate, at least on the Republican side. About a year ago, I started saying Rudolph Giuliani and Hilary Clinton were going to win their respective nominations. Don’t look now, but the Giuliani campaign must be smiling from here to Los Angeles. With Mike Huckabee winning the Iowa Causes, and John McCain looking stronger in New Hampshire every day, there is no clear cut winner to speak of. Instead, what we have is a jumbled mess with no one looking to be the front runner. Hence, the Giuliani campaign has to be thrilled. If one of the candidates had seized the momentum by winning the Iowa Caucasus and the New Hampshire primary, Giuliani would have had to fight from behind. Now, the nomination looks primed to be taken by an ex-mayor of New York City who, as Joe Biden once said, only knows how to construct a sentence by using a noun, verb and Sept. 11, 2001.On the Democratic side, things are even murkier. Before last Thursday, I would have sworn up and down the river that Hilary Clinton would win the Democratic presidential nomination. She had the money, the party mechanics backing her, and the name recognition of Clinton. Now, things are looking quite different. Barack Obama won Iowa decisively, Hilary Clinton cam in third behind John Edwards, and the momentum looks to be for Obama. I am still not willing to count Hilary Clinton out (they don't call Bill Clinton the comeback kid for nothing), but I have little faith. At some point she is going to have to win something, and since she is far behind in the polls for New Hampshire, I am not sure what state that win will come from.
Iowa may not mean anything. Ronald Regan and Bill Clinton lost Iowa and still won the presidency. Come July, we may be staring down a Romney-Clinton race for president, and we will all look back to this time period and smile. However, while my Giuliani pick looks safe, I am starting to think maybe Clinton is not as invincible as she once was.
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