The only certainty - The Republican Vice Presidential nominee

The primary season for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election is almost here and this will be the year when both party’s nominees will be decided before the end of February. New York and New Jersey are among 20 states that have advanced their primary dates to February 5th. We are getting closer to having a national Primary Day and with that the increasing irrelevance of each party’s summer conventions, other then them being a week long tedious commercial for the already decided in winter presidential nominee. This frontloaded calendar scheduling of the primaries will also favor strategy over tactics (and the well funded leader over the cash strapped dark horse) as events are going to happen very quickly. It will be very difficult for candidates who stumble in the early rounds of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire’s January primary to recover in time for Super Tuesday on February 5. When Russell Baker used to have a regular column on the NY Times Op-Ed page he once wryly noted that a popular political sport in this country was seeing the front runner knocked off in the early primaries. That was usually a regular occurrence for the Democrats; witness the history from Muskie to Dean. Still it’s hard to see how Clinton, barring some unfortunate gaffe or the discovery of some previously undisclosed dirt from the always digging Republican attack machine, will lose to Obama or Edwards. The Republican contest will be the more interesting horse race as Rudy Giulani has a very tenuous lead over Romney, Thompson and Huckabee. As we get closer to the Iowa caucus the social conservative block will get more anxious over Giulani’s lead in the polls and will try to get behind one of the other three. At this point that increasingly looks like it will be Romney. Hopes are falling that Thompson would fill the shoes of that other actor Ronald Reagan and excite the faithful. They forgot that Reagan learned to speak off script in his waning days as an actor when he learned to do so successfully on the lecture tour circuit.
Regardless of who gets the Republican nomination it is almost certain that Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior U.S. Senator from Texas will surely get the spot for the Vice Presidency. Although slightly liberal on abortion Hutchison, unlike Romney, has solid conservative credentials since she was elected to the Senate in 1994 with an ACU life time rating of 90.4. And as a woman she will help blunt the almost certain criticism that would result from an all male, all white Republican ticket. Expect her to decline when first offered but will relent after accepting the pleadings that she will be critical in preventing a Clinton-Obama administration. You heard it here first.