Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2008 | 2:01 a.m.
The term “Super Tuesday” probably doesn’t do it justice, but Americans in two dozen states voted yesterday in presidential nominating contests, making it the closest thing to a national primary election this country has ever experienced.
On the Republican side, Arizona Sen. John McCain was expected to move closer to securing his party’s presidential nomination, but McCain wasn’t able to pull away from his two main rivals. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee did well in the South and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won the state he presided over for one term and also won states in the West.
While McCain probably is the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination, he still is facing vitriolic criticism from the right, and Romney and Huckabee are more conservative than McCain on issues that the right is passionate about.
Deep ideological differences divide the three top Republican candidates. Add in the disastrous Bush presidency that has sapped Americans’ confidence in the GOP to handle the top issues facing the country, whether it’s the economy or the war in Iraq, and whoever the Republican nominee is will enter the general election in a weakened position.
On the Democratic side, while Democrats are enthusiastic about their chances of recapturing the White House in November, neither Sens. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama were able to win enough states and delegates to effectively put an end to the race. One of the more interesting twists of Tuesday night was that Clinton won the Massachusetts primary. So much for the endorsement clout of Massachusetts Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee, who backed Obama.
It might take a day or two, maybe longer, to sort out the precise delegate count from the vote in Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses — the parties and the states don’t have a uniform way of allocating delegates from the actual votes cast, adding to the difficulty of getting an accurate count immediately.
The conventional wisdom among pundits entering 2008 was that Super Tuesday would be decisive, and that both parties would have presumptive nominees by then. But, as has happened all during this campaign, conventional wisdom has been turned on its head, making for an exciting contest for the presidency this year.
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