Be Careful What You Wish For

So, as everyone else is no doubt expecting, Barack Obama is sure to sweep to victory in New Hampshire leaving Hillary a broken candidate. She may still feasibly somehow roar back in the big state primaries on Feb 5th but it seems her flush is well and truly busted.

As a current Obama fan, I am of course perfectly content with this turn of events but look at what’s happening on the other side. John McCain has found a second wind. Does anyone else think there may be a link between the two? Are the Republicans shrewdly picking the best guy to beat Obama and hoping the Democrats fall for it hook, line and sinker?

To back my point, let me paint a picture of a cold and blustery October:

The joint Republican ticket of John McCain and Mike Huckabee is beginning to take hold amongst the American electorate. The public are slowly but surely pulling back from the longstanding support for the Democrats. Iraq is getting better, the dollar is recovering and mortgages, jobs and school funds are felt to be in a safer place with the grounded and experienced McCain in control of the reins rather than a self-confessed roll of the dice.

Obama meanwhile is trying to make lightning strike twice, he’s running all over the place, he’s banging on about change, he’s rolling his sleeves up, he’s trying to stir the imagination with his colourful tongue. But suddenly there is a real lightweight feel about the young kid on the block and his ever smiling sidekick John Edwards. It seems he can’t quite work the same magic that propelled him to be the Democratic nominee back in early 2008.

Obama begins to wonder if all that time when the Democratic nomination was decided but the Republican primaries were still closely fought could be his current undoing. All that air time the Republicans had, all that free air play of their policies, constant debates on how they’d beat Obama, filling the country with the fear that they were now using to reverse Obama’s high polling figures. Like a lamb to the slaughter, he never had a chance.

And the grassroots Democrats can’t believe it, how could they have been so naïve? It’s John Kerry mark 2 up there and the Republicans, somehow, are going to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat having trailed in the polls for so long. “Four more years. Four more years” they grudgingly mutter as they traipse home on election night, their giant foam fingers trailing along the ground parallel to the tail tucked between their legs.


And yet, if I were from New Hampshire, I’d still vote for Obama today without even thinking about it. A lack of thought. therein may well lie the Democrats ultimate problem.