All the talking heads on the cable news channels, newspapers and bloggers are caught up in the veepstakes.
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My view is that it doesn't matter much who McCain or Obama picks for the number 2 spot because people don't vote for Vice President. As long as they don't get burned by picking a Tom Eagleton or Admiral Stockdale it won't impact the campaign. Nixon won with Agnew on the ticket and President Bush got away with Dan Quayle.
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Trying to make the VP pick an issue didn't work for Hubert Humphrey but I love this old ad.
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LBJ most certainly helped JFK; Had Quayle (with the exception of Cheney, our most villified VEEP) not been on the ticket in '92, it may have helped Bush and finally had Ford not dumped Rocky in '76 for stuffshirt Bob Dole, he may have taken a few of the swing states in the northeast (particulary of course, New York and PA, winning him election). In certain elections the Veepstakes matter and since McCain is pushing 100, it certainly matters on the GOP side.
ReplyDeleteP>S. Barack better start getting in the mud because the ad with the Britney and Paris reminds me of the ads against Harold Ford. Two blonde white women and a black man. Totally racist. Barack, you better start talking about MAC and Ted Stevens, etc. etc. It looks like we are on the way to blowing another one and if we can't win this year we will never win.
Gort, you know more about politics and political history than I do, and all this is based on "I seem to remember that", but...
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember that in the leadup to the 1988 election Ted Kennedy was one of Bush the Elder's greatest and most vocal critics - until he picked Dan Quayle as his running mate. Seems that Kennedy had co-authored some key legislation with Dan Quayle, and basically could not attack Bush's choice of a Veep without calling his own judgement into question. So Kennedy fell silent for the rest of the race, and Dukakis just coasted to defeat.
Does any of that sound right?
By the way: SiteMeter is causing an error in all Blogspot blogs (and other sites) when you open them through Internet Explorer. Like, you can't open the sites. At all. I'm going in through Blogger to do a SiteMeterectomy. Hopefully they will get this issue resolved pronto.
ReplyDeleteThis must be some new feature - it was only a problem with some sites last night, and now it seems universal. So they must have been rolling it out on a few servers last night, and then got them all by today.
...and when I say "at all", you usually have a few seconds of grace before SiteMeter is activated. Which is how I was able to open this comment window and leave these comments!
ReplyDeleteI blame internet explorer. Why did it work in FF and on Macs and not in IE with Windows.
ReplyDeleteBecause. Internet Explorer and Windows = teh suck
IE didn't like however they (sitemeter) changed the code and crashed.
I'm a computer snob.