John McCain est désormais factuellement le candidat Républicain

Première page du site internet de John McCain depuis ses victoire de l'Iowa, de Rhode Island, du Vermont et du Texas

Après sa quadruple victoire de la nuit dernière, John McCain, avec 1260 délégués (sur 1191 nécessaires pour l'emporter en Septembre), a remporté la primaire du Parti Républicain. Il ne sera cependant candidat officiel que le 1er Septembre prochain, au début de la convention Républicaine.

Au cours de la nuit, Mike Huckabee a annoncé qu'il se retirait de la course.

John McCain sera donc effectivement le candidat pour le GOP.

Côté Démocrate, les victoires d'Hillary Clinton (Ohio, Texas, Rhodes Island) relancent cette dernière dans la course à l'investiture. Mathématiquement, il devient impossible pour l'un des deux candidats de l'emporter par le nombre de délégués à la convention de Denver fin Août. la campagne durera donc jusqu'à ce moment fatidique, et le camp Démocrate continuera à se déchirer.

Pierre Toullec

Comments

[Pierre]

Une autre analyse, vu par un des plus grands Néo-Conservateurs Américains (Bill Kristol) sur l'importance de la tâche pour John McCain




McCain’s Daunting Task


By WILLIAM KRISTOL
Published: March 10, 2008
Buried inside Sunday’s papers was a noteworthy election result. In a special election to replace former Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, first-time Democratic candidate Bill Foster emerged victorious. George Bush easily carried the district in 2004, as has every recent G.O.P. presidential candidate.

This Democratic pickup suggests that, for now, we’re in an electoral environment more like 2006 than 2004. Foster’s eight-percentage-point improvement on John Kerry’s 2004 performance in the district mirrors the general shift in the electorate from 2004, when Bush won and the Republicans held Congress, to 2006, when the Democrats took over Congress and ran on average about eight points ahead of the G.O.P. Most surveys have shown the Democrats retaining that sizable advantage over the last 16 months. Saturday’s special election would appear to confirm these polls.

This isn’t encouraging for G.O.P. prospects in 2008. Nor is this: It’s rare for a party to win a third consecutive term in the White House. The only time it’s been done since World War II was in 1988. Then the incumbent, Ronald Reagan, had a job approval rating on Election Day in the high 50s. George Bush looks likely to remain stuck in the 30s. Factor in the prospect of a recession (the bad housing and job market reports at the end of last week were politically chilling) and the fact that a large majority already thinks the country’s going in the wrong direction. Add to the mix a huge turnout so far in the Democratic presidential primaries, far above that for the Republican contests, even when both parties still had competitive races.

As former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power would say: Ergh!

Nor should Republicans be too cheered by the prospect of a drawn-out and bitter Democratic nomination battle. That battle is personal, not ideological — and, Republican hopes to the contrary notwithstanding, Democrats will unite behind Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, or behind a ticket with the two of them.

Don’t Obama and Clinton have more vulnerabilities than a typical nominee? Perhaps. Obama is more liberal and inexperienced than any winning presidential candidate in modern times. Clinton is a problematic carrier of a message of change. And both have taken positions appropriate for the Democratic primaries — for a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, against making it easier for telecommunications companies to cooperate with the government in spying on terrorists, for tax hikes and against a ban on partial-birth abortion — that should cause difficulties in a general election.

A sustained assault highlighting these weaknesses of Obama or Clinton could be effective. In 1976, Gerald Ford was the Republican nominee in similarly inauspicious circumstances. He trailed by more than 20 percentage points, but hammered away all fall at Jimmy Carter’s inexperience and liberalism, and almost closed the gap.

But this time, too, such an attack probably wouldn’t be enough. Luckily, John McCain has more to offer as a nominee than Gerald Ford did. McCain can feature an amazing story of personal courage, a record of independence and accomplishment as a senator, and courage and foresight with respect to the most important foreign policy decision of the last couple of years — the surge in Iraq. If any Republican can defend conservative principles and policies, at once acknowledging Bush’s failures while pivoting to present his own biography and agenda to the voters, McCain can.

Still, he’ll have to take risks. He could embrace a “Sam’s Club” domestic-policy reform agenda, oriented toward the legitimate concerns of middle-class and working-class families, even if it gives country-club Republicans heartburn. (He could also criticize corporate boards that have rewarded C.E.O.’s lavishly as they’ve managed their companies into the ground.)

He could explain forthrightly that we’ll have to stay in Iraq for quite a while, even if this means challenging the American people to spurn the feel-good promises of irresponsible Democrats. And he could mock the narcissism of the Obama supporters, who think they’re the ones we’ve been waiting for — by pointing out that their contemporaries serving in the armed forces are the ones making real sacrifices on our behalf.

Perhaps the most obvious way McCain could upend the normal dynamics of this year’s election would be a bold vice presidential choice. He could pick a hawkish and principled Democrat like Joe Lieberman. He could reach beyond the usual bevy of elected officials by tapping either David Petraeus or Raymond Odierno — the two generals who together, in an amazing demonstration of leadership and competence, turned the war in Iraq around last year. He could persuade the most impressive conservative in American public life, Clarence Thomas, to join the ticket. There are other unorthodox possibilities.

But whomever he picks, and whatever issues he emphasizes, McCain should keep following Danton’s injunction: “Il faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/opinion/10kristol.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[Pierre]

Une très bonne analyse de la situation de Richard Cohen


How the Democrats Could Lose
By Richard Cohen

By official count, The Washington Post's 10th most e-mailed column of 2007 was published last June under the headline "How the GOP Could Win." It said that the Republican Party would promote national security as the salient issue of the campaign, making a silk purse (victory in November) out of a sow's ear (the quagmire in Iraq), and keep the White House for another four years. Increasingly, I think I might have been right.

It was Mitt Romney, the Harvard MBA, who left John McCain with what could be the winning business plan. In his campaign swan song, Romney used the two words you will repeatedly hear in the fall: retreat and defeat. Referring to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Romney said, "They would retreat, declare defeat, and the consequence of that would be devastating."

In my 2007 column, I compared this presidential campaign to that of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon. The parallels are in some ways obvious -- the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, above all. What I could not have foreseen a year ago was how much more obvious the parallels would become. Back in '72, the Democratic Party was split between doves and hawks, reformers and stogie smokers -- even men and women. The result was a national convention that was boisterous, unruly and ugly to look at. It might, however, look like a tea party compared to what could happen in Denver this August.

At the moment, no one can figure how the Democrats are going to get a nominee. What the party needs is someone like George Mitchell, a senior figure of trusted wisdom who might be able to do what Howard Dean, the party chairman, clearly cannot -- avoid the train wreck everyone can see coming. But barring either Mitchell or a miracle, neither Clinton nor Obama can garner sufficient delegates on their own. It might take a combination of superdelegates and a revote in Michigan and Florida -- punished for holding unauthorized primaries -- to come up with a nominee. By the time that happens, the Democratic Party will be one, huge, dysfunctional family.

In that 2007 column, I did not take the surge into account. Putting an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq has indeed made a difference. It has not won the war and it has not enabled American soldiers to come home, but it has dampened the violence there -- notwithstanding the carnage on Monday. Overall, civilian deaths are down. Overall, military deaths are down. To that (limited but important) extent, the surge has worked.

When I mentioned 1972 and Vietnam to an important Clinton adviser, he pointed out that Nixon initially won in 1968 by saying he had a secret plan to end the war. That nonexistent plan was still apparently unfolding four years later. In addition, Nixon made opposition to war seem unpatriotic and defeatist. He exploited the war, exacerbating cultural divisions.

John McCain lacks Nixon's raw talent for hypocrisy, so I don't think he'll go that far. But he will make his stand on the surge and it will be, for him, the functional equivalent of Nixon's secret plan. McCain's plan, he will say, is to win. The Democrats' is to surrender. The issue, if he frames it right, will not be the wisdom of the war, but how to get out with pride.

McCain, of course, owns the surge. He advocated putting additional troops in Iraq way back when President Bush, deep into denial, was proclaiming ultimate faith in Rummy and his merry band of incompetents. McCain, in fact, oozes national security. His weakness is that he has too often advocated using -- or bluffing -- force (North Korea, Iran, the former Yugoslavia). With the deft application of just a little demagoguery, he can be made to look like Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), the deranged Air Force commander in Stanley Kubrick's always instructional "Dr. Strangelove."

You can see it all happening again: a Republican charging that the Democrats are defeatist, soft on national security and not to be trusted with the White House. And you can see the Democratic Party heading toward Denver for yet another crackup. This time, instead of McGovern, a genuine war hero (the Distinguished Flying Cross) caricatured as a sissy, the party will put up either a candidate who has been inconsistent on the war or one with almost no foreign policy or military experience. A year ago, it looked like the party could not lose. This year, it seems determined to try.

[Pierre]

En fait, McCain a de bonnes chances de l'emporter, mais à peu prèt autant que les Démocrates. Pendant qu'il réalise sa campagne et qu'il rallie son camp, les Dems se divisent et se déchirent. Dans le même temps, McCain apparait moins dans les médias, alors que les Dems font tous les jours la première page, du à cette interminable primaire...

A ce propos, l'info de la nuit est que Obama a refusé une proposition de Clinton de faire un ticket commun !!! Après que Clinton avait dit dans un débat qu'elle refuserait de faire un ticket commun avec lui...

Un mot : pitoyable...

[Eric]

J'ai pas compris ce que tu veux dire pour les Démocrates.

[Landry]

Est-ce que McCain peut gagner ?
Vous rigolez !
McCain a de TRES grandes chances de gagner.

Les sondages d'aujourd'hui n'ont aucun sens pour des élections qui auront lieu dans 8 mois ! Une éternité ! Déjà qu'à 2 jours près ils ne sont pas fiables...

En 8 mois il peut s'en passer des choses. McCain lui, ne risque pas de changer de convictions (la constance c'est son point fort), tandis que les autres...

Les démocrates avaient une occasion pour réaliser l'alternance, en proposant un candidat présentable et sérieux. Or ils prennent bcp de risques avec les 2 qui restent.
Franchement, pour moi, aucun des 2 ne fait le poids contre McCain.