'08 Election

Today is Iowa Caucus day. The results are coming in and it looks like Obama & Huckabee are the winners tonight. I am pretty conservative myself so mostly have been looking at the Republican contenders. About a month ago I would say Romney and Huckabee were the two candidates I was mostly considering. Today I am probably more for Romney--not sure how the Huckabee win in Iowa will affect his race though. I disliked Huckabee continually bringing up religion in this race. While I am not a believer of the Morman faith, I also don't think it really applies to how someone would perform as President or any other position in government for that matter. While this tactic certainly helped Huckabee in Iowa, I don't think it will help much in the other states coming up. New Hampshire it sounds like is going to be between Romney and McCain--another Romney loss and it might be too hard for his campaign to recover in time to win enough on Super Tuesday. It will be interesting to see if Huckabee is able to carry any momentum into the upcoming states--NH, S Carolina, Michigan, Florida and probably a couple others I am not thinking about right now.

It also looks like Thompson will come in 3rd just in front of McCain. I feel better about Thompson after talking to one of my brothers over Christmas. My brother Alan is a big supporter of Thompson at this point and helped convince me that Thompson might be another contender to look at. I saw the last Republican debate in Iowa just before Christmas and thought both McCain and Thompson really looked old, too old to be electable in my eyes. Part of that could be the long campaign and another could be that they realized almost no one would be watching this debate so they & their handlers might not have been as focused at getting them ready to look the part either.

As far as what I see/think about the Democratic side, I still think this is Hillary's race to lose. She has the money, recognition and on the ground workers that she should be able to win the nomination. Obama and Edwards are doing their best to make it a race though. Edwards with his populist format and Obama with his less on the issues and more on just a positive attitude/fresh look at politics, both could cause Hillary some problems in some states but I still think overall Hillary will win out.

It should be kind of a fun ride to see what happens in the next few months. I figure once the nominations get sorted out, we here in Missouri will be seeing or at least have the opportunity to see the candidates quite a bit. That is kind of fun being in a bellweather state.