peterkim blog

My polling place is a Boys and Girls Club on 21st Street and 30th Road in Astoria. I last went there a few months ago on election day. Those elections weren’t that interesting—the only offices up for election were state judicial positions. Even though very few people were interested in voting for state judges, I went to vote anyways because I consider it a privilege to live in a country where I have a say in choosing my leaders.

This past Tuesday was obviously different. I gave the poll worker, an elderly woman, my name and address and when she noticed I was a Republican, she enthusiastically shouted “Yay!”. I responded, “There aren’t too many of us here, are there?”

I think a lot of people were surprised by how things turned out. All the pundits seemed to make this out to be a two man race for the Republican nomination between McCain and Romney, but as Huckabee proclaimed during his speech last night, the pundits were right about it being a two man race but got one of the two men wrong.

While I believe Huckabee will continue to do well, he obviously won’t win. I don’t know why so-called conservative talk show hosts are bashing McCain so much as not being a “true” conservative. The Republican Party should rally around the only candidate who can win a general election against Clinton and Obama—John McCain. If Huckabee wins the nomination, the Democrats will win. Why? While conservatives (even then, probably just evangelicals and Pat Buchanan-esque populists) might come out strong for Huckabee, moderate Republicans will simply stay home or maybe even vote for the Democratic candidate. The Republican Party cannot win a general election anymore with only the support of conservative Republicans. With the Huckabee nomination, there’s also the possibility that someone like Bloomberg or even Giuliani would run as a third party independent candidate, both of whom would be far more liberal than McCain.

With regards to who McCain would pick as his running mate… I think Huckabee would still be a very bad choice. When it comes down to it, I think conservatives will come out to vote for McCain, regardless of who the running mate is—he doesn’t need someone like Huckabee to “shore up” the conservative vote. I think he should just pick a man of strong conviction and character—someone like him. I don’t know who that man (or woman) is. What I think would be interesting is if he chose Joe Lieberman as his running mate. I’m not saying it’d be the best strategy for him, but it’d be very interesting.