Mullings An American Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Conventional Wisdom

Wednesday February 6, 2008

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From the Associated Press Bureau
Washington, DC

The conventional wisdom in Washington is almost always wrong. If the pundits (including me) on CNN or Fox are saying it is daytime; you can be fairly certain that if you look outside the stars will be shining bright in the sky.

The conventional wisdom coming into Super Tuesday was that this would be a close-out night for John McCain on the Republican side but that for the Dems Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would come out more-or-less tied for the Democratic nomination.

However, as I am writing this early Wednesday morning, it appears that is approximately what will have happened.

Mike Huckabee ran more strongly in the South than many had predicted, but even that played into McCain's hands.

McCain won nine states - including New York and California. Leaving out Alaska (which is not yet decided) the other eleven states were split between Huckabee and Romney six and five.

To prove the point, on the Democratic side, Hillary (as McCain has done) also won California and New York as well as six other states. However Obama won 12 states as of this writing.

Missouri, which had been called earlier in the evening for Clinton, was pulled back by the AP and is still too close to call.

Of course these nominations are not decided by state-by-state wins, but by delegates won in all the states. Some of the state rules are so complex we will not know the answer to that for a day or so.

Nevertheless, as you awake on Wednesday morning, most of the nation's newspapers will have as the lead paragraph in the story about Super Tuesday this as written by the AP's Special Correspondent David Espo:

Sen. John McCain swept a string of delegate-rich, East Coast primaries Tuesday night, reaching for command of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Democratic rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama traded victories in an epic struggle from Connecticut to California.

I did analysis for Associated Press television with my Democratic counterpart Jenny Backus. Jenny - who is a well-respected operative - admits that the process on her side could easily go through April into May or June.

As I have written before, this is the nightmare scenario for the Democrats: The GOP has a candidate in place early who can spend the next six months uniting the party. The Dems have two candidates who will be spending the next few months tearing their party in half.

It is not likely, but it is certainly possible that the Democrats go to their convention in Colorado in August with neither Clinton nor Obama having a majority of delegates elected during the primary/caucus process.

In that case the "Super Delegates" - largely elected state and federal officials - will weigh in and, in all likelihood, throw their support to Senator Clinton. That would only serve to further alienate the Obama supporters as their work in the primaries and caucuses will have been negated by delegates who were never elected at all.

One can only hope.

The last big prize of the night, California, offered two important insights: As Jenny Baucus said in our final TV analysis, "I is interesting that voters in California - the State of change and all things new - picked Hillary Clinton and John McCain; the two most inside-the-beltway candidates in the race."

I said it was remarkable that Hillary Clinton needed a strong win in California just to stay in the race.

So, on that Conventional Wisdom thing? It is true that the chatter which began late last week and continued through the weekend was correct.

But if you look back exactly one year - to February of 2007 - the Conventional Wisdom was that Super Tuesday 2008 would mark the end of the Democratic campaign and the coronation of Hillary Clinton, while the Republican race would continue on for weeks, if not months as the GOP struggled to decide on a candidate.

Conventional wisdom was, as usual, wrong.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: A link to the AP reporting from last night, a Mullfoto of what we looked like in the AP newsroom; and a Catchy Caption of the day.

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