Wishful thinking?

The editiorial in today's Independent smacks to me a little bit of wishful thinking. The general tenor is that the 2008 Presidential Election is essentially sewn up for the Democrats, which is a point of view, and not one that is necessarily wrong, though it isn't the way I see it. But the problem is the reasons that are given for the Democrat's superiority.

As a matter of fact none of the Democrats are mentioned, so the leader really focuses on the trouble for the Republicans, and specifically John McCain. The fading of McCain's challenge, from front-runner to old-timer, has been mentioned a lot recently - though it's still way too early for anything to have been settled. But what the Independent seems to infer from this wilting is that the Republicans are finished. Finished because all the front-runners, McCain Romney and Giuliani, are unacceptable to the 'religious right' and therefore to the Republicans as a whole.

Only a moderate, centrist Republican can win in 2008, but that is not where the party's centre of gravity lies.

Well, the fact is that all three of the Republican front-runners, from whom the eventual candidate is overwhelmingly likely to be chosen, are basically drawn from the moderate centrist wing of the Republican Party. This would seem to negate the central point of the leader: that the Republicans are unelectable because they are too extreme.

A more interesting argument might, in fact, be that while the Republicans are basically drawn from the centrist wing of the party (at least on 'social' issues) the Democrats are definitely tilted towards the left wing. While Clinton is still a 'New Democrat' and has in fact tacked to the right on issues like gun control and abortion, both Obama and Edwards are from the populist left of the Democrats. As for Al Gore? Depends on what's been programmed into his circuits...