Thread: A Presidential Wager

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Marc Sandalow: A Presidential Wager

I made the following bet with a friend on New Year's Eve.

It begins by identifying the six front runners for the 2008 presidential election: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards on the Democratic side; John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney on the Republican side.

If both nominees come from that list, my friend wins. If anyone not on that list captures either the Democratic or Republican nomination, I win.

Strong arguments can be made either side.

Go through the names of potential candidates not on that list (Biden, Dodd, Vilsak, Kucinich, Kerry, Clark, Gore, Hagel, Gingrich, Huckabee,Pataki, Brownback, Hunter, Tancredo, Paul)and it is difficult to concoct a scenario -- absurd in some cases -- in which one emerges as their party's nominee.

The new, even more frontloaded primary calendar has voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and Arizona casting ballots in the opening weeks, with California and perhaps a dozen more states not far behind. Strategists figure between now and the time the voting starts in January 2008, a candidate will need to have raised roughly $100 million (that's more than a quarter million dollars a day.) That's a lot easier for Hillary Clinton or John McCain than Tom Vilsak or Duncan Hunter.

On the other hand, it would be presumptuous to assume that in a country of 300 million people, with 24-hour-a-day media and a war on, that the field can be so sharply limited so far in advance.

2008 will be the first election in 56 years in which neither party has an incumbent president or vice president seeking the presidency.

Just four years ago, Howard Dean was hardly a blip in public opinion polls a year before the New Hampshire primary. Unfortunately for him, he was hardly a blip once the voting began a year later. But in between he went from obscurity to the Democratic Party's frontrunner.

Eight years ago, George W. Bush and Al Gore were already identified as their party's likely standard bearers. But Bill Clinton was such a long shot the year before the 1992 primaries, that when he offered Californian Dee Dee Myers a job as his press secretary, she told him ok, as long as he could wait for her to finish up her work for San Francisco mayoral candidate Frank Jordan.

My friend is betting that the field is not as wide open as it appears. I'm betting that there is a better than 50-50 chance that something unexpected happens.

Who made the better bet?

Jean wrote

I made the following bet with a friend on New Year's Eve.

What scares me is everyone is getting caught up in who's who and who's next..well if we don't face an even more important issue right now, none of that is going to make a difference. I'm talking about the red-hot issue just right before the election and now that the election is gone, it has seemed to be gone from everyone's mind--out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

Our electronic voting machines are still without a paper trail and are just as faulty as they were before and during the election. The federal standards, if any, are still vague or not enforced enough. If we don't make this an issue now, then by the time the election rolls around, it will be too late to do anything about it and another election will have gone by with us not really knowing who REALLY got elected.