2008 Woodie Awards
The Republican party has its nomination for the 2008 presidential candidate pretty much shorn up.
Mike Huckabee, the evangelical populist, is still running, despite being asked to leave the race for the sake of party unity.
However, that John McCain will be the nominee is all but a foregone conclusion.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still in a dead heat. Every primary matters at this point.
Pundits are predicting the potential for a nasty showdown at the convention. The nomination may come down to superdelegates, those wily party elites who aren't committed to a candidate the way normal primary delegates are.
I vote Democratic, but I'm not really a Democrat.
There was a political scientist with the last name of Duverger who had a theory about voters, particularly those in two-party systems.
People may prefer a third-party candidate, but if they know that candidate has no chance of winning, they're going to pick the candidate from the major parties who's least objectionable.
In my case, I had a candidate in the Democratic pack for whom I could actually feel good casting my vote.
Then he dropped out.
He didn't relent in 2004, so I wasn't really expecting him to give up this time around, even though his chances were pretty much just as slim.
My absentee ballot arrived Saturday, and I was informed that since my candidate had dropped out, any votes cast for him simply would not be counted.
This development threw a wrench in my back-up plan, which was to vote for him anyway, even though it wouldn't really mean anything.
Bill Richardson picked up a couple thousand votes in New Mexico, for instance, long after he had exited the race.
I went to the effort of requesting the ballot over winter break, and I'm going to go to the trouble of paying the 97 cents for postage to send it back, so I'd like my vote to actually count.
I had no problem with it not being particularly substantively meaningful, but I don't want it not to count at all.
But between Clinton and Obama, I don't have a preference.
The primary was going to be my chance to vote my conscience.
I'm not sure if Duverger's law covers situations where there is no least objectionable candidate.
It's not that I have a problem with the thought of voting for either Clinton or Obama in the general election, but I wasn't expecting to be confronted with this dichotomy in the primary, because I genuinely have no preference between the two.
It's not that I'm a true independent - I wouldn't offend the center by describing myself as a moderate - I'm just unrepresented by a viable party.
I assume a similar process is happening on the Republican side. Giuliani voters (whatever their candidate says aside) may not feel great about voting for either McCain or Huckabee.
At least between those two, there are some major differences. McCain certainly couldn't be described as a populist, and Huckabee isn't trying to paint himself as a moderate.
It seems to me that Clinton and Obama are both painting themselves as experienced enough to provide change for the country.
Maybe I'm too jaded to notice a difference at this point.
But more people identify themselves as independents than members of either of the two major parties, and it seems like those people might have some unrepresented preferences.
Whatever the nomination results are, are they really meaningful?
Winning presidential candidates usually get 35-55 ish percent of the vote, but there's no guarantee that even among those relatively low percentages that people are really happy casting that particular vote.
Is the best this country has to look forward to in the future simply a candidate that's less objectionable than the other?
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