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It has been an amazing primary season. The pundits, media and bloggers around the world have been breathless schoolchildren for the past 116 years as the contests pile up like weekly train wrecks and the Big MO’ (Baby!) swings back and forth like Boston Red Sox DH Big Papi Ortiz’s spring bat, erratically but when it connects, oooh… a thing of beauty.
My first primary was in 1976 as a Boston College sophomore. Jimmy Carter stood a mere 10-feet away on the running board of a state police car using a megaphone to talk to a crowd of about 400 students gathered outside of Roberts Center. We stood, watched and listened to this “everyman” from Plains, Georgia on a campaign swing through Massachusetts. That five minutes almost gave him the vote John Anderson got and he seemed sorry he could not spend more time with us outside and needed to go in to meet with the wealthy alumni inside who would fund his campaign.
90-seconds before his arrival the madness of the primary season became apparent as two busloads of the press pack disgorged, with reporters, cameras and microphones at a dead run to get inside and set-up before the Governor entered the hall. It was but a sliver of a microcosm of what these candidates have been through over the last 16-months as the video at bottom shows.
It’s long past time for the preliminary campaign to end and for us to now focus on real issues facing these candidates:
1. When will Hillary decide to go and how can Obama make her leave a winner after all of this time, according her and Bill the respect they deserve for their years of service?
2. When will John McCain see how much trouble he really is in? As the presumptive nominee winning two months ago, why did 25% of his Republican base vote for Ron Paul?
3. Why did so many Republicans switch to Democrat for the Indiana contest?
4. Can Barack Obama heal the party and bring disaffected Hillary supporters to heel in time?
5. When will the press focus on McCain’s temper and misstatements?
6. When will everyone let Reverend Wright go back to his cloud cuckoo-land?
7. How long will it be before the Republicans fail to learn how tired we are of Rev. Wright and focus on issues?
8. When will McCain realise he’s being boxed into a Bush 3rd term corner?
9. How long before he reverses himself and starts promising to end the war in Iraq?
10. Who will bring the US back into the community of nations, close Guantanamo, honour our treaties and heal this nation?
Those are just some of the questions we will see in the coming weeks.
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