Presidential Candidates for 2008

Campaign 2008 is already in full swing. Who are the players? Below we look at the candidates. Several candidates have come and gone (like Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) and some didn't come at all (like Al Gore). The field has narrowed considerably since the race started. Here is what is left.

Click on a picture for the candidate's home page.
Click on a name for the candidate's entry in the Wikipedia.
Click on a party (D) or (R) for the national party

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Candidate

Notes

Barack
Obama
(D)

Barack Obama is no longer the "skinny black kid with the funny name" as he used to put it. He has about a 80% chance of being the Democratic nominee. Superduper Tuesday was a draw, with he and Clinton splitting the delegates about evenly. It will now be battle for every single delegate, possibly decided on March 4 when Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island vote. If he can win these, he will be unstoppable. Obama has matched Clinton dollar for dollar in the money race and even beaten her in recent weeks. Polls show him beating John McCain in November, too.

Candidate

Notes

Hillary
Clinton
(D)

Hillary Clinton is for change, but the changes in the first months of voting have not been kind to her. She was expecting a coronation, and now she is in a real dogfight with Barack Obama. They have about the same number of delegates and we might well see a brokered convention, the first since the Republicans' in 1976. Her backers include working class voters, women, and the elderly. March 4 will be do or die for her. If she loses Texas and Ohio, she's finished.

Candidate	Notes
Mike Gravel (D)	Mike Gravel, the former senator from Alaska, is running for President to the left of Dennis Kucinich. Gravel supports gay marriage, decriminalization of marijuana, federal financing of stem cell research, and similar positions that most candidates won't touch. However, unlike Kucinich, who has a small but loyal core of followers, Gravel is almost totally unknown outside Alaska.

Republicans

Candidate

Notes

John
McCain
(R)

John McCain came into this race as the clear front runner, but in a few short months all that changed. All his strengths (decorated Vietnam war hero, long record of achievement in Congress, maverick streak) and all his weaknesses (his age, divorce, three bouts of malignant melanoma, refusal to kowtow to Jerry Falwell then suddenly kowtowing to Jerry Falwell) hardly mattered any more. Like no other candidate, he is Mr. Iraq. He has firmly attached himself to the war and the "surge." When Iraq was in the news every day, his candidate kept sinking. But now that it has become a bit quieter, he has been miraculously resuscitated. He was also helped by the collapse of all his opponents except Mike Huckabee, who never broke out beyond his evangelical base. Barring a miracle for Huckabee, McCain will be the Republican nominee.

Candidate

Notes

Mike
Huckabee
(R)

Mike Huckabee, born in Hope, Arkansas, just finished his second elected term as governor of his native state. He is keenly aware that another Hope native who governed Arkansas went on to bigger and better things. Huckabee used to be so fat that he could barely walk up the steps to his office. His subsequent diagnosis of diabetes scared the daylights out of him and he lost over 100 pounds and wrote a book entitled "Quit Digging Your Grave with a Knife and Fork. As governor he has focused on health issues. As an ordained Baptist minister from the South, he has a leg up on the competition, but as governor, he had to be pragmatic and is not the kind of firebrand many Republicans want. He won the Iowa caucuses and came in third in evangelical-free New Hampshire. He won a number of primaries in the South and is the darling of the evangelicals, but he wasn't able to expand his base beyond them. If the Democrats win the White House this year, Huckabee will be the front runner in 2012.

Candidate

Notes

Ron
Paul
(R)

Ron Paul is a Texas congressman who is running for President as a Republican although he ran for President on the Libertarian ticket in 1988 and came in third with over 400,000 votes. He still has very libertarian views and routinely votes against almost all bills that raise taxes or increase government spending. His libertarian views often irk his Republican colleagues. For example, he is pro life, and is thus against capital punishment as well as abortion, the latter not entirely surprising since Paul is a gynecolegist who has delivered 4000 babies. He is also against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage saying it is none of the federal government's business who you marry. As a doctor, he supports the medical use of marijuana, again saying the federal government should not be telling doctors which drugs to prescribe. He has raised a huge amount of money from grass roots libertarian activists. He is a real phenomenon, but is the longest of longshots to win the nomination.

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