Election Update

Lots of stories about the primary and Super Tuesday.

First, the Democrat side.  Things are tightening up as Super Tuesday approaches.  Totally losing the air of inevitability and suffering from from a vicious case of the Bills, Hillary Clinton has shown some major cracks in the facade.  Barack Obama has closed the gap in national polls over the past week or so by gaining a whopping 11 points.  It seems that lots of Democrats (even prominent ones) are uncomfortable with the low-blow attacks and slash-and-burn tactics the Clintons have turned on a fellow Democrat (it's apparently okay to do it to Republicans, though).  On the endorsement front, the notorious anti-American propaganda group MoveOn.org has officially endorsed Barack Obama.  The real irony here is that MoveOn.org was originally created to encourage people to 'move on' from Bill Clinton's scandals...and now they're opposing his wife!  Gratitude is apparently an elusive thing in today's Democrat party!

Now, the Republican side.  Michelle Malkin collects a number of stories about Huckabee's record on supporting open borders.  Also, Powerline suggests that one of the main differences between Romney and McCain is illustrated by the flap about who supported the surge and when.  McCain is accusing Romney of not supporting the surge despite not having any concrete information about it.  Instead, Romney waited to take a position until he had a chance to study it.  Kind of strange how that's a bad thing, isn't it?  Anyway, Powerline suggests that McCain tends to make snap judgments based on slim evidence, and doesn't appear willing to reverse course when proven wrong.  Not good.

When questioned about how conservative he is, McCain is on the record as saying that he should be judged by the company he keeps.  Michelle Malkin took him at his word and compiled this list of people hanging around with McCain:

Russ Feingold. [campaign finance - attack on 1st Amendment]
Teddy Kennedy. [amnesty for millions of illegal aliens]
Lindsay Grahamnesty. [amnesty for millions of illegal aliens]
Juan "Mexico First/Free Flow" Hernandez. [current campaign adviser]
Jerry "Spanish first" Perenchio. [current campaign adviser]
Geraldo Rivera. [future press secretary appointment...?]
La Raza. [a Hispanic supremacist group who honored McCain]
Charles Keating. [bought off McCain and other Senators]
John Kerry. [McCain approached Kerry about switching parties to run as Kerry's VP in 2004]
The New York Times. [anti-Rep, anti-conservative paper endorses McCain]

Contrast McCain's open-borders campaign staff with that of Romney's new appointment: Kris Kobach is to be Romney's new immigration enforcement adviser.  This is outstanding - Kobach is a Kansas City local who is an experienced Constitutional law professor, immigration expert, and head of the Kansas Republican party.  But that's not all...Romney has tapped the following excellent conservative talent, too:

Today, Governor Mitt Romney announced that Andrew C. McCarthy will be joining his Advisory Committee on the Constitution and the Courts, which is co-chaired by Professor Douglas W. Kmiec, former constitutional legal counsel to President Ronald Reagan, and former Congressman David McIntosh who co-founded the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies.

Who's the actual conservative again?  Duh.

NumbersUSA reports that McCain laid out his Immigration Plan in radio ads in South Carolina:

1. "Secure the borders."
2. Deport around 2 million illegal aliens who have committed felonies.
3. Treat the other 10-18 million illegal aliens with "compassion" by letting them keep their U.S. residency and their American jobs and eventually become citizens.

McCain never expresses compassion for the 23 million working-age Americans without any college who do not currently have a job -- or the millions more Americans whose real wages have stagnated or declined in recent years because their occupations were flooded by foreign labor.

Although the nation already has nearly 40 million foreign workers and dependents, McCain has repeatedly said that we need to import even more. During the last two years, he has pushed various bills that would double and triple immigration.

Of course, there's no proof to indicate that McCain would actually secure the borders first, and his history indicates exactly the opposite.  After that apparent lie, it just continues downhill from there.  Illegal immigration is a huge, HUGE problem, and McCain's solutions will only help illegals and terrorists.

Moving on, some have questioned Romney's viability for the long haul after not winning Florida.  The question was answered in spades by him sinking millions of dollars of his own money into TV ads in many of the Super Tuesday states.  It looks like it worked quickly, because over the weekend Romney won the Maine caucuses easily, with 52% of the vote to McCain's 21% (Paul had 19%, Huckabee 6%).  Several national polls show the race between McCain and Romney closing as we come to Super Tuesday.  As McCain's liberal stripes and low-blow attacks have come out over the past couple weeks, many prominent conservatives have openly come out in favor of Romney.  Mark Levin, one of the biggest (and a former Reagan aide), has a lengthy article explaining why Romney is 2008's only remaining choice for conservatives, calling for the base to rally to Romney before McCain gains too much momentum to be stopped.

On the lighter side of things, watch this fun little video of Romney's son pranking the old man on the campaign trail, posing as Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Of the states in play tomorrow, each of the candidates is leading in several (though Huckabee is less than McCain and Romney), so it's still anyone's ballgame.  For example, McCain is leading in more states overall, but Romney is leading in California, which has the most delegates to offer.  But, given how wrong some of the polling and predicting has been so far in some of the early primaries, polls are hardly an indicator you can hang your hat on at this point.  Plus, some states (like California) award delegates on a precinct-by-precinct basis, so even if someone 'won' the state, it's possible someone else could win more delegates there.  Regardless, it looks like it could be a showdown of sorts, with the MSM and 'conventional wisdom' lining up in favor of McCain, and conservative grass roots efforts supporting Romney.  Conventional wisdom is often wrong - just ask the Patriots.

It looks like we'll have to wait for the votes to be counted.

There's my two cents.