Straight talk
Sen. John McCain of Arizona won the hotly contested Florida primary, defeating Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee with 36 percent of the vote to 31 percent for Romney, 15 percent for Giuliani, who is finished, and 14.4 percent for Huckabee. On the Democratic side, voters flocked to the polls in greater numbers than Republicans, despite announced plans by the Democratic National Committee to strip Florida of all its delegates to the party convention this summer for moving up its primary. Hillary Clinton received 49.7 percent, Barack Obama 33 percent, and John Edwards 14.4 percent. Here's the always excellent New York Times interactive page on the results.
I found McCain's remarks about Romney during the heat of the run-up to the Florida vote to be both fascinating and disturbing for what they say about McCain and what you could expect of him as President. McCain basicly accused Romney of being a defeatist on Iraq because he once sort-of maybe advocated a "timetable" for U.S. withdrawal from this hopeless conflict. Muhammad Cohen (there's a multi-cultural name), writing in the Asia Times, links McCain's hard line stance on Iraq to his experiences as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. According to Cohen, McCain remains fixated on the idea that the U.S. could have won the Vietnam War if only it had tried harder.
Combined with McCain's comments prior to the New Hampshire primary that he wouldn't mind if the U.S. stayed in Iraq for a hundred years, we should take him at his word and assume that any withdrawal from Iraq short of "victory" (whatever that is) will be over his dead body. Is that the kind of President you want? George W. Bush on steroids? Maybe attack Iran while he's at it and oh, yes, reinstitute the military draft to get enough bodies to throw against the Iranian human wave attacks? If you think Congress will refuse to reinstitute the draft, you're a cockeyed optimist. All it would take is another big terrorist attack on U.S. soil "linked" to Iran.
On a final note, I would urge Democrats to look at the Florida vote totals as cautionary. Although Clinton received far more votes than McCain, 856,844 to 693,425, Republican candidates in total received more votes, 1,925,728, than did Democrats, 1,724,855. Yes, voting behavior in primaries isn't always a reliable predictor of how the general election will go, because voters in a primary are limited to candidates from their own party. But these overall totals in Florida show one thing: it isn't in the bag yet, folks, so don't get cocky.