Had it not taken more than two hours to get from downtown Los Angeles to Beverly Hills on the morning of the California presidential primary, I would have gotten to watch Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vote and then ask him the usual barrage of election day questions.
But there was traffic, and lots of it.
Amid my steaming frustration, staring down miles of seemingly endless freeway at a dead stop before the clock even struck 7:30 a.m., I realized something was missing. It didn’t feel like an election day.
In more than three hours in the car en route to Beverly Hills and back downtown, there were only four small signs promoting presidential candidates, and they were all above freeway overpasses, almost too tiny to read.
Every one belonged to the democrats, specifically Sen. Barack Obama. Not one for Sen. Hillary Clinton, not one for Sen. John McCain, not one for Mitt Romney, not one for Mike Huckabee or even Ron Paul. As if the lack of campaigning on the part of republicans was to be an indication of the turn out that day, less than one million republican voters opted for the inevitably victorious candidate, McCain.
There are more than 36.4 million in the entire state. And only about 986,000 came out to support the candidate who will probably take office if a Republican is given the nod next November.
Clinton, the leading democrat, garnered more than two million votes, personally.
So what happened? Why did McCain get the shaft, even considering the generous boost given by our state’s increasingly moderate governor?
Maybe it was because his wife, Maria Shriver endorsed Obama, for what that’s worth.
According to CNN exit polls, 70 percent of Californians who strongly support Gov. Schwarzenegger voted for McCain. Maybe his endorsement meant something after all.
“When it comes to choosing a presidential candidate, for decades California wasn't important. Now it is," said Schwarzenegger in the USA Today.
To get less than million votes as your party’s front runner in a state this size while supported by a governor as popular as Schwarzenegger should send a clear message to McCain about what he needs to do if he is going to emerge victoriously in November. He’s going to have to do more than get former candidate Rudy Giuliani to jump out from behind a curtain on Jay Leno’s tonight show and surprise the audience as McCain’s new best friend.
He’s going to have to connect with republicans in a way he has yet to find, because as we’ve seen in a number of elections, the momentum he carries with him now, which may well launch him into the GOP nomination, may not be an indication of how voters will act in the general election.
Simply put, McCain is going to have to do something.
Yes he found a friend in Schwarzenegger, yes he found friends at the Los Angeles Times, who declared that "he has waged a principled and persistent effort to end the Bush administration's embrace of torture as a weapon of war, a frightening concession to terrorism and an abdication of basic American values."
But his staunch criticism for supporting the series of immigration bills that would have increased the chances of citizenship for about 12 million illegal aliens in this country, and also his co-authorship of the McCain-Feingold campaign financing law has made him enemies in his own party. He also voted against President Bush's tax cuts and for banning same-sex marriage. The point to be made here is this: Primaries are sometimes and indication of how a candidate will fair in the general election. This one is not. McCain is a front-runner, but only because conservatives see no other viable candidate. There will be no Mike Huckabee to pull him up by his bootstraps when facing Clinton or Obama.
A Field Poll, however, found that McCain and Clinton would garner approximately the same amount of votes if this were the general election. But the poll has McCain losing to Obama by about seven points.
If McCain walks away from California with a smile on his face, it should be because he is still in the race, not because he has sealed a presidency. He should take the clear and deliberate message sent to him by California’s voters and change his tune, rapidly, if he wants to become the next president of the United States.
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