WI: Obama vs Rice '08

Let's *vigorously waves hand* that the Clinton vs Obama thing goes the same.

The Draft Condi rice gains more momentum and she eventually gets conviinced to enter and *vigorously waves hand* ends up winning the Republican Party nomination and picks *vigorously waves hand* John McCain as her running mate.

How would a Rice vs Obama contest pan out?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Rice is effectively an appendage of George W. Bush. Being so closely tied to Mr. Twenty Five Percent and being unable to rally the social conservative base results in Rice losing by a greater margin than McCain did IOTL.
 
Rice specifically said she did not want the job.
Thus, the vigorous application of handwavium.

Personally, I think Rice would pick someone other than McCain as her running mate; Romney or Huckabee have the advantage of being less tied to Bush but still popular with the base, which she'll definately need.
 
Thus, the vigorous application of handwavium.

Personally, I think Rice would pick someone other than McCain as her running mate; Romney or Huckabee have the advantage of being less tied to Bush but still popular with the base, which she'll definately need.

True, but she would then assumedly be going in with the Bush machine at her back and anyone they picked as a VP would be nothing more than a hood ornament on the "grand narrative." Without the sideshow atmosphere of OTL's VP contest, the thing just fades into the background as per usual. This is hardly going to energize the base.

But that's not to say you're not on to something. They'd have to make the case for (let's say) Huckabee as an uber-Cheney; give him a massive domestic issues slate and run Rice as a "big picture" foreign policy and taxes kind of president. With the Bush machine in place and motivated, we could see a very effective double-talk campaign where they run to moderates and the base at the same time. Obama's still got an amazing ground game so it might not work, but it would make things much more interesting in places like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.

Another thing that isn't talked about much is that failed narrative the Jesse Jackson and others tried on for size in the primaries where they tried to claim Obama's story was not the story of the descendents of slavery. Rice grew up smack dab in the middle of Alabama during the civil rights struggle. She had friends and relatives jailed and assaulted and killed during the struggle. She would pull a fair number of religious African Americans away from Obama (but I wouldn't go higher than 25%, even that being admittedly optimistic for her.)

If she can out-debate him, it might work, but again, they'd have to pull off some rather spectacular double-talk to give a little juice to the base and sap a little energy from the Democrats.

And in concluding the analysis, she can probably still get the religious vote out to the polls, but I see significantly higher numbers for Bob Barr from the no-tax Republicans who can't stomach her welfare moderation. So Rice picks up North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana and with a real home run Florida and Ohio. Obama (with the help of a Barr split) picks up Montana, Alaska, Arizona and maybe North Dakota. But even if Obama picks up nothing it's still 278 to 260 in his favor.
 
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