Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

WHO COULD BE THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SAVIOUR FOR 2008?
by Terry Heath, 2005

The time is January, 1999. If Vice-President Al Gore had been as political savvy as we assumed he was and realized what it could have done for his own political future, he would have insisted that President Bill Clinton resign the office of the presidency in wake of his ongoing impeachment trial taking place in the U.S. Senate at that time over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and would have taken over to serve the last two years of Clinton’s final term in office. He surely would have been elected in his own right in 2000 and probably won re-election in 2004, pending some type of disaster under his watch. Plus one could assume that the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001 could have been played out differently with an Al Gore as president.

But Gore didn’t and instead lost in November, 2000 to Texas Governor George W. Bush even though he got more popular votes than his Republican opponent but when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the vote counting in Florida that was still going on in mid-December of that year must end, it gave that state’s electoral votes to Bush, giving the Texan the election although it must be pointed out that if Gore had won either his home state of Tennessee or Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas he would have been elected despite the debacle that occurred in Florida.

But that’s in the past. Where do the Democrats go in 2008 in choosing their nominee for president after Massachusetts Senator John Kerry lost his chance in 2004? If they are smart and willing to learn from recent history then they should choose someone from the southern part of the United States as their candidate.

Senator John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, the last northern Democrat and ironically, the last sitting U. S. senator, to go directly to the White House with a plurality of just 49.7 percent of the popular vote to his opponent, Vice-President Richard Nixon, who tallied 49.6 percent over the vote. Following his assassination on November 22, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson from Texas was elected in 1964 in a landslide majority over Republican U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater with 61.1 percent of the popular vote, being the last Democrat to get at least fifty-one percent of the vote, but one could argue the point that his victory could probably be explained due to the nation’s reluctance to have three presidents within one year of time and Goldwater’s intransigence on the issues he believed in as the spectre of the Vietnam War loomed ahead in that decade.

Yet the Democratic Party have only elected two presidents since. Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Hey, weren’t they from the South? Could this be a trend that the Democrats could exploit if they want to return to the White House?

Jimmy Carter was an little known governor of Georgia who was considering a run for president as a Washington outsider when he met David Rockefeller in 1973 and began to be promoted as a national figure by the banker and his cronies at the Trilateral Commission so that by the summer of 1976 he was the Democratic Party’s nominee against Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, who was hoping to be elected to a full term after taking over the presidency in 1974 upon the resignation of Richard Nixon over the political scandal known as Watergate. Ford ran a close race despite being stuck with the baggage from the scandal and his subsequent pardoning of Nixon even though he was not involved with any crimes from it but Carter won with 50.0 percent of the vote.

But his one term was a disaster and the Republicans won handily in 1980 and 1984 with Ronald Reagan and 1988 with George Bush. It wasn’t until 1992 when an another obscure southern governor named Bill Clinton decided to challenge Bush’s re-election plans as most of the more popular Democratic Party figures decided to skip out that year since they assumed Bush was unbeatable since his poll ratings were still high following the conclusion of the Desert Storm liberation of Kuwait. But a souring economy, a poorly run re-election campaign by Bush’s political staff and the appearance of Ross Perot’s Reform Party made it a three-way race and Clinton won with just 43 percent of the popular vote. He was subsequently re-elected in 1996 over U.S. Senator Robert Dole and Perot again, this time with 49 percent of the vote.

So how has the south affected the Democratic Party nominee’s chances of winning the nationwide race? Let’s go back to 1964 when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and prophetically warned that his signing of that legislation ensured that the Democrats had lost the south forever. How right he was because he lost in five southern states that November with four of them going Republican for the first time since 1880! It seems the only way to get southern voters to support a national Democratic ticket over these last forty years is to have one of their own running.

Alabama Governor George Wallace took advantage of southern voter disillusionment with the Democrats in 1968 by running on the American Independent Party and won five southern states and got 45 electoral votes although Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey by just 500,000 votes in the national popular tally.

Nixon took advantage of the southern campaign strategy in the 1972 race against Democratic Senator George McGovern and won in a landslide. Then Ronald Reagan used same strategy to win big in 1980 and 1984. Do you notice that every northern Democratic nominee since 1972 has lost with McGovern in 1972, Walter Mondale in 1984, Michael Dukakis in 1988 and John Kerry in 2004?

So where does this leave the Democrats if they want to win in 2008? Their best bet is to pick someone from the south and try to split the Republicans into two warring factions and win in a three-way contest.

There is precedence for this success for the Democrats on three previous occasions. Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912 over Republican incumbent William Taft when former President Teddy Roosevelt became disillusioned with his fellow Republicans and ran as a third party candidate under his Progressive (Bull Moose) Party and despite being wounded in an assassination attempt in the final days of the campaign he actually got more votes than the incumbent Taft, although Wilson was elected and served two full terms. And Bill Clinton repeated the same trick over the Republicans in 1992 and 1996 with the unwitting help of Ross Perot.

Let’s look at possible Democratic candidates for 2008.

Joseph Biden - U.S. Senator from Delaware.

Wesley Clark - former U.S. Army general from Arkansas.

Hillary Clinton – U.S. Senator from New York.

Howard Dean – former Governor from Vermont.

Mike Easley – Governor of North Carolina.

John Edwards – former U.S. Senator from North Carolina.

Al Gore – former Vice President from Tennessee.

John Kerry –U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.

Nancy Pelosi – U.S. Representative from California.

Mark Warner – Governor of Virginia.

We can probably disqualify Biden, Dean and Kerry right away as they have all unsuccessfully run for president before and come from the northeast part of the country. And we can discard Pelosi even though she is the House Minority Leader because she is not a well-known name to the rest of the country and probably won’t run if Hillary Clinton runs.

Then what about Hillary Clinton? Her name and presence is a lightning rod and she probably has too much baggage from her days as First Lady to win the presidency although there would be an excellent chance that she could get the nomination in 2008 from the diehards in the party whom would be the actual delegates to the convention.

This leaves us with the five remaining candidates who are all from the south. Wesley Clark ran in 2004 and didn’t get very far as he only has a military background and will need to get some political experience first which could include running for the Arkansas governor’s post in 2006. Mike Easley was re-elected as North Carolina Governor in 2004 and could enter the race but he would have to go the Jimmy Carter route and get the support of the eastern establishment if he has any chance of becoming a national name.

The remaining candidates from the south are Al Gore, John Edwards and Mark Warner. Warner is an up and coming player and seems to be getting the attention of those at the top of the party and to the power movers in the world when you learn of his recent appearance in May of this year at the Bilderbergers gathering in Europe before the world’s rich and elite. John Edwards could also be formidable in 2008 since he was the vice-presidential nominee in 2004 and would still have name recognition when going into the early primaries. His only drawback now is that he is currently out of office and it will be hard to keep his name in the public’s eye when one does not have a bully pulpit.

Our final choice is former Vice-President Al Gore who, if you’ll remember, actually got more votes than George Bush in the 2000 contest. If he decides to run and can figure out a way to neutralize any third party candidacy on the left and divide the Republicans then he could be the best man possible to get the Democrats back into the White House.

So where does all of this lead for the party currently out of power and seeming to be out of step with the American public for the last decade? If the Democrats want to win in 2008 then they are going to have to forego selecting the traditional eastern liberal choice and use the Republican southern strategy against them and pick a candidate from the south. Someone such as Al Gore, Mark Warner or John Edwards; preferably in a three-person race. Their best strategy is to hope they can split the Republican Party into fragmented halves as they did in 1912, 1992 and 1996. And the only way they can do that at this moment of time is to hope the economy sours, or the Iraq war and occupation of that faraway country gets much worse and public opinion turns on the present Bush administration and the Republican nominee who will have to defend that position in three years. Or they could hope the conservative religious faction of the Republican Party gets disappointed at Bush or whomever gets the nomination in 2008 and goes their own way by either sitting the election out or putting up their own candidate on a third party ticket, guaranteeing a Republican defeat and a Democratic Party win.

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com