Norris says McCain too old for president
APRIL CASTRO
AP News
Campaigning for Mike Huckabee, actor Chuck Norris said Sunday that Sen. John McCain is too old to handle the pressures of being president.
"I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency," said Norris
As the first Southern primary, South Carolina was supposed to be friendly territory for Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister.
"We obviously wanted to win and we really thought we would win," he said. "The fact of Fred Thompson's being in the race took some votes that we would have most likely had."
Huckabee also blamed late snowfall in parts of upstate South Carolina.
"The snow not only froze the streets of the Greenville-Spartanburg area, the votes kinda stopped once it started snowing," he said. "That was an area we were looking forward to having a significant vote margin."
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Further down in this article from Talking Points Memo, Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee lamented the affect of weather (and Grandpa Fred) on his vote totals in South Carolina.
Especially today, on the formal celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, it is worth noting the cavalier attitude we seem to have towards democracy and voting rights. I am not old enough to remember the bulk of the struggle for women and minorities to secure the right to vote. But in a country that considers itself the modern torch-bearer for democracy, in a country who nicknames its president the Leader of the Free World, in a country where thousands have died in the Middle East so we can ostensibly enjoy the freedom to shop here at home, it startles me to see the basic act of democracy so tattered.
Weather should not affect elections. If more South Carolinians really wanted Gov. Huckabee to win, it shouldn't be his bad luck - or a reflection on him - that they were too lazy or not intrepid enough to brave the weather in order to vote. It is troubling enough to deal with the variables of computerized voting versus hand counting, of polling places running out of ballots, of citizens actually turning away in Nevada because of half-mile lines to vote. It is likewise disturbing that dozens of votes were found to have been miscounted in New Hampshire, despite the fact that the recount did not change the outcome. Do you want your vote to be the one that is not counted?
So I guess my beef is not with Mother Nature. It is with our particular flavor of democracy. The tradition of Tuesday voting - harking back to the days of farmers' markets, and when most citizens would be "in town" to vote - needs to be retired. We need weekend voting, multiple day voting, voting by mail. Ask Oregon - mail voting has been tremendously efficient and effective, and very impervious to fraud. Austin always had multiple early voting sites throughout the city when I lived there. Unless you were away on business for three weeks solid, there was no excuse for failing to vote.
After all that has been given by so many for our right to vote, shouldn't it be more protected, more cherished? A vote should not be minimized because one could not get off work...because one could not get a ride to the polls...because one had a sick child on the one day of the vote...because weather depressed the turnout of an entire area of a city or state.
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