As a political junkie one of my favorite pastimes is counting delegates for candidates seeking their party's Presidential nomination.It doesn't happen very often anymore because most nominations are won or lost in the first month or so of the primary season. Not this year..... at least not yet so I have once again started to "count delegates" for the Republican Presidential nomination.
I first started this hobby in 1960 when I was convinced John Kennedy would not be able to win the Democrat Nomination on the first ballot because LBJ, Humphrey, Stew Symington and other "favorite son's" had divided the delegates to prevent any one candidate from winning the majority. I had a delegate list state by state from Look or Life and Time magazine that convinced me the convention in L.A. would go to a second ballot. Well, this was my first lesson to not believe the Main Stream Media because as we all know JFK won it on the first ballot and went on be beat my boy hood hero Richard Nixon.
Four years later in 1964 I did it again with Berry Goldwater and started my own delegate count much earlier, and knew long before the Main Stream Media did, that Goldwater had a "lock" on the Republican Convention in San Francisco. The MSM was still trying to "pump up" Nelson Rockefeller and the late entry of Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania when I knew it was all over.
In 1968 I again did it for the race between Nixon, Rockefeller, and my new hero, Ronald Reagan, at the convention in Miami Beach.
In 1976 I kept a file box for the delegate count in the race between President Ford and Ronald Reagan. Each state had it's own index card where I kept the number of delegates for each from that state and a sheet of paper with all of the states listed and a total for each candidate. During the convention I took two large blackboards and pasted puzzle pieces of each state from a puzzle of the United States and kept track of the delegate count during the convention in Kansas City.
Now I get to do it again in 2012. I printed off a chart from Real Clear Politics and have projected how many delegates each candidate will get in the primaries and caucuses to come and predict that Mitt Romney will win it on the first ballot and is close to having a lock on it. I learned in 1960 if you come to the convention leading and close to a majority you can always get the extra you need through a little old fashioned American political horse trading.Larry Sabato said essential the same thing this morning in a tweet.
