Obama bruises reputation of mock convention

BY REX BOWMAN
Media General News Service
Published: June 9, 2008

Students at Washington and Lee University proved in January that they still know how to throw a political convention — despite a shocking lack of bunting — but Sen. Barack Obama has bruised their reputation as accurate pickers of presidential nominees.

Continuing a tradition that began in 1908, when the private college’s first mock political convention descended into fisticuffs, students gathered this year and voted New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as the candidate they thought would win the Democratic nomination for president.

Oops. Obama is the presumptive nominee.

It’s the first time the students have botched a prediction since 1972, when they concluded Edward Kennedy had the chops to beat George McGovern. Before this year’s gaffe, they had rung up eight straight accurate predictions.

The students hold the convention every four years to predict the nominee for the party that currently does not hold the White House, and they’ve been mostly accurate over the past half century. After bungling the 1948 prediction (they snubbed Thomas Dewey to pick Arthur Vandenberg), they have since correctly picked 13 of the past 15 winning candidates.

Richard Friedman, the W&L student who was chairman of the convention, accepted defeat graciously. “We suspected that Obama would end up clinching the nomination about two weeks after making our prediction,“ the Fairhope, Ala., native said. “Once Super Tuesday rolled around, we had a general idea how it was going to play out.

“But, and I may be grasping, I honestly think this has added to the legitimacy of the mock convention. It’s been criticized for celebrating a foregone conclusion, and this proves it absolutely is not.“

Even before Obama emerged victorious over Clinton, signs abounded that this year’s pick was going to be a tough one for the W&L students. The mock convention’s organizers flubbed their guess at the Iowa caucuses, picking Clinton (Obama won). Then they compounded their error by picking Obama in the New Hampshire primary (Clinton won).

Rex Bowman reports from the Roanoke bureau of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.