Guest Blog Pundit Johanna Wald: Tell Hillary the Party is Over
The party’s over. Only, apparently, no one is brave enough to tell Hillary Clinton.
Granted, I pay more attention to “momentum” and to trends in public opinion polling than to the delegate math. But I learned something that startled me today. According to Josh Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo,
“ the press has been largely complicit in maintaining the fiction that the Democratic nomination race is not for all intents and purposes over. The obstacles in the way of Hillary Clinton are virtually insurmountable. And her now-sizable deficit among pledged voters is only one of them.’
Who would have known?
I am a political junkie, I read articles and blogs about the campaign constantly; I watch Hardball, the Daily Show, Colbert, and sometimes even Tucker Carlson before he was cancelled. I find watching a bunch of talking heads screaming at each other about the campaign oddly relaxing. And I honest to God didn’t know that her obstacles to the nomination are “virtually insurmountable.”
So…let me get this straight. Hillary Clinton is tearing the party apart. Her only remaining strategy is to destroy Barack Obama. She is creating sound bites for John McCain’s general election campaign about Obama's experience and his fitness to serve as commander in chief. She is feeding the Reverend Wright frenzy and shrugging non-committally when asked whether Obama may really be a Muslim. Her campaign is sending around photographs of him in Somali garb. She is trying to woo superdelegates to vote against the majority of Democratic voters. As McCain solidifies his base, replenishes his coffers, and goes on international junkets, looking Presidential, she is forcing Obama to spend money trying to keep, as one commentator noted “his limbs intact.” She is doing everything she can to alienate him from the working class voters he will desperately need in the fall.
All for an “insurmountable” quest?
Where are the grown-ups in the Democratic Party to step in? Where are Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, John and Elizabeth Edwards, Howard Dean and Harry Reid? Robert Kennedy used to say that the hottest place in hell is reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, remain neutral. I argue that this is a moral crisis for the Democratic Party, and, potentially, for the country, if we end up electing John McCain because of bitter rifts within the Democratic Party.
Seems to me an intervention of the Democratic grown-ups on the Clintons is in order.
