I’m in hell…we’re all in hell tonight with the Hildebeast having won Pennsylvania by a solid 10%. I know Obama’s seeming flirtation with Adlai Stevenson-ism is frightening to many of us (it certainly has been to me), but the two bedrock reasons for the persistence of the Clinton campaign are, face it or not, (a) gender loyalty among the less-well-off, somewhat less-educated women who can’t let go of the momentousness of a woman making a super-serious run for the presidency, and (b) primal tribal resistance among the working grunts — under the skin, only slightly acknowledged ** — to the idea of an African-American president. Very few will cop to it, but it’s been there all along. Don’t lie. Don’t deny.
“Why can’t Obama put Clinton away?,” MSNBC’s First Read asked this morning “The AP’s Ron Fournier takes a stab at answering this, and he points to five reasons (race, working-class voters, friends in trouble, inexperience, and mettle). But to us, women seem to be the bigger reason. They continue to rally to her side; nothing has shaken their confidence in her. If Clinton continues to beat Obama by 30-plus points among white women, how can he knock her out?”
On top of which that Clinton won’t stop with the viciousness, and the bubbas seem to keep going for it.
“The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it,” says a N.Y. Times editorial called “The Low Road to Victory.”
“Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.”
** Fournier’s piece noted that “an AP-Yahoo News poll found that about 8 percent of whites would be uncomfortable voting for a black president. The actual percentage is probably higher because voters are shy about admitting a racial prejudice to pollsters.”