"McCain couldn't have hoped for a better day."

[Voice for Peace]

http://counterpunch.org/

A Great Day for John McCain (and Maybe Nader)

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

The race for the Democratic nomination now lurches on to what is already being billed as the next major battleground in Pennsylvania on April 22, and any Democrat with any memory of kindred blood lettings in the past should shiver as history begins to repeat itself. After eight disastrous years of Bush, with a candidate like John McCain, who says he knows nothing about the economy and thinks the US will be in Iraq for the next 100 years, almost the only way any Democratic nominee can lose the presidential face off in the fall will be a protracted internecine battle, ultimately decided by the Democratic convention in the last week of August.

The press is blaring tidings of a great Clinton comeback in Ohio and Texas last night, both states in which she had twenty point leads in late February. But in terms of delegates Obama is ahead by what appears to be an insurmountable margin.

The only way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination is to savage Obama with calumnies, bloodying him to a point where the Clintons can turn make the case to the super delegates in the convention that in a race against McCain Obama has already been fatally wounded.

It's a course to which the Clinton campaign is now totally committed, exactly along the lines advocated by Mark Penn, Hillary's pollster and chief strategist. Penn's policy has been the antithesis of any grand coalition of the kind put together by Roosevelt in the 1930s. Already in south Carolina the Clinton campaign was willing to throw the black vote overboard. In Texas Clinton deliberately exploited Hispanic-black animosities.
-snip-
The Clintons have never been confused their own political fortunes with those of the Democratic Party. In 1996 and 1998 Bill Clinton refused to release campaign surpluses from his own war chest to help elect Democrats to the House and the Senate. Obama's campaign has most certainly rallied blacks and the young to the Democratic Party. These new recruits will surely melt away as they see the party machine grind the politics of hope in the dirt.

McCain couldn't have hoped for a better day.

[Radical Activist]

1. dupe

[Radical Activist]

2. Slash and burn is what they know best.

Very hypocritical after Bill's moaning about the politics of person destruction.

[Voice for Peace]

3. Yes. Hypocrisy is what they seem to be all about.

[Pyrzqxgl]

4. That's bull! If the Democratic nomination is contested into June,

that leaves McCain sitting with his nomination and his thumb up his ass
while Hilary and Obama get all the press. Let the battle continus & we'll
get together at the convention.