The Beginning Of A Trend?

The day after her decisive win in Pennsylvania, Hillary! has picked up a previously uncommitted superdelegate.

We'll see if this is just a single event, or the start of a tipping point. As Victor Davis Hanson notes (and I've been pointing out for months), the Dems are in horrid position for November (one in which they put themselves, largely because of dumb primary rules, an idiotic decision by Howard Dean to not seat the Michigan and Florida delegates, and their decades-long indulgence and encouragement of identity politics).

The Democrats are tottering at the edge of the abyss. They are about to nominate someone who cannot win, despite vastly out-spending his opponent, any of the key large states -- CA, NJ, NY, OH, PENN, TX, etc. -- that will determine the fall election. And yet not to nominate him will cause the sort of implosion they saw in 1968 or the sort of mess we saw in November 2000.

Hillary won't quit, since she knows that Obama, when pressure mounts, is starting to show a weird sort of petulance, and drops the "new politics" for snideness. And at any given second, a Rev. Wright outburst, an Ayers reappearance, another Michelle 'never been proud' moment, or another condescending Obamism can cause him to nose dive and become even more snappy.

They won't be able to force Hillary out since she still has strong arguments -- the popular vote may end up dead even, or even in her favor; while he won caucuses and out-of-play states, she won the critical fall battlegrounds -- and by plebiscites; she is the more experienced and more likely to run a steady national campaign; she wins the Reagan Democrats that will determine the fall election; and by other, more logical nomination rules (like the Republicans' fewer caucuses, winner-take-all elections) she would have already wrapped it up. There seems something unfair, after all, for someone to win these mega-states and end up only with a few extra delegates for the effort. The more this drags out, the more Obama and Hillary get nastier and more estranged from each other -- at precisely the time one must take the VP nomination to unite the party.

If Obama is perceived to have been denied the nomination by the party elders because he is "unelectable" (which his followers will interpret to mean, too black, too "progressive," etc.) there will be days of rage in Denver, and lot of potential Democrat votes sitting at home in the fall. The best hope that they have at this point is for Obama to continue to lose the rest of the primaries, in which case Hillary can at least claim that he has "lost momentum" and that she has gained it, and will be the stronger candidate. If the perception is that Obama was thrown under the bus because of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, and the fact that not everyone agrees with the left about Obama's theories of false consciousness of the embittered, batten down the hatches. It will be an(other) ugly year for Democrats, and this time there will be no Nixon to save them.