People who wonder why the Democratic primary contest has gotten so divisive need look no further than this sort of thing. Clinton wants to talk about flipping pledged delegates now? This is rather tone deaf, and I find it baffling that Clinton insists on dragging out this process endlessly on the principle of "everybody's voice needs to be heard" while effectively asking the representatives of the people to disregard the voices that don't happen to agree with her. Pretty obvious instance of hypocrisy to me (perhaps she misspoke again?), but I'm used to it by now, and I've come to expect the Clinton campaign to spontaneously discover powerful new principles as soon as said principles are in their favor.
I also think it's worth noting that this campaign season wasn't supposed to be divisive. Democrats largely agree on the issues, and we had a rather strong field this year. As the field got pared down to two, the contest has gotten more divisive, and I can't imagine how this can be blamed on Barack Obama (though plenty of Clinton supporters on the web will be more than happy to go to all manner of contortions to try to do so). Clinton has been a uniformly negative element in this campaign for quite some time: from injecting racial politics into the contest, to unashamedly playing the gender card and attacking Obama on all manner of issues (sometimes fairly but often not) to praising John McCain at Obama's expense. And then there have been the procedural tactics: Florida and Michigan, the stuff in Nevada, and now this. Now Clinton is angling to get onto the ticket to try to heal the damage that she herself caused. I sure hope Obama resists the temptation.
Update: I highly recommend David Brooks's column on this subject. And this is distressing as well: evidently Clinton now feels that going off about Jeremiah Wright is, like, a smart thing to do. It's beginning to seem that her campaign is self-destructing in a fiery fit of nihilistic fury, fed by equal parts denial and bitterness. So much the better.
