So, it appears that 22% of Democrats want Hillary Clinton to end her presidential campaign. Rasmussen Reports says that an identical percentage also want Barack Obama to abandon his campaign. So I guess she should keep going?
This is lunacy, though, is it not? If Hillary Clinton had the delegate and popular vote lead that Barack Obama has, I would not say she should withdraw from the contest--indeed, there would be no moral justification for doing so. Obama is winning by every metric, aside from the arbitrary ones that Clinton surrogates come up with to try to cloud the issue. Evidently there are quite a few Democrats out there whose reaction to unjust attacks on Obama by Fox News, the Clintons, and all the rest is to blame the victim. This is not the liberalism that I have embraced. What happened to justice and fairness? The Clintons are more than happy to distort and lie to their own advantage, and this campaign has taught us that. I guess you can chalk it up to Clinton supporters who have believed for so long that the Clintons have been under siege by a right-wing conspiracy that they simply cannot believe they're doing anything wrong. Then again, the motivation for the continuance of the Clinton campaign is made up of about 90% denial, so it fits.
I find this antipathy toward Obama among certain quarters of the Democratic Party to be puzzling, and I think it really speaks to the Clinton campaign's bankruptcy on so many fronts that she's not being responsible in trying to maintain intramural unity in the party. Not only is she nonplussed by the increasing polarization in the party, she is wholly dependent on such polarization to get the superdelegates to overturn Obama's all-but-certain nomination. Obama has, from the beginning, refrained from making nasty attacks on Clinton to make it easy on her supporters to eventually find their way into the fold if/when he won. Little good it seems to have done him. I'm not sure this is going to be a huge problem--how many Deaniacs insisted they wouldn't vote for Kerry if he got the nomination?--but it underscores the danger that this extended primary season affords for us.
