Obama vs Clinton vs DNC

There has been a hell of a lot of talk recently about how Clinton cannot possibly win against John McCain come November’s general election. However this evenings exit polls are posing some awkward questions for Barack Obama’s campaign. CNN is reporting that (yeah, I realise that this could be somewhat skewed);

According to early exit polls, half of Clinton’s supporters in Indiana would not vote for Obama in a general election match up with Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

A third of Clinton voters said they would pick McCain over Obama, while 17 percent said they would not vote at all. Forty-eight percent of Clinton supporters said they would back Obama in November.

Obama got even less support from Clinton backers in North Carolina where 45 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for him over McCain. Thirty-eight percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for McCain while 12 percent said they would not vote.

Obama voters appear to be more willing to support Clinton in November. In Indiana, 59 percent of Obama backers said they’d vote for Clinton, and 70 percent of Obama backers in North Carolina said vote for her against McCain.

What has caused this? Obama was meant to be the poster boy of the DNC, the best thing since JFK according to some. So what has happened? According to exit polls the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his connections to Obama seem to be a major factor, with the response of those who thought it is a major issue to those who didn’t splitting almost 50/50. Those who did think it is an issue seemed to vote for Clinton, those who didn’t went with Obama. The question here is, did the people voting for Clinton intend to vote for her before the whole issue blew up or is this a consequence of the Reverend comments? This is an important questions which, so far at least, seems to have been left out of the polling data.

The results so far suggest that Obama has easily taken North Carolina and Clinton has taken Indiana. It looks increasingly likely that neither candidate is going to get the required 2,025 delegates required to win the nomination, although Obama is closest, that this will therefore have to go all the way to convention. If it does then the DNC has a real headache on it’s hands; on one hand they have Barack Obama, a young charasmatic Junior Senator from Illinois who until recently could do no wrong. On the other hand they have the former First Lady and Senator from New York Hilary Clinton, she has had to claw back from the political abyss over the last few months of her campaign and supporters say this has proved her steel.

If the DNC, plumps for Clinton they will be branded racists and of ignoring “the will of the people” (or in this case the press), and if they plump for Clinton they could easily alienate a large portion of their voters who have not taken kindly to Sen. Obama’s comments about “small town America” and his former Reverend’s comments about and against the US itself.

The third option is to go for a compromise candidate, Al Gore’s name has been bandied about a lot recently but I’m not sure he’d take it as he seems to like the way the party view him - that he actually won in 2000 and of course he his Academy Award and Nobel Prize have done him no harm in the eyes of the Liberal elite. Who else then could do it, well as memory serves Howard Dean made an impression in 2004, albeit briefly, and he (if I remember correctly) is the Chairman of the Party now… Could he be the hero of the DNC waiting in the wings?

No. Whoever it is the Democrats are not going to unite around and they will therefore succumb to the fate of 1968 and 1980. That is to say, John McCain will win and unless the DNC get it together soon, he will likely win re-election in 2012 and could retake the hill from a DNC in a state of anarchy.

What other possible option could there be? Well, there is one, a friend of mine, Ross, suggested it to me a week or two back, but it won’t happen, it can’t happen, there would be riots… actual riots, which would make 1968’s violence look like Sesame Street.

In short, the DNC hold up their hands and say, “we’re not going to contest the 2008 General Election”. That is what they should do and what they would do if they had an ounce of decency.

The reason? Can you honestly think of any other time when a party has been in such a prime position to take the biggest prize of all and then screw it up, right in front of the worlds media, in the most spectacular way possible? Because neither Ross or I can.