Just to add my own perspective on the turn the democratic primary has lately taken.
I'm disturbed by it. I was never as engaged in a primary as I am in this one, so I don't have a sense of how it compares, but Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama, vis a vis Las Vegas, and Hillary Clinton's dissimulation about what Barack Obama said about Reagan, and, finally, this strange move over delegates in Michigan and Florida, I find deeply disturbing. Maybe it's normal, but I hate it. It seems almost as if the Clinton's being smart people have seen what Karl Rove/Swift Boat Veterans for truth did, what the republican party did in Florida in 2000 and said to themselves, we understand that . . . and we can do it too.
I maybe didn't even realize it until I started writing here, but, in truth, I find it deeply demoralizing. I'm in tune with Clinton's platform, and I will vote for her against which ever Republican wins their nomination, but one of the most important aspects of replacing George W. Bush with a democrat has to be that it would represent a collective refutation of his politics above all else approach to governance. If the democratic nominee wins the general election with the same tactics Hillary is using in the democratic primary, we will have a better president and generally more just policies, but we won't have extracted ourselves from this postmodern, cable-tv-addled mindset that the present administration has pressed onto the national consciousness.
I don't think Barack Obama is any kind of transcendent figure and I have serious doubts arising from his occasional incoherence, but to the extent that he seems to me now to be more reasonablethan the Clintons, I'm leaning more strongly toward him than I have toward any of the other candidates so far in this race.
I'm actually deeply curious about the degree to which the present direction of the Clinton campaign will penetrate the non-internet-grounded political junkie segment of voting democrats. I wonder how other people are feeling.
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