Fallout
22 March 2008 7:00 am by Taylor Marsh
h/t to reader MT
“I am confident I will get her votes if I’m the nominee. It’s not clear she would get the votes I got if she were the nominee.” – Senator Barack Obama
Taking myself out of this equation entirely, except for the fact that the first person to warn people about the hardening on the Clinton side against Obama was me, because I had proof through emails. People are finally getting the message of what Obama’s campaigning has wrought, including when he flippantly said he could get Clinton’s voters, but she couldn’t get his. Then his wife weighed in and made matters worse by saying she’d have to think about it before she could say she’d vote for Clinton. Add the other events, including former chief of staff of the Air Force Tony McPeak, co-chair of Obama’s presidential campaign, going well off the reservation yet again. The first time is when McPeak said Obama “doesn’t go on television and have crying fits; he isn’t discovering his voice at the age of 60.”
“It sounds more like McCarthy,” McPeak said. “I grew up, I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I’ve had enough of it.”
This was inspired by a remark WJC made that has people unwinding on him again. I’ll leave you to judge it for yourself.
Combine all of these events and you’ve got a real problem already set in the Democratic party over the nomination, but now there’s more evidence, at least from one state.
Jake Tapper makes it “official” in “Keystone Democrats set to defect,” by having a traditional news organization weigh in, at least on Pennsylvania, though the message is nothing I haven’t written before:
In a sign of just how divisive and ugly the Democratic fight has gotten, only 53% of Clinton voters say they’ll vote for Obama should he become the nominee. Nineteen percent say they’ll go for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and 13% say they won’t vote.
Sixty percent of Obama voters say they’ll go for Clinton should she win the nomination, with 20% opting for McCain, and three percent saying they won’t vote.
Grim.
Grim? Yeah, no kidding.
But Obama got some good news from a CBS poll about his speech, which is good news for all Democrats. The one catch is that on uniting the country his numbers have dropped 15% since last month.
Given the mood some Democrats are in right now, uniting Democrats will be the nominee’s hardest job.
