Flying Pink Unicorns

I just had a flash of inspriation. First the latest news. Obama SMOKED Hillary in South Carolina. He took her out behind the woodshed and administered a good old fashioned whooping. Hillary went back to Bill, crying.

The reasons are simple: Obama won African American voters. They constituted 53% of the vote, and 80% of them went for Obama.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2008/01/demography_and_the_democratic.html

Addtionally, Bill's work on the campaign trail was very poorly received, particularly among black voters and late deciders. In a very ominious sign of things to come, voting has become badly polarized by race. According to the Jay Cost piece linked to above, the entrance poll shows that white women broke decisively for Clinton (42% to her, 36% to Edwards, 22% to Obama). Edwards won the white male vote, and Clinton and Obama were in a statistical tie for second.

EDWARDS WON THE WHITE MALE VOTE. EDWARDS!!! You know, the guy in a DISTANT third, that no one pays any attention to anymore. White male voters, at least in South Carolina, were so turned off by the mudslinging (I am assuming) that they went for EDWARDS. ARE YOU LISTENING, CLINTON CAMPAIGN-- you are turning people off! KNOCK IT OFF.

Now to my flash of inspiration. When Clinton was leading in the national polls by wide margins, she was running a positive, rather bland campaign, highlighting her experience and Obama's inexperience, while occasionally floating the drug non-issue. Floating the drug stuff was of course dishonorable, but the campaign's heart wasn't in it, and the campaign was going well enough as far as anyone could tell. When Obama won Iowa, and began to close nationally, the Clinton campaign went into attack mode, with Bill as chief attacker. They successfully injected race into the campaign, in a variety of seriously distasteful ways. As Dick Morris has pointed out, Bill's a southern politician, and well understands how racial politics works. When he analogizes Obama's big victory to Jesse Jackson's in 1984, he is telling the world that Obama is a black candidate who did well with a highly black electorate, and never you mind any appeal to whites he may have.

As Dick Morris and others have agreed, this process is apparently working. Black voters have swung hugely to Obama, while Clinton has made gains among whites. All very sad in a democratic party primary.

My inspiration? Hillary intends to make Obama her vice. It all then makes senses. ASSUMING he'll take the job, and with Bill around Hillary's vice may be a very invisible figure! Still, if he would take it, and he well might, one would imagine that any racial and other wounds would be healed in a nanosecond. I know precious little about how the mass of black voters will react, but I am assuming that there would be just HUGE enthusaism among potentially alienated black voters about a Clinton/Obama ticket. The rest of the democratic base should be reasonably happy to very happy as well. There just isn't a downside.

Up until now I have been assuming that Hillary did not want Obama as her vice, because I assumed she wanted a yes man, and Obama is a LOUSY yes man from what I know of him. Perhaps I was right. But circumstances change, and I am really beginning to think that Bill has impressed upon her that winning at all costs comes first, and healing via Obama can come later.