Cross-posting from the TownHall version
That’s pretty much what Shoebox is saying in stating we are going to see a Clinton/Obama ticket on the Dem end. I’m not yet quite sold on that inevitability, either as a ticket or as the next occupants of the Oval Office and the Naval Observatory. At this point, all that ticket is guaranteed to do is prevent the collapse of the Democratic Party that the various campaigns to keep Clinton alive, from MKH’s efforts to Rush Limbaugh’s quite-successful Operation Chaos to my own Spring Hill campaign, was designed to bring about.
It definitely is (I am not ready to say “was”) a high-risk/high-reward effort. I can’t speak for anybody else, but my hope is that things would get so caustic, the Nightmare Ticket would not happen and a major core constituency would take November off. Unlike Shoebox, I believe things are that caustic, though like him, I doubt that we will see John Edwards or Bill Richardson on the ticket for much the same reason he believes that ticket is inevitable. Even at that, most of those on that short list have the same “racialism” problem, only that would be in the open.
If the Nightmare Ticket does happen, I am counting on so many panders to the left being made that it would be rather difficult for them to return to the center. Fortunately, Obama made that job a bit harder with today’s speech. I’ll also state that neither we nor the middle were Obama’s target audience. Ed Morrissey believes it was the superdelegates. I humbly disagree; they’re looking for electability in the general election, and on that front, this speech sure seems sorely lacking. Rather, I believe it was to reunite the various colors of the radical wing of the Dems behind him, the general election be damned.
That speech, and the reaction to it, also plays into something Shoebox put up yesterday on Obama losing Generation Y. Because The Hammer is a Gen Y’er, I’ll point in the general direction of her take on that speech. The $192,000,000 (or whatever is going to be spent on the general election) question is whether the Gen Y’ers and the middle are simply going to be turned off to Obama or turned off to politics entirely. If it simply is to Obama, the election will be John McCain’s for the taking regardless of his missteps with conservatives and regardless of whether the Dems heal themselves between now and November.
If, however, the trend of the middle to disappear from politics entirely continues, it will be a “base turnout” election. If there is the Nightmare Ticket or “Son of Nightmare” Ticket, the various portions of the Dem base will be united, the middle will be pretty much out of play, and it will be up to McCain to actually heal his rift with conservatives to come out on top. Unfortunately, for every step McCain takes to heal that rift, he takes one to reopen it.
I haven’t said it enough, but I would be remiss if I didn’t say I thank God I got him blogging. Very short story – he was a regular commenter over at Michelle Malkin’s place, and stumbled into a few of my debate liveblogs from my pingbacks to her liveblogs. Eventually, I recognized just how good he was and he eventually agreed to try blogging as a guest-blogger. I’ll say he took to it like a duck to water; he’s bailed me out of a couple of blogging funks I’ve been in, and he’s improved the discussion here a lot.
