News Item 1: The boycott of DailyKos by Hillary Clinton supporters will be almost completely ineffective, for a number reasons. The first is that, well, there just aren’t very many Hillary supporters on the web. If you look at the demographics of primary voters from exit polls, you’ll see that the more highly educated and higher income you are, the more likely you are to support Obama. These are also the demographics that are most active on the web. That’s probably why Kos’s traffic is pretty much the same as any other non-primary weekend. Impact of this boycott: near zero.
There are other reasons why Hillary supporters tend to clash with the Dailykos crowd. Al Giordano outlines some of them:
There was always something incongruous about the self-proclaimed “Hillary Bloggers” trying to use Daily Kos for their purposes. DKos has been defined as a meeting ground not for every Democrat, but for the kind that wants to change the party to be more grassroots oriented, adhere to a 50-state strategy, stop the war in Iraq, and blunt the influence of lobbyists, PACs and the neoliberal Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). That’s the glue that has always held the DKos community together and made it so large and strong.
Given that candidate Clinton is a member of the DLC, voted to authorize the war, accepts federal lobbyist and PAC money, clearly thinks that a lot (if not most) states “don’t matter,” and epitomizes a 1990s style top-down form of doing politics, it’s no surprise that for all of 2007 Clinton never exceeded 11 percent support in the monthly Daily Kos users straw poll.
News Item 2: Clinton’s only real hope at this point is to swing a large contingent of superdelegates her way. Barring any ridiculous gaffes by the Obama campaign, he will easily win the popular vote, greatest number of caucuses, and most pledged delegates. Even if she somehow overturned the will of the people by pulling supers to her side, she’d inherit a divided party and could very possibly lose the general election. Jonah Goldberg outlines such a scenario in a widely published op-ed today:
If Clinton keeps this going to the convention, the nomination will largely be left to the whims of the party hackocracy. Clinton most likely cannot catch up in either the popular vote or in the normal delegate count. But she can certainly win by skullduggery and intimidation.
So imagine she wins the nomination. Obama’s supporters will be vexed, to say the least. Clinton, who hoped not only to win the nomination in a cakewalk but to enter the general election as a plausible moderate and centrist, will be put in the position of having to placate many of the most important left-wing constituencies of her party: wealthy liberals, young people and, most of all, African Americans.
This means that at precisely the moment she needs to move right toward the center, she will need to move left to shore up an angry base. In other words, the Democratic party would nominate the most polarizing candidate possible (roughly half the country already says it will never vote for her), who will have to become even more polarizing in order to appease aggrieved Obama voters.
Sounds like a recipe for success. Meanwhile, Obama continues to attract huge numbers of young, independent, and even republican voters. McCain has a proven record of appealing to the middle, and Obama can do the same. Clinton cannot win with the same polarizing politics the Clintons used in the 1990s. Obama clearly has the best chance of winning in a general election, which would give America what it really needs this November: a Democrat in the White House.
