Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Obama wins North Carolina

When her supporters are as insane as this, there really is no telling when Hillary will accept the inevitable and concede that she has lost the race to be the Democratic nominee for the White House.

Hillary Clinton's hopes of winning the race for the Democratic nomination for president are dwindling after she failed tonight to close the gap on Barack Obama in two key primaries. She won the Indiana primary but saw that outweighed by his win in North Carolina.

Clinton needed to win both North Carolina and Indiana to stand a chance of reining in Obama. It was her last opportunity after battling it out in state after state since Iowa on January 3.

In a speech in Indianapolis tonight, she signalled her intention to battle on. She recalled that Obama had predicted Indiana would be the tie-breaker.

"Tonight, we came from behind and we have broken the tie and it is full speed to the White House," she said.

With 85% of the vote counted in Indiana, Clinton had 554,261 (52%) and Obama 514,909 (48%).

In North Carolina, with 86% of the vote counted, he had 782,549 (56%) to Clinton's 583,700 (42%).

Having given up on winning by the conventional route of securing more delegates than your opponent, Hillary now seeks victory through "momentum", by convincing the super delegates that the country has turned against Obama and that they should now award her the nomination.

His victory in North Carolina, despite weeks of bad publicity over Reverend Wright, destroys Hillary's argument.

The question now becomes whether Hillary's supporters, having been trained by her over the length of this campaign to despise Obama, will eventually give their support to the Democratic nominee. Obama yesterday claimed that they would.

With only six primaries left, Obama is within touching distance of securing the Democratic nomination to face the Republican John McCain in November's general election.

At an election night party in Raleigh, North Carolina, he denounced political pundits who said the Obama-Clinton contest had polarised the Democratic party and that in November Clinton's supporters would not turn out to support him.

A third of Clinton backers claimed in exit polls today they would vote for Republican John McCain if he faces Obama in November. One in five Obama supporters said they would vote for McCain over Clinton.

He acknowledged there will be "bruised feelings" but predicted that the party would unite behind him in the autumn.

"This fall, we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country," he said.

He is being highly optimistic when he says this. The level of hatred displayed towards Obama on sites like Taylor Marsh's leads one to believe that Hillary has actually split the party in two. Since March 5th, when it became numerically impossible for Clinton to win the delegate count, she has been campaigning to make Barack unelectable. Unfortunately, many of her supporters have been swallowing her rhetoric whole. They believe the bile she has been spewing. The bile which tells them that Obama is unelectable.

How anyone who wants what Hillary's supporters claim to want could even consider voting for McCain simply baffles me. Perhaps they were never Democrats in the first place and simply wanted to see the first woman put in the White House.

However, as the weeks go on, it is becoming impossible for even the most ardent Hillary supporter to ignore the inevitable; she has lost and eventually she is going to have to stand down.

On that day they are going to have to decide which candidate offers the policy which is the nearest to that offered by Clinton. The answer to that question is undoubtedly Barack Obama, but they will have to get over all the hatred which Hillary has been stoking to ever arrive at such a clear headed conclusion.

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