Electing the Unelectable: A Peculiarly Democratic Malady

The tragically flawed Democratic nominating process rolled on last night as Obama won North Carolina by 14 percentage points and Hillary Clinton eked out a two-point victory in Indiana.

As expected, pundits and politicians, except those backing Clinton, are talking about “impossible delegate math,” Obama’s “stranglehold” on the nomination and other such nonsense. Nonsense, of course, because the race has been about the superdelegates for some time now, neither candidate able to acquire enough pledged delegates to win the nomination without the help of the superdelegates.

Although the math is anything but impossible with the superdelegates, it is unlikely Clinton will be able to convince the superdelegates to vote for her over Obama, fearful as they are alienating black voters.

Because if they need a reason to be convinced as to Clinton’s electability there was no better indication of this then last night.

In both primaries Obama was beaten silly in the category of white Democrats, losing this demographic 64-36 percent in Indiana and 62-37 in North Carolina. In Indiana, white Democrats made up 49 percent of all voters and in NC, 42 percent.

As I have written recently, Obama has performed poorly with white Democrats from beginning, including nearly all the primaries he has won. In fact, Obama has won white Democrats just three times—in his home state of Illinois, Vermont, where he nabbed the latter’s Ben and Jerry, and Bernie Sanders voters who are hardly representative of the rest of the country, and New Mexico, a state he lost.

I don’t know if there are statistics for this, but I can say with certainty that there has never been a Democratic nominee that has won the white Democrat vote in just three primaries.

If Obama’s problem with white Democrats isn’t enough to convince the superdelegates, perhaps the flight of the independent and Republican voters—voters Obama must have in order to win the general election—will do the trick.

Clinton won white independents and white Republicans in both Indiana and NC last night. You know, the folks whose supposed attraction to Obama distinguished his candidacy from other Democrats. The Rush Limbaugh factor at work, you say? If any of these people were voting for Clinton simply to throw the Democrats in chaos, as the hopelessly megalomaniacal Limbaugh claimed, they certainly won’t be voting for either Clinton or Obama in November, no matter who is the Party’s nominee. So much for Rush.

The Democrats are in big trouble right now and are unlikely to extricate themselves from the tortuous nominating process they created, which even after all the ostensibly populist twists and turns (caucuses, proportional representation, awarding delegates in Texas based on shoe size) isn’t nearly as efficient or democratic as the Republican winner take all process. Most astonishingly, the Democratic nominating process fails to leave out of its meandering itinerary, as a stop, let alone its final destination, the goal of electability.

If Democrats were genuinely concerned with electability, even with the rat’s maze of a nominating process they have crafted, they might have avoided being in the dark place they now find themselves: in the center of the labyrinth and on the verge of sending forth another candidate to almost certain defeat. (As if to punctuate the extent of this fiasco, George McGovern, the Democratic candidate so thoroughly trounced by Nixon in 1972, endorsed Obama today, an event as ominous as the ancient mariner’s shooting of the albatross.)

Is there any kind of counseling available for the psychic ills of the Democratic Party, with its misplaced idealism, uncritical thinking, or just plain stupidity? If McCain is elected can Democrats claim temporary insanity? Can they get a do over?

The answer to these questions, of course, is no.

And then we’ll all need a turn on the couch when Grandpa McCain picks a couple or three supreme court justices, completes Bush’s job of privatizing Medicare, and plows ahead with an immoral, impractical, and stupendously expensive war in Iraq.