The Party Is Pulling Together

by Steve Soto

This blog, June 2 (with a large number of commenters disagreeing with me):

I think the party will mend fences and come together quicker than people assume. Oh, it won't happen right away and the feelings will still be raw for most of the next month or so. Don't confuse what Hillary operatives say about voting for Obama, and vice-versea with the feelings of everyday Democratic voters. After months of hand-to-hand combat, I expect people who have been immersed and invested in this (Clinton and Obama supporters and operatives, and yes, blog readers) to say that they won't easily vote and support the other candidate. But I think the media narrative about a chasm within the party will give way after July 4th into stories about Democrats pulling together to smash the Doddering Imbecile, who I also think will get less and less media attention the more enfeebled he looks.

Newsweek Magazine, yesterday:

Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator wrested the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With numbers consistently showing rock-bottom approval ratings for President Bush and a large majority of Americans unhappy with the country's direction, the opposing-party candidate should, in the normal course, have attracted more disaffected voters. Now it looks as if Obama is doing just that. A new NEWSWEEK Poll shows that he has a substantial double-digit lead, 51 percent to 36 percent, over McCain among registered voters nationwide.

And where has Obama's surge in support come from?

Obama seems to have built his margin in part by picking up a key slice of Clinton's support, including women. Women voters in the new poll prefer him over McCain by 21 points (54 percent versus 33 percent). Defections to McCain by Hillary Clinton supporters are also down significantly since she dropped out of the race and endorsed Obama. In the new poll, registered Democrats and Democratic leaners who supported Clinton during the primaries now favor Obama over McCain by 69 percent to 18 percent. In last month's survey, Clinton supporters backed the Illinois senator by a significantly smaller margin, 53 percent to 34 percent. Registered independents have also moved toward Obama, backing him by a 48 percent to 36 percent margin after splitting about evenly in last month's poll.

Do I expect this margin to stick? No, McCain will raise lots of money from the usual suspects for a smear and image destruction campaign against Obama. That's really all the GOP knows how to do. It will have an effect, but Obama has raised and invested a lot of money already to set up a national campaign organization, something that McCain cannot match. Once he gets Team Hillary on board next week and gets her fundraising team fully integrated with his, there will be all types of donors pouring money into the campaign between now and November.

And the party will be unified.

My disgust, and yes, my loathing of Bush's GOP overwhelms any disappointment over how the primary turned out. And I think as time goes on, a lot of Democrats will feel the same way, and work collectively to bury these bastards with no mercy.