tygerland.net

So Super Tuesday didn’t sort the wheat from the chaff.

Clinton came out of the primaries with around 80 more delegates than Obama; but, as The Guardian points out, Barack Obama won the most States and has enjoys a favourable lead in seven of the remaining contests. Obama also enjoys a stonking lead in the money stakes, more than doubling the war-chest available to Hillary C (indeed, it seems that the lobby-friendly Clintons’ have exhausted their donors and are feeling the squeeze).

But what does an indecisive democratic result mean for the Dems?

Well it probably means that Barack and Hillary will be tearing strips off each other, while GOP frontrunner John McCain is able to communicate directly to the nation, bar the occasional scuffle with the limpet-like - i.e. financially self-sufficient - Mitt Romney (McCain and Mike Huckabee are pretty chilled).

Also, we’ve also seen enough of Hillary, and Bill for that matter, to know that they haven’t forgotten how to fight like rabid alley cats. Obama, for all his righteous notions of a new politics, will have little option but to descend to the Clintons’ level if he’s to have any hope of surviving another salvo of negative campaigning.

What more mud-slinging will mean is more bullshit and more people turned off from the progressive message. The Republicans may be as popular as the Ebola virus right now, but that doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten how to campaign. Howard Dean, the Democrat chair, ought to compel the two remaining Democratic challengers to fight fair. But, alas, I doubt Dean has the influence - and he certainly doesn’t have the constitutional power - to change anything.

A Dem win in November is not a foregone conclusion. John McCain would be a very strong general election candidate. Barack and Hillary would do well to remember that and spare any more blood on the carpet.