Election '08 or bust!

As the rest of the world looks on, the Democratic party is tearing itself apart. As German magazine Der Spiegel so aptly puts it, Obama and Clinton are like two boxers in a ring. Each is throwing blow after blow, targeting the same sensitive areas of their opponent. Meanwhile, the Republicans have their candidate warming up on the sidelines, with one eye to the ring. McCain only has to wait for Obama and Clinton to duke it out until one or the other hits the floor. Then, as soon as the winner can stumble to their feet again, there’s McCain, armed with the same accusations the two democratic candidates have been already been throwing around for months.

Why haven’t the two democratic candidates realized how much of this vicious primary season has essentially been self-destructive? Why haven’t they called a compromise and put aside their overused insults? Compromise is just conflict by more sophisticated means, says a German columnist. Ouch. Step it up, America, because the rest of the world thinks that it’s time for you to move on from this stalemate situation. Foreign opinion doesn’t even hold out much hope for an overdue but successful end to this candidacy race. A fight to the death won’t end with even a decent majority of the Democratic party’s support behind a single candidate. Already this race has sharply divided the party and on the day that a Democrat is potentially voted into office, millions of Democratic voters will still be mourning the absence of the candidate who lost months previously. The issue with this election’s candidates is that feelings run particularly deep. People aren’t just voting for the next U.S. President—they’re expressing their own views about race and gender. A vote for Obama means a vote for racial minorities; a vote for Hillary means a vote for women. Either way, it would be a first in America’s history, and voters are taking these personal aspects of the candidates to heart this year much more than ever before.  Not only do Americans want favored policies to be protected, but they also want to be able to identify with the candidate chosen--in a such celebrity-crazed society, this is not so hard to understand.

There aren’t enough regular delegates left for either candidate to win a clear nomination and so it will be left up to the 800 superdelegates at the nominating convention this summer to make that final decision. It looks as though this fight will have to wait for the DNC to be decided because it doesn’t look likely that a compromise will be reached. Clinton’s team may have once been willing to consider Obama as a Vice President, but refuses to consider the same option in reverse. The feeling’s mutual at Obama headquarters. At present the possibility of a dream ticket is most definitely out of the question. For now, this bitter fight is only helping one man, and he’s ready to get another four years for the GOP.