Yes, it is very true that the Democratic Party is split almost to the point of ceasing to be a true national party.
This is both because America has become a self-satisfied, conservative imperial country and because the Civil Rights Bill of Lyndon Johnson created waves that have not calmed. This last makes the rise of Obama all the more remarkable.
Dear old Bill Clinton exploited this fact of the Democratic Party politically. Imagine a Democrat taking credit for ending traditional public assistance?
Bill did something else, too, that is now intensely at work with his wife. He was extremely cavalier with human beings.
He would appoint someone highly qualified, and then back off as soon as there was some opposition or noise, leaving the appointed person in the public stocks of a lowlife press and Republican Party.
In other cases, he appointed people and, without ever announcing it publicly, effectively reduced their jobs if he thought they were not quite up to the mark for some reason.
Hillary’s basic approach now is to behave ruthlessly and make Obama upset, standoffish, and awkward about her behavior. He is a far more thoughtful and decent-minded person than she, and he is repulsed by such behavior, as am I and many, many others.
Obama has genuinely tried to run a campaign of which he could be proud, a rare thing in American national politics, still pretty much in the Political Stone Age.
But Obama faces a terrible dilemma when confronted by an opponent willing to say close to anything to win. Hillary truly has proven herself an Appalachian throwback, a grinning political predator exactly in the tradition of Richard Nixon.
It is unforgivable and shocking beyond words that she threatened the lives of eighty million people on the morning of the Pennsylvania primary.
And her ad with Osama’s image is in the disgusting tradition of the infamous Willy Horton ad. These are the behaviors of a low-grade psychopath, the kind of individual who has been president for more than seven years.
And there really are bad intentions at work in America’s press covering the election and re-inforcing the impact of her tactics.
There is the endless repetition of the same meaningless anecdotes as though they were defining matters of substance, a kind of idiotic mantra which, like catchy advertising slogans, stick in the minds of many.
Today’s corporate consolidation of news corporations means fewer and fewer sources, and those in the hands of people whose interest and focus is anything but genuine news. It also means cost-cutting and shortcuts. And it means a propensity towards audience-building sensational entertainment rather than hard information.
And, like the phenomenon we see in the primaries with Hillary Clinton’s stooping to the lowest approach, once one major news source takes the low-road, competitors find it awkward to remain above the low tactics, the basic phenomenon which has kept American national politics in the Political Stone Age.
