Farewell the Clintons?

The figures on the African-American vote are now quite staggering, with 92 per cent supporting Obama in North Carolina (which has a one-third African-American population) and 94 per cent in Indiana. Given that Bill Clinton as President was actually quite popular with African-Americans, it is indicative of the failures of the Hillary Clinton campaign that this margin has kept getting worse for her with successive primaries.

The following week has seen a slow leak of the “super delegates”, the 800-odd Democrat big-wigs who could overturn the primary vote on pledge delegates if they decide that someone is “unelectable”.

The question now is when, or whether, Hillary Clinton will concede to Barack Obama, and on what terms. Although she vows to fight on, it is no longer clear what for, as she could only become the Democrat nominee if the super delegates defy the popular vote. While doing so, however, the Democrats will continue to splinter along class and racial lines, with real opportunities for the Republicans and John McCain to pick up support from disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters.

The fact that Hilary Clinton has won West Virginia this week - a gun-owning, six-pack state if ever there was one - while Obama will win big in Oregon the following week, will only further the perception of the Democrats as a house divided.

As the Republicans have won seven of the last ten Presidential elections, the Democrats are prone to get skittish at such moments. The reality is that the 2008 Presidential election is very much theirs for the winning with a half-electable candidate with half-decent policies.

George W. Bush now has a 28 per cent approval rating, lower than that of Jimmy Carter during the hostage crisis in Iran, and less than half that of Bill Clinton when he left office. John McCain can only partly distance himself from the Bush years, as he is not overturning key policies of this period - on the war in Iraq, taxes or health care.

The gusto with which the right-wing culture warriors - O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck - are lining up to bash into Obama as a reckless, unpatriotic liberal is matched by a decided lack of enthusiasm for McCain, who is perceived as a closet moderate. Even the evangelical Christians are up for overtures from the Democrats this year, following large-scale defections from the Republican camp in the 2006 Congressional elections.

If Barack Obama is the Democratic Party nominee, the question of what happens to the Clintons is on the minds of many pundits. There is some talk of a “dream ticket” with Hillary Clinton as the Vice-Presidential nominee, in order to suture together the two fragmenting strands of Democrat support. But I think this is unlikely to happen, partly because, as one Republican advisor wittily observed on CNN, Obama would need to employ a food taster in the White House to check that nothing had been slipped into his soup.

Bill Clinton’s energetic performance on the campaign trail suggests that the would-be First Husband has no intention to step back from string pulling in the party, and would find it impossible to not involve himself in the affairs of state if he ever got near the White House again.

With an African-American candidate performing so strongly in the Democratic Party primaries, questions of race were going to feature more in the 2008 US Presidential election more than ever before. It is notable that the Republicans avoid the politics of racial polarisation at this stage, and may even change the equation if they nominated someone like Condoleezza Rice as Vice-Presidential nominee.

The major problem has been that Hillary Clinton has done so much in recent months to present herself as the candidate for “white America” that it has fostered divisiveness in a party that badly needs to be inclusive if it is to with the elections in November.