How Sidney Blumenthal and Hugh Hewitt will be pleased. A reader seems to channel my own thoughts on the prospect:
(1) Romney’s supporters consist overwhelmingly of the Republicans who still like Bush (as, to a lesser extent, do Huckabee’s). McCain and (of course) Paul draw their vote from the Republicans and Independents who don’t like him.
(2) The exit poll of that weird race on the Democratic side indicates that ultimately Hillary will beat Uncommitted by only about 13 points — her 2 to 1 current lead is simply because the returns from Detroit are always the last to come in, and blacks are overwhelmingly voting Uncommitted because they’re not allowed to vote for Obama. (The exit poll also indicates that, if Obama had gotten on the ballot, Hillary would have beaten him about 45-37, with Edwards getting 12%.) But poor people in general definitely prefer Hillary, as they did in Iowa and New Hampshire — which means that poor Democratic whites must be going for her overwhelmingly.
So the odds are rapidly growing that the Democrats will end up getting entangled in a really vicious racial fight for the nomination — blacks and well-off reformers overwhelmingly for Obama, poor and lower-middle class whites overwhelmingly for Hillary — with serious repercussions for November.
(3) Indeed, the main message of this latest fight is that things may end up changing politically in this country a lot less than commentators have been saying. We may very well end up seeing a Romney vs. Hillary race, despite the unpopularity of both among the American people as a whole, simply because the majority of Republicans still like Bush and therefore like Romney, while the majority of Democrats still like Bill Clinton and so like Hillary — with the majority of Americans in the middle of the spectrum getting shut out of the process completely, as they usually do. And we may also end up seeing a revival of the brutal racial split between white and black Democrats that people were beginning to think was finally buried. Plus ca change…
The Dish 