Already the polarisation between the two candidates and their respective camps has become deep and destructive. Each camp is arguing that it has the numerical and the moral advantage and deserves the nomination; the danger lies in the unsuccessful candidate’s supporters feeling betrayed and spurned. The enmity between the two camps is already far greater than any animosity towards the Republicans.
It is threatening the Party’s chances of winning in November as Obama supporters say they would never support Clinton as the candidate – and many Clinton supporters say the same thing about Obama.

And are you living in a world where Jesse Jackson can still legitimately be called a.) progressive and b.) representative of the black community? I’d say that a man who seems to think that it’s his professional job to hand out forgiveness at the drop of a hat to racist celebrities, so long as he gets to be on television, isn’t exactly the best current example of the Unreasonable Angry Black Man. Then again, you also seem to think that McCain has “high positives as a candidate.”

My preferred candidate all along was Al Gore – his refusal to run is turning out to be a terrible tragedy for the Dems and the US. I agree that Clinton has plenty of negatives and that she and Bill C were far too complacent and have not conducted their campaign very well. I agree that it will now be very difficult for her to persuade the superdelegates to ignore Obama’s lead in the primaries and nominate her.

My point is, that if the Dem party had stayed united and nominated her (or Gore, or even Edwards), it would have maximised its chances of winning in November. Instead, the combination of the Black block vote and the liberal elite vote have carried the day in the caucuses (though not in most of the big-state primaries) and given Obama a commanding position for the nomination.

But if Clinton has a big win in PA and holds Obama to within 5% in NC, the supers will be in a very difficult position, because Obama’s implosion will then be too evident to ignore. They have a duty to respect the popular will, but they also have a duty to the party as a whole – the whole point of supers was to prevent another McGovern debacle, which is exactly what an Obama nomination will produce.

Obama is imploding, as he fully deserves to for being a half-filled balloon of hot air with murky Chicago friends, but at the same time he is making it impossible for Clinton to win the nomination without wrecking the Democratic Party. Consequence: McCain will win and the next four years are going to be pretty bleak.

Eh, that’s the thing about metaphors, isn’t it? They only go so far.

I’m not sure that a fruit basket gets at the interconnected-ness of interlocking oppressions, though, since you can still separate the apples from the oranges from the kiwis. It’s more like those Swiss chard-carrots – carrots on the bottom, but the leafy tops growing out of the carrots are Swiss chard rather than carrot greens. Recognizably two different things that come together to make a new, inseparable veg.

And just so I’m not completely pointless –

large groups of people have decided that we should argue about which is worse instead of how to dismantle both

I blame it on the mainstream media. Honestly. Undeniably, some people are incapable of seeing that acknowledging racism doesn’t have to mean denying sexism, and vice versa, but I do think that the way the media has been portraying the election as a contest between Woman (white) and Black (man) has poisoned the discourse. They could have set an example, particularly opinion columnists, by either framing the race differently or by thoughtfully examining systems of prejudice rather than taking sides and so presenting useful, thought-provoking analysis to their readers. Instead, they’ve signally failed to do so.

Indeed. And sometimes they mix to form a freak hybrid oraple or applnge.