Monday, August 25, 2008

PUMA's My Ass!

Something is becoming clearer to me. The results of a poll I heard about today list 45% of Hillary supporters as currently being avid Obama supporters. An additional 25% say they will vote for Obama regardless of mixed feelings. And a whopping 30% say they will vote for McCain.

Wow!

How do you explain that? Are people so willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces? Or are they that racist that they will vote against their own interests rather than bring themselves to vote for a black man? I used to think it had to be one of these two answers.

I don’t believe it any more. The answer is simple. This 30% of Hillary supporters never did support Hillary. They registered as Democrats. I’ll agree with that. And they did so for the following reasons: 1) They wanted to lend legitimacy to their supposed support for Hillary, and 2) They really wanted to do their best to defeat Obama in the primaries.

This explains a lot:

Obama started out in Iowa beating Hillary handily. He followed that with a Super Tuesday sweep. And then things started turning. All sorts of reasons for this shift were touted at the time. Folks started asking why Obama couldn’t close the deal.

Now supposed Democrats say they will vote for a candidate who has made very clear the platform that he will espouse. McCain favors everything Bush has stood for. McCain has added not a single progressive move to Bush’s platform of the past seven and a half years. What Democrat would possibly vote for that platform?

No Democrat would vote for that platform. That’s the answer. These 30% factions of “Hillary supporters” are not Democrats. They are Republicans. They were always Republicans. All you need to do is to listen to some of their rhetoric (I’ve heard many of them). They don’t sound even the tiniest bit like Democrats. They utter their allegiance to all things Hillary, but those utterances ring hollow. Everything else they say clearly screams Republican.

So to all those who have felt Barack should have done better against Hillary than he did, take heart; he did! And to anyone who is listening to this 30% faction and wondering if their own support of Obama might be the result of flawed thinking, relax. And to anyone who is upset that we might be missing 30% of 18 million Hillary votes (that’s 5.4 million votes), forget it. Those were never Hillary votes. They were never Democrat votes. They were always McCain votes.

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