Barack Obama Should Concede the Nomination to Hillary

Although one can't help but admire Barack Obama's tenaciousness, it's time that he face the facts and abandon his quixotic quest for the Democratic nomination. We all know that the Clintons will stop at nothing to get the nomination for Hillary and the best thing Obama could do for his country and his own political future is to concede defeat and preserve one last shred of dignity. After his trouncing in Kentucky and his lackluster win in Oregon, the writing is on the wall. It is obvious he will not have enough delegates to secure the nomination and all he is doing is prolonging the misery. Perhaps he can run again in 2032 when he will still be younger than John McCain is now and people will have forgiven him for the divisiveness he has caused by trying to get people to vote for him.

Unfortunately for Obama the mathematics is against him. Under no scenario will have enough pledged delegates when all the primaries are over to win the nomination no matter how he tries to spin it. Although, technically, he has more pledged delegates than Hillary does, there is no guarantee that this margin will hold until the convention. He can't very well trust the pledges of delegates who are supporting him when he won't even pledge allegiance to the flag, according to a number of emails I have gotten, which also claim that he is secretly a Muslim. And how can he be sure all of his pledged delegates will survive until the August convention, which is more than three months away? We all know what the Clintons are capable of, as the World Net Daily, the Internet's most reliable news source, amply documented in the case of Vince Foster. Obama has fewer than 200 more delegates than Hillary as it stands now. How many of them will mysteriously disappear before the convention?

Although Obama apparently believes that he will be able to win over enough superdelegates to secure the nomination, as far as we know his campaign has done nothing to win over the double secret superdelegates. In fact, I wonder if his campaign is even aware of the double secret superdelegates. Many of the members of his campaign are quite young and not all that familiar with the Byzantine Democratic nominating rules. They have made a number of rookie mistakes in this campaign, for example, not realizing that winning caucuses doesn't matter, campaigning in little states that no one cares about and red states that Democrats are supposed to ignore, and going along with Howard Dean's unique strategy to disenfranchise voters in Michigan and Florida, which must have seemed like a really good idea at the time. Obama's campaign will be in for a shock when Hillary reveals that she has sewn up the nomination.

The fact that Obama failed to deliver a knockout blow has played right into Hillary's hands. Hillary's strategy should be familiar to anyone who knows anything about boxing. Obama has fallen victim to the "rope-a-dope" strategy that Muhammad Ali used against George Foreman in their 1974 heavyweight title match in Zaire. In that bout Ali spent the early rounds lying on the ropes, conserving his energy and letting Foreman pummel him until Foreman tired himself out. Then Ali knocked him out in the eighth round. By losing so many primaries and caucuses early on, Hillary conserved her energy while luring Obama into a false sense of security and tiring him out. Any minute now she plans to land the knock-out blow and Obama won't know what hit him.

It's funny that so many bloggers, who are as young and naïve as many of Obama's idealistic young campaign workers, think that Obama has the nomination in the bag. They don't realize that we are at the point in the narrative where the Terminator has been left for dead only to rise one more time, that Carrie is just about to stick her hand up from the grave, that Glenn Close is just about to rise up from that bathtub and attack Michael Douglas again. If the Obama children have any pet rabbits they might want to request Secret Service protection for them.

Even more telling, many pundits seem to believe that Obama is already the nominee. Is there anything that pundits haven't been wrong about this year? Remember when they said that Rudy Giuliani was the frontrunner? And that John McCain was washed up? And that Fred Thompson was the new Reagan? If all the pundits agree on something you can almost be certain that they are wrong.

Someone close to Obama needs to tell him that the jig is up (and before someone emails me, "the jig is up" is not a racist phrase as far as I know, except possibly when applied to Irishmen). Or perhaps someone with stature in the party, someone like Bill Clinton, though probably not him, needs to say enough is enough.

By stubbornly refusing to concede defeat Obama has put this country at risk. If he steals the nomination from Hillary, women around the country will become completely unhinged, rioting in the streets and withholding sex from their husbands. We all know how hysterical women can get when they don't get their way. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Does Obama want to see our cities ravaged by looting and violence?

Unfortunately, I don't think Obama cares about the havoc that will be wrought if he denies Hillary the nomination. He has already divided the Democrats by insisting on prolonging his campaign until all the votes are counted. By forcing Democrats to choose between two candidates and stretching his campaign out to the end of the primary season, he has ripped the party apart, setting husbands against wives and brothers against sisters, so to speak.

And if he cares so little about the rifts he has caused in his own party, imagine how his campaign will rip apart our country when he tries to force people to take sides between him and John McCain and make people who don't vote for him, because there is something about him they just don't like, feel like they are being racist when that is not it at all. Hasn't this country been divided enough? I'm afraid that Obama will not be satisfied until he has stoked a Civil War between the red and blue states. If Obama really wants to heal the divisions in this country, as he often claims, he should start by dropping out of the race.

Like many white people, I was really looking forward to having a constructive dialogue about race (like this one) all the way until November and then never talking about race again. But the future of our country is too important and we'll just have to have that dialogue sometime in the future -- perhaps after we have solved pressing problems like poverty, disease, war and starvation. And it would have been nice for a change to have an election where we talked about important issues, such as who else in Obama's past has scary ideas that might give a clue to what he really thinks. But that will have to wait, too.

Unfortunately, Hillary doesn't care about whether she divides her party or her country or not. And it looks like we are going to have an election where Hillary unfairly attacks McCain and the press is forced to defend him and point out how much they dislike the Clintons. But at least she is honest about where she stands. Obama was supposed to be different. He was supposed to be the candidate that brought us together by blurring our differences. If healing the divisions in this country is really so important to him, he can start by healing his party and dropping out of the race. I say, let the healing begin.

Share This Post



Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, 2008 Election, Republicans, Democrats, John McCain, Politics