Last night I wrote my first and probably second-to-last candidate diary. I'd been reading the print edition of Newsweek, where a sidebar touted their blog entry on Sid Blumenthal's DWI arrest in New Hampshire as one of the previous week's "top 10" in reader response. So I went to check it out, and my jaw dropped at both the volume and the intensity of the response. It seemed hard to believe that a Clinton advisor could still evoke such raw hatred. I came here and wrote that it was evidence of her unelectability.
The few comments my post drew were uniformly negative. I was a tool of Scaife and had been listening to too much Limbaugh. (Yeah, I know: Boo-fuckin'-hoo. If you can't stand the heat...)
The commenters who took me to task more cogently pointed out that if online commentary was any guide, Ron Paul would be the front-runner, and that Clinton had, in fact, carried conservative upstate New York twice. Maybe they're right about the implications for November; I hope so.
Obviously, it's impossible to gauge how representative of the general electorate the crazies on the Newsweek thread really are. And I wrote hastily and maybe without thinking it through (something no one else on dKos has ever done, apparently). Nonetheless, it was a shock to see so much of that stuff on a supposedly centrist site; and I won't be surprised to see Whitewater, Monica, Vince Foster, Sandy "Burglar," etc. come roaring back to life as this year's swiftboating.
That said, we should all, of course, vote our policy preferences.