I'm just as happy as everyone else about the surprising results last night. And I'm glad to see a lot of gestures towards unity. But I think we need to go further with this, and I'll explain after the jump.
As the Clinton campaign begins the process of drawing down their efforts to undermine Obama's movement and ultimately suspending their campaign(which should happen in 2 - 3 weeks, after the WV and KY primaries), now is not the time to be snarking about Hillary, holding grudges about how she conducted herself at points in this contest, or otherwise piling on to the generous amount of bitterness that has already been exchanged between the two camps. We need to keep our eye on the ball. In case you've had your head buried in the sand, underneath a boulder being overrun by a Panzer tank, the "ball" in this case is John Sidney McCain III. And if you are among the minority who think this is going to be easy or that we have time to waste on further party infighting, guess again. The Republicans are shameless. Compared to the Mark Penn tactics that Hillary threw at Obama up to and past the March 4th primaries, GOP communications strategy and talking points are going to be staggeringly repugnant to us.
Here's why: since political strategists on the Republican side are even more freed from the burden of having to tell the truth, and conveniently untethered to the operations of logic, their attacks can be arbitrarily dishonest. We shouldn't put it past the Republicans to float two mutually contradictory smears against Obama. We've already seen secret Muslim rumors pushed alongside a full-throttle campaign to assassinate the character of our nominee through his Christian pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ. You would think those two things just wouldn't work together, but the Republicans demonstrably seem to think they could. And to some extent, they do. At one point, (if I recall correctly) a poll showed that 12% of respondents believed Obama was a Muslim, despite the ongoing Wright saga. While it can be argued that the 12% who believe that were probably not going to vote for Obama anyway, it is still troubling and we should be vigilant lest this absurd level of ignorance take us by surprise. Republicans have such a low opinion of voters that they will go to any length to seed fear, uncertainty, and doubt in their minds, capitalizing upon our basest and most prejudicial biases which lie deep in the unconscious of even the most enlightened of us. Last night on the Daily Show's special "Ticket to the Pollies pt. 2" starring John Oliver, we got a preview of the special brand of filth that the Republicans are going to peddle against our nominee, crafted by none other than Floyd Brown, the man who made the Willie Horton ad that ran against Dukakis in 1988.. Watch it below. Sorry, I couldn't find just the complete ad to embed(NewsMax's clip on YouTube had embedding disabled by request). Watching the Daily Show piece in its enirety ought to be enlightening and entertaining anyway - the ad is at the very end:
As we can see, the racist undercurrents we've seen in this campaign have yet to find their fullest expression. No matter how hurt we were by some of the attacks levied, they are most assuredly tamer than the kind of bluster we are about to go up against. But we have an opportunity: as many have said, our party is not only still standing as we end this nominating process. It's also amazingly energized. We're seeing unprecedented levels of involvement from people of all kinds of backgrounds. This is a realization of the progressive dream. We need to harness this energy, make large gestures of good will towards the Clintons(and yes, even accept the possibility - though slight - that she might end up on the ticket), and pivot ourselves completely towards tying John McCain irreversibly to President George W. Bush so that we can soundly defeat him and the politics of yesterday in November.
So for those who say we don't need to bend over backwards for unity, I concur, but I'd also say that we need to find a sensible middle ground between standing fully upright and reverse genuflecting towards Hillary's supporters to make a gesture to them that we don't just want, but need them to help fight against McCain. The fight is going to be long and soul-withering whether we like it or not. The stakes are just too high to be dilly-dallying and engendering further resentment.