Obama nation

Other than ensuring the Greatest Show on Earth will continue, does it matter that Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama Tuesday in Pennsylvania by nine-plus points? Barack Obama is the nominee… it’s going to be McCain versus Obama in 2008. I believe the cement set around the Clinton coffin last Friday. The Obama campaign announced it had received the support of former Sens. Sam Nunn of North Carolina and David Boren of Oklahoma… That is like hands reaching out from the graves of FDR, JFK and LBJ to announce: “Enough is enough. This man is your nominee. Go forth and fight with the Republicans.”

In a better world, Sam Nunn (or a David Boren) would have been the party’s candidate for president. Such candidacies remain impossible under the iron law of Democratic primary politics: No centrist can secure the party’s nomination in a primary system dominated by left-liberal activists. The iron law produces candidacies such as McGovern (1972), Mondale (’84), Dukakis (’88), Gore (’00) or Kerry (’04), who pay so many left-liberal obeisances to win in the primaries that they cannot attract sufficient moderates… to win the general election. Bill Clinton, who broke that law twice, knows all this. His 1996 triangulation campaign dangled welfare reform and spending restraint. It worked. Hillary Clinton knows all this. The 2008 nomination was hers. There was no competition…

Sam Nunn and David Boren… should be in her camp. Instead, they threw in with Obama, who calls his campaign “post-partisan,” a ludicrous phrase. The blowback at ABC’s debate makes clear that Obama is the left’s man. So what did Messrs. Nunn and Boren see? The biggest event was the Clinton Abandonment. In a campaign of surprises, none has been more breathtaking than the falling away of Clinton supporters, loyalists . . . and friends. Why? Money. Barack Obama’s mystical pull on people is nice, but nice in modern politics comes after money. Once Barack proved conclusively that he could raise big-time cash, the Clintons’ strongest tie to their machine began to unravel.

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Today he’s got $42 million banked. She’s got a few million north of nothing.When Obama proved he could perform this most basic function in politics, it was a get-out-of-jail-free card for many Democrats. For some, this may be personal. For others, it is likely a belief that the party’s interests lie with finding an alternative to the Clinton saga. One guesses this is what Sam Nunn and David Boren concluded.

Excerpted from Daniel Henninger’s ‘The Democrats have a nominee’ in The Wall Street Journal, April 24