Advantage of a Democrat

Despite the far greater closeness that everyone would expect me to feel toward B. Obama,I have a big advantage over the legions who are prepared to be intractably bitter about which of the two Democratic candidates gets the nomination. For me it's an all win situation, and I don't see how it's at all possible to change that, because J. McCain and his party are as unlikely to reform themselves as jackals, hyenas, and baboons are to modify the unseemly behavior hard-wired into them through the eons. Either Democrat in the Oval Office would be infinitely preferable to any Republican, and that's all that matters. Therefore I'm counting on being able to maintain a much better state of mental and by extension physical health through the summer than all those who are spitefully screaming and threatening that if their guy or gal doesn't get the Democratic nomination, they will either sit out the November elections or -- with equal boneheadedness, the natural state of the angry soul -- they will vote Republican.

Now H. Clinton has won in Pennsylvania, B. Obama's lead in the delegate count has narrowed, and either candidate still has a chance to win the Democratic nod. Yet a short while ago, entirely discounting all the hard work and capital of several kinds that she and her people had been putting into it for a long time, and with the situation not much different from what it is now, many were calling for Clinton to drop out, so as to leave Obama in the same position as McCain, with the nominees for both parties thus neatly determined long before all the votes had been counted. But, to his great credit, Obama put a stop to that by saying that Clinton should run as long as she felt like it, and it's likewise to her credit that she's showing enormous fortitude in doing just that.

The thinking by some in both parties, even now, is that the extended Democratic race, compared to the foreshortened Republican one, is harmful to the Democrats and a lifesaver to the Republicans. But I notice that these Demos who are so short in sight and those Republicans who are so oversold on their own cunning, are on the stingy side when it comes to supplying the reasons as to why that should be the case. Apparently because they are so perceptive and sophisticated, we're just supposed to take their word for it while continuing not to bother with thinking for ourselves.

But my determination to think for myself keeps insisting on asking a paired inconvenient question. So far where has the advantage been for the Republicans, and how has the Democratic Party been bruised?

I'm not aware that either situation exists, and if anything the protracted struggle has instead been to the advantage of the.Democrats. Even the media, which because of the leanings of its bosses favors the Republicans, can't help but have paid far more attention to what Obama and Clinton have to say and are doing than they have to J. McCain. The Democrats are still marching, while McCain has just been uninterestingly marking time, and when the time finally comes when he really has to rouse himself and get to cracking, he may be so in that habit that he will have trouble realizing that it is another day and he has to slip into another mode...

Also -- though I am not putting all my faith in this, though who knows? -- a large number of voters have reason to feel much more grateful to the Democrats than to the Republicans, by having arranged things so that a far greater number of citizens are having a say in the runup to the nominating conventions than the Republicans have furnished... For months now the Republican voters in many states have been totally locked out of being heard from, and, for instance, in Pennsylvania just now, there was also a Republican primary, and how much attention was paid to that? Meanwhile each and every vote for a Democratic nominee is turhing out to mean something really important, as much throughout the primaries as it will in the polling later this fall.