Of all the presumptions of Obama supporters, I think the most infuriating one is that “decency” somehow required her to preserve Obama’s chances to become president, at least someday, when ALMOST NONE of his supporters, nor the candidate himself, felt the least bit obligated to do the same for her.

It was perfectly OK for Obama to link HRC with everybody’s bad memories of the ’90s, as if the Republican slime machine was not a good 95% of the cause of that unpleasantness, for example. But let Hillary make a perfectly valid and not at all racist remark contrasting the roles of LBJ and MLK in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and Obama people start waggling their eyebrows and talking about coded language. Hillary has to own the ravings of that asshole Bob Johnson, but Obama is allowed to float serenely above the insulting drivel Samantha Power puts out.

I know that everybody who reads this will claim plausible deniability, and mention how they actually respected Hillary before South Carolina / Philadelphia / “hard-working white people” / whatever, but now they don’t. But let me tell you that in the blogosphere and comment sections thereof, your fair-minded views are a distinct minority. For a sizeable fraction of the Obama fanbase is built out of people who have no higher goal than to put an end to the political aspirations of Hillary Clinton, Clintons more generally, and the centrist/DLC wing of the Democratic Party. For them, “change” means “destroy the idea that the Clintons were good for the Democratic Party, or the country more generally.” Despite ample evidence to the contrary.

These are the people who started yelling that any role the superdelegates played other than unanimously validating their razor-thin margin of pledged delegates with a dozen contests left to go was tantamount to STEALING THE NOMINATION (all caps), despite the fact that their candidate didn’t manage to win enough of those pledged delegates to win outright.

So no, Obama supporters, Hillary was not the first one to play the race card, and she was not the first one to attempt to delegitimize the rules of the contest, in attempting to seat the MI and FL delegations. That was your boy’s campaign and supporters who did that.

Am I disappointed that Obama won the nomination? Not really. He’s a fine candidate and will be a fine president; I supported the other candidate but the differences between them were small enough that (as with academia) the contest became very personal and somewhat ugly at times. But overall the length of the primary was a good thing for the party and for Obama — can you seriously claim it’d be better for those Rev. Jeremiah Wright videos to come out on October 30th instead of in April?

But I am very disappointed that the media, rather than being impartial, came out against the candidate they didn’t like. And their reasons for not liking her were typically petty: “Clinton fatigue.” Ladies and gentlemen of the press, your job is not to write story arcs, your job is to report the news. Didn’t you learn that after the disaster you fostered in 2000? The country could give a good god damn if you are tired of covering the Clintons, and would rather cover a “fresh” story. That pettishness is what angered all those Clinton supporters and made them so hostile the candidate you liked better: it turned into advocacy, and disrespect for a fine public servant, and your arrogant and juvenile whininess in moaning “Why won’t she GO AWAY?” for the past six weeks has made me wonder what priority, exactly, the public interest holds in your list of core values. I suspect it is not high.

Back to the topic: maybe HRC wasn’t as gracious as Obama partisans feel she should’ve been. Maybe she’s just not as nice a person as BHO. But she wasn’t running on being nice; Barack Obama was. And when he made those oh-so-subtle remarks conflating Clinton politics with Gingrich politics, he deliberately underlined fifteen years of right-wing slander and poisoned the well against her. I remarked at the time that her campaign against him was based on experience — his campaign against her was based on character. She ran against him with the message “not yet” — he ran against her with the message “never again.”

You tell me which is the more “gracious” campaign strategy.

— Ajax.