OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Scorched Earth: Clinton Campaign Morphs Into a 'Stop Obama' Movement

All the other candidates, including Obama, agreed to abide by the rules. Only you, Senator Clinton, are crying foul -- and you're doing it only because you're at a disadvantage in the only count that matters for the nomination -- the delegate count.

Moreover, we're talking about a party primary, which is governed by rules set by the party, not the general election, which is governed by state and federal law. The Supreme Court ruled decades ago that political parties have a right to set their own rules, provided that they're not in direct conflict with the law.

Therefore, Senator Clinton, your invocation of the 2000 general-election debacle in Florida is specious, especially since members of the Democratic National Committee who support your candidacy -- most notably Harold Ickes -- voted to strip Florida and Michigan of their delegates in the first place. Floridians -- as well as Michiganers -- will have their say as to who they want to be our next president when they vote in the November 4 general election.

Poll: Democrats Nationwide Closing Ranks Behind Obama

And despite her huge wins in West Virginia and Kentucky, Clinton appears to be swimming against an increasingly strong current of support for Obama among Democrats nationwide. The latest Gallup daily tracking poll suggests Democratic voters are beginning to coalesce around the Illinois senator.

Obama holds an 11-point lead over Clinton in Gallup’s latest daily tracking poll released Thursday. He has the support of 53 percent of Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters while Clinton’s support is at 42 percent.

Obama’s lead over Clinton is down slightly from a 16-point, 55-39 percent edge on May 18, two days before Tuesday's primaries in Kentucky, where Clinton clobbered Obama by more than 30 points, 66-34 percent, and in Oregon, where Obama scored an easy 56-38 percent win. It remains a dramatic reversal of fortune for Obama, who, prior to John Edwards’ withdrawal from the race, lagged 20 points behind Clinton in mid-January.

The Longer Clinton Fights On, the More She Turns Off Black Voters

The Clinton campaign -- whether consciously or unconsciously -- has been subtly and not-so-subtly playing to the racial fears of working-class white voters, particularly in West Virginia and Kentucky. But while the former first lady adopts a populist appeal to working-class whites, she's at the same time alienating blacks -- the Democratic Party's most loyal voter constituency since the 1960s.

Employing euphemisms -- long denounced by many African-Americans as racial "code words" -- about how Obama can't win over “blue-collar” voters, Clinton is completely ignoring the reality that there are many blue-collar blacks.

This comes on top of Bill Clinton's ill-mannered attempt in January to belittle the significance of Obama's overwhelming victory in the South Carolina primary by comparing it to the Reverend Jesse Jackson's South Carolina wins in 1984 and 1988 -- a naked attempt to paint Obama into a corner as "the black candidate," unable to attract white voter support.

The former president's remarks infuriated African-American voters -- who make up more than half of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina -- and they responded by voting overwhelmingly for Obama.

Until the South Carolina primary, black voters were almost evenly divided between Obama and Clinton, with African-American women especially torn between voting for the nation's first woman president on the one hand and the country's first black president on the other.

Since the South Carolina primary, however, black voter support for Clinton has almost completely collapsed, with Clinton drawing less than ten percent of the black vote in every primary and caucus -- including a record-low six percent in West Virginia.

Not since the 1972 run -- abruptly ended by a would-be assassin -- of former Alabama Governor George Wallace, a one-time arch-segregationist, has a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination fared this badly among black voters.

Without Black Voter Support, No Democrat Can Win the White House in November

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