How the Democratic campaign turned into an absurd and acrimonious culture war that threatens to split the party in two



Zero hour, the night of the excruciating Pennsylvania primary. I'm in the ballroom of the Park Hyatt hotel in Philadelphia, site of Hillary Clinton's victory speech. The place is going nuts. The floor is a teeming mass of celebrating Lifetime demographic; I haven't seen this many strong, independent women in one place since . Clinton, who has just kicked Obama's ass all over the state, is onstage spooning out her rap.

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As Hillary finishes her speech in the ballroom, plumes of confetti shoot into the air out of a pair of paper-cannons. The loudspeaker — which for hours now has been playing an agonizing loop of patriotic classic rock, with heavy emphasis on Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" — is now blasting John Cougar Mellencamp's "Our Country."

I raise an eyebrow. The song is (1) the soundtrack to a hideously overplayed truck commercial and (2) possibly, just possibly, a weird and weirdly gratuitous dig at Obama, who at that very moment was making his gloomy "I'm fucked" concession speech in Evansville, Indiana, flanked by Indiana native Mellencamp and his wife, Elaine. Is the Clinton camp trying to make a joke about the fact that Obama is grasping for the endorsement of some gnomish Eighties B-lister while Hillary is grabbing America by the balls? Yeah, this is our country, motherfucker! Suck on this!

Has it come to this? The political equivalent of "I know you are, but what am I?" On both sides, this Obama-Clinton race has turned into something very like the vicious rivalry of a pair of blood-lusting high school student bodies — Odessa Permian versus Midland Lee, only with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance.

This race has already seen such juvenilia as one would previously have considered inconceivable in a contest between two ostensibly cerebral Democratic presidential candidates, including a surprisingly serious argument over which camp had the right to invoke Rocky references in their Pennsylvania campaign rhetoric — an argument settled, amazingly, when Gov. Ed Rendell declared "by executive order" that the right was Hillary's alone. The problem has been exacerbated by the relatively minor policy differences between the two candidates, although one suspects that even if those differences were major, they would take a back seat to the emerging tribal schism now cleaving the Democratic Party — a wholesale regression to clashing teenage emotions that turns these supposedly profound electoral battles into feverish squalls of car-honking and sarcastic sloganeering.


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