No one left to offend

HRH has had rather a busy week. Fresh off summoning the spirits of dead Kennedys as a reason to prolong her presidential bid, herself blamed her own lack of traction within the Democratic Party electorate on misogyny in the ranks, even while continuing to insist to the “super-delegates”- those extra-democratic elites charged with preventing the grass roots from falling foolishly in love with an unelectable candidate – that she is more electable in the general election.

One might have thought that loose talk about “electability” as sufficient reason in itself to support a candidate – as though really, politics was nothing more than a cynical game to get hands on controls – would have fallen out of favor after the 2004 national election. In that campaign the Party chose the junior* senator from Massachusetts to be their standard bearer pretty much for that reason alone and despite the fact that no one much cared for him. It would be OK. He was electable.

But as GMU professor of economics Donald Boudreaux points out in the WSJ today, the underlying calculus of her combined allegations must surely be off-putting to progressive self-esteem:

If Mrs. Clinton is correct that she is more likely than Barack Obama to defeat John McCain in November, that implies Republicans and independents are less sexist than Democrats.

It must be so. If American voters of all parties are as sexist as the Democrats, Mr. Obama would have a better chance than Mrs. Clinton of defeating Mr. McCain. The same misogyny that thwarted her in the Democratic primaries would thwart her in the general election. Only if registered Republicans and independents are more open-minded than registered Democrats