Hillary still alive, Nader joins the fray, McCain gets the nod.

Hillary Clinton is still in the race for the democratic nomination after most projections declare her the winner in Texas and Ohio. That doesn't mean the Clinton campaign is back from the dead yet, these were must-win states, needed just to stay in the game. Obama still has the same lead and Hillary still needs a Carvillesque zinger. Clinton has the same problem this time around that George Bush Sr. had against her husband, the media cycle is running a lot faster than she expected and the other side is doing a much better job of presenting a consistent and appealing image.

Clinton was forced on the defensive by Barack Obama's delegate lead, while he has proven a master at magnanimously forgiving her for portraying him as 'all talk'. Most of the rumours about Obama that would have been useful to the Clinton campaign have been done to death, and are sliding off him like water off a duck's back. Only the Israel-Jewish conservative axis is still using his attending a madrassa and wanting to talk to the Palestinians as the 'first signs of your candidate's co-optation by the Islamo-fascist Junta'. Obama's only weak spot that will stick, is his relationship with Tony Rezko, tenuous though it may be, but since Matt Lauer dug up that picture of Hillary and Bill standing next to Rezko, she can't really exploit this, besides the fact that this would open up her campaign financing can of worms. There are more shady characters at the average Clinton fund-raiser than at the Hanoi Hilton in 1973.

The last thing an already divided democratic vote needed was the charming news that Ralph Nader and the green party are going to draw votes on the extreme left again. While the democratic nomination is not yet secured, there's no reason to worry about this too much, but whoever gets it will have to do a public appeal, urging people not to vote Nader and Nader himself to give up, for the sake of the country. What they're overlooking is the fact that a good win for Nader might finally motivate the Christian Conservatives to set up their own party. The Democrats might lose votes on the left, but imagine what a more right-wing movement would do to the Republicans. More and more polls are saying that the unusually high voter turnout expected in this election will prove once and again that the population of the United States of America is far more liberal than everyone thought. John McCain is a much more serious threat to the Democrats' voter base than Nader will ever be.

McCain got the nod, and Mike Huckabee is out of the race, but it's still by no means certain that John McCain will win the presidency. In an interview with dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, The always diplomatic Christopher Hitchens said; "Now McCain will be forced into some kind of unholy alliance with one of those Christian thugs.." Or not, E.J Dionne's columns in the Washington Post are markedly more positive about the Republican party's chances to rid itself of the undue influence of the Christian conservatives, finally returning to their fiscal conservative roots.

Ronald Brownstein's latest book, 'The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partizanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America' has a very interesting perspective on the last quarter century of developments in partisan politics. The Democrats were the first group to use the tactics used by the Conservative Christians today. In the late fifties they started to try and work the dixiecrats in the south out of the party by polarising public opinion and manipulating Democratic party politics. They succeeded with Lyndon B. Johnson's social democratic reforms, which where a sort of clarion call for the new left. The public shrugged and the following voter migration sowed the seeds for the extreme partisanship by making the Republicans more Christian and Conservative as the Democrats became more Liberal and Progressive. So really the Democrats are to blame for George W. Bush.