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WASHINGTON: For US Democrats, it was a nightmare
image: a grinning John McCain strolling through the White House,
just as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama dug in for a long political
war of attrition.
A day after clinching the
Republican nomination, Senator McCain claimed President George W.
Bush’s blessing and officially launched his general election
quest, unencumbered by a Democratic rival.
Senators Clinton and Obama,
meanwhile, signalled a new, nasty phase of a battle that could go on
for weeks or months, likely leaving them both damaged, and tear at
their party’s fragile unity.
“This is rather bleak for the
Democrats,” said Dan Shea, professor of political science at
Allegheny College, Pennsylvania.
“They are going to attack each
other. What we have seen in the past, is just a taste of how
negative it’s going to get.”
That was great news for McCain,
who will now profit from a free torrent of campaign advertising as
his potential Democratic rivals savage one another.
An ad used by Clinton last week
asked who voters would trust if the White House phone rang with a
foreign policy crisis at 3 a.m. It was an attack straight out of the
Republican playbook, and will not have escaped McCain.
The complicated arithmetical
picture coming out of Tuesday’s contests, showed neither Democrat
can reach the 2,025 delegates they need to win outright.
--AFP
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