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Starting tomorrow night with NBC and MSNBC during the KY and OR primary coverage, a Democrat feminist group called Clinton Supporters Count Too plans to show its boycott muscle….


Plans are, according to ABC News, “to boycott the Democratic Party if Clinton doesn’t win the nomination, and… work against superdelegates who support Obama over Clinton as a means of registering their displeasure with the party.”
shuster.jpgThe group is starting with the aforementioned news stations for what it considers sexist remarks made by David Shuster and Chris Matthews “that Democratic Party leaders haven’t more aggressively denounced.” CSCT is also angry with slanted media support of Obama and “the drumbeat for Clinton to get out of the race.”
How serious is CSCT’s threat? From its press release:

We have a plan to campaign against the Democratic nominee…. We have the (wo)manpower and the money to make our threat real. And there are millions of supporters who will back us up in the swing states. If you don’t listen to our voice now, you will hear from us later.

Whether this is blather or real remains to be seen. But at the very least the threat shows a worsening schism. From the Washington Post today:

A Democratic race that a couple of months ago was celebrated as a march toward history – the chance to nominate the nation’s first woman or African American as a major-party candidate – threatens to leave lingering bitterness, especially among Clinton supporters….
Put together, Clinton’s coalition of women and working-class white voters along with Obama’s alliance of African Americans and young voters could be a potentially unstoppable Democratic force in the fall. But, at least for now, many on both sides said they have been too put off and have become too embittered to pull together for the party if their candidate isn’t on the ballot….

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But the Obama-Clinton fight has gone on so long and the ill will has become so intense that even if the candidates can heal the party, as both have vowed to do, they will have to spend critical campaign time dealing with those wounds rather than taking on McCain.
“You can’t afford to leak away all of these Democrats come November,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. The Democratic nominee “will have to spend weeks solidifying the base,” he said. “. . . Now you’re cutting into the time you have to begin making the case to independents, because first you’ve got to take care of business at home.”

And that’s fine with me.
[Top photo courtesy of the New York Times]

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