The old saying is that politics makes for strange bedfellows. I would modify this to say that political parties make for stressful marriages... and we are seeing one marriage fall apart before our very eyes. More and more, the Democratic presidential primary is like watching years of frustration boil over between a couple that has been faking a loving marriage for the sake of the kids.
One spouse (I'm not saying who is the wife and who is the husband) is the Democrat's liberal elites who are unleashing their fury for having to soil themselves with Bill Clinton for eight years and are seeking absolution through Barack Obama. It is not so much that these elites want to avoid the kind of dirty politics they associate with the Clintons; they just don't want to be so publicly identified with it. It's the same reason the Lake Shore liberals in Chicago cheer Mayor Daley but wince at any mention of corruption within his administration and find it in poor taste to raise it (particularly in public). Joining the liberal elites are the African-Americans, who have always had an unspoken feeling that they were being taken for granted in the marriage but now wonder if anything their spouse every said was true. Imagine, Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro finally being revealed for their true Jesse Helm's selves.
The other spouse is the Democrats who really believed that Bill Clinton felt their pain and bonded with Clinton over eating at McDonald's. They know that it is the liberal elites who cheated on them and voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. You can hear this spouse screaming that if they are the ones actually losing the jobs, the health care and the sons/daughters to war that are causing liberal elites so much pain, why does their opinion not matter? And isn't it possible that this spouse might not support Obama and still not be a racist? It is as if the first spouse fashions themselves to be the morally superior Tom Cruise character in A Few Good Men, while the second one is Jack Nicholson screaming, "You want me on that wall" and "You can't handle the truth."
While both spouses are feeling a sense of relief (and in some cases glee) that comes from releasing years of unspoken rage, the collapse of this marriage seriously threatens the Democrat's ability to win the presidential race in November. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, she will still be able to capture the liberal elites vote, because like the evangelicals in the Republican Party, they may not love their spouse but they hate the other couple more. However, many African-Americans will stay home. Nothing between now and a Hillary Clinton nomination would convince a majority of African-Americans that this election was not stolen from Obama. While they may eventually come back to the marriage, the trial separation will last at least through November.
If Obama is the nominee, he will also face an uphill battle. While conventional wisdom holds that Obama will have a better chance of winning in November against McCain because he appeals to independents, conventional wisdom has been wrong throughout this election. Obama will have trouble holding onto many of the Clinton Democrats, who will become McCain Democrats, let alone appeal to the independents. In the meat-and-potato big states that Obama has lost to Clinton, they'd rather be with a true American hero, McCain, than be married to someone whose nuclear family treats them with arrogance and contempt, and keeps them in fear of being called racists. At the end of the day, Obama's new progressive movement may look a lot like McGovern's.
While the Republicans may not love their spouse, they'll stick by them in November (think Silda and Eliot). For the Democrats, it seems that the spouses will be too busy fighting and belittling each other to see what it's doing to the kids, and they may end up losing their marriage and their family.