Between Barack and a Hard Place

I'll disagree with what Matthew Yglesias writes here and point to the post just below it. Politically there may not be a vast difference between Clinton and Obama, or at least, both candidates have given themselves sufficient wiggle room that whatever those differences are aren't likely to play out beyond the rather vague horserace indicators, like when one candidate stands and the other doesn't during the President's State of the Union.

Electorally, though, the candidates promise very different elections. If Obama wins the primary, breathless Obamafandom dies instantly among conservative pundits—but so does mouthbreathing Clintonhatred disappear among the base, the dragon having been vanquished. Rabid hatred isn't so transferable as the right might wish. There would be frightening room for unforced errors from the untested Obama campaign, but beyond the crass racist appeal (hints of which we've already seen) and I would even imagine in spite of the racist blunders from the Imuses and so on who won't be able to keep their mouths shut during a general election (which would affect the right's appeal to the middle), whatever conservative conventional wisdom emerges on Obama cannot hope to match in terms of temper or pervasiveness the right's standard lying line on the Clintons, built up from the hardened bilious secretions of a fevered conservative organ that has brooded in its indigestion for more than a decade.

On the right, then, we have McCain—who remains on every issue (except neverending war) the least conservative candidate to vie for 2008—whose paradoxical strategy depends on appealing to independents who fundamentally disagree with what he's saying, that is, with the rhetoric he has tailored for a base that is turned off by him. He presumes quite rightly that the press will hide his seams, but I'd think that Obama would compete for some of those "maverick" votes that make up McCain's center/right compromise candidacy even as the base, with no Clinton candidacy to contemplate, wipes the foam from its mouth and stays home.

Clinton energizes McCain, whereas Obama draws from McCain—granted, for reasons that have no resemblance to the actual differences between Clinton and Obama, but nevertheless.