Why Obama and Not Hillary?

Andrew Sullivan spells it out in the current issue of Time magazine in an article entitled: "Don’t screw up, Democrats, Barack Obama is your man":

"[Hillary] has extraordinary negatives. She galvanises the conservative movement in ways no other Democrat can. Against McCain, she and she alone enables the Republicans to forget their deep internal divisions and unite. Nothing – nothing – unites them as she does. The money she will raise for the Republicans is close to the amount they can raise for themselves. If you’re a hard-nosed Democrat, especially in a state that leans Republican or that voted for Bush, she is potentially toxic to your chances. No Democrat in Nebraska wants to counter an advertisement morphing his face with Hillary’s.

"Hence the endorsements Obama has secured: Janet Napolitano, Democratic governor of Arizona; Kathleen Sebelius, Democratic governor of Kansas; Claire McCaskill, Democratic senator from Missouri; Tim Kaine, Democratic governor of Virginia, and Ben Nelson, Democratic senator from Nebraska.

"What do all these states have in common? They are all states that George W Bush won twice. If you’re the next generation of Democrat, trying to appeal to the centre of the country, Obama is your candidate. Clinton takes the party and national politics back to the polarised red-blue ideological past. The danger of this is that if you are someone in the middle – on the purple edge of the red-blue divide – then the polarising nature of Clinton might mean that if she were the candidate you might vote Republican. Obama is the salve for this syndrome.

"The polling data are clear on this as well. Obama’s margins of victory over most Republican candidates are greater than Clinton’s. He is more liberal in some respects but he tends to be more liberal in those areas where the Democrats are strongest, primarily Iraq where his antiwar stance has resonance."

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