Post-Iowa, one of my coworkers suggested that Obama’s win was a good thing for the Democrats because Clinton is too “polarizing” to win in the general election.

It’s certainly true Clinton does draw a fanatical degree of hostility from the right (and even from some on the left), but if any other Democrat gets a shot at the White House, I think the right will find them just as polarizing and will have little trouble whipping up a similar level of hate.

Consider Sen. Kerry, whose presidential run generated accusations he self-inflicted wounds in order to qualify for a Purple Heart—charges that came from the same political wing that likes to run around screaming that Democrats don’t respect the American soldier.

Or consider Barack Obama, and the e-mail rumor campaign falsely claiming that Obama is a Muslim, attended an extremist Wahhabi Muslim school as a child, swore his oath of office on the Koran and only belongs to the United Church of Christ for political reasons—and might even be a Muslim plant designed to sneak into the highest office in America in order to destroy us! All of these are lies; so is the statement that Snopes has confirmed them (Snopes, the urban-legend busting Web site, has branded them all false).

In the same vein, the right-wing FreeRepublic Web site asserted after Obama’s Iowa win that “Hussein Obama’s” failings include “weakness against his jihadi brethren” and that “we should all come together tonight and agree on a common strategy that will keep the White House from becoming a madrassa”

It doesn’t matter who the Democrats nominate, it’s going to get ugly. There’s a hard core of Republican crazies (my apologies, as usual, to Republicans who don’t share this view) for whom this country is supposed to be a one-party state: The mere idea of someone challenging the Republican candidate is inherently offensive to them (remember conservative pundit Kathleen Parker’s 2004 column in which she quotes, apparently sympathetically, a man who said all the Democratic candidates should be executed for questioning Bush’s Iraq policies?). Views that deviate from party doctrine are by definition unAmerican, and anyone who questions the Glorious Supreme Republican Leader is a traitor to the country.

With that kind of thinking in play—and a fair number of pundits such as Parker or Limbaugh who cater to it—the only way the Democrats can escape polarization is by not fielding candidates.

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