Is Obama in danger of driving votes to Nader and McKinney?
Given that it seems increasingly likely that Barack Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, now might be an appropriate time to raise some doubts about his viability as a candidate in the fall. A popular claim for some years on sites such as DailyKos, MyDD, and sometimes TPM, is that votes for Ralph Nader were responsible for putting (and keeping) George W. Bush in the White House. Is the Obama candidacy primed to repeat this situation? Marcy Winograd is an Executive Board member of the California Democratic Party. She initiated a story that has played on MyDD, Huffington Post, etc., that Obama operatives have been involved in a purge of possible delegates from California to the Democratic Convention to be held this summer. Winograd suggested that the California Obama campaign had purged almost all progressive anti-war activists from its delegate candidate lists. I am reminded of the situation at the Democratic Convention in Boston four years ago when Kerry was nominated. An
