Sullivan’s doing all primary all the time today, and his reaction to last night’s Hillary win is close to my own - a whiff of despair. 

On the surface, a partisan like me is supposed to be in favor of a Hillary candidacy. Yes, she’s a polarizing figure - but what would be better than jamming Hillary, of all people, down the conservative movement’s collective throat?

But I don’t like Hillary specifically because she’s so polarizing. I’ve certainly engaged in a tremendous amount of partisan sniping at the Bush administration and the conservative movement in general - while retaining a soft spot for paleoconservatives and others on the right side of the fence who have themselves been made nervous by the arrogant unilateralism of the past seven years. I thought Bill Clinton was far better at governance than our current president, that is for sure. But my own partisn rancor was in large part a response to the partisan rancor generated by the conservative movement then; I simply decided at some point that liberalism needed to give as good as it got, and not take all the smears and invective lying down. Bullies need to be smacked in the mouth, so I balled up my fist and swung away.

But now there comes a time for a clean break with all of that. Eight years of Clinton and partisn rancor; eight years of Bush and partisan rancor. I would ask even those who would like nothing better than to wallow in the schadenfreude, who would like to tell the Limbaughs and the Hannitys of the world to suck on it by electing Hillary - are we going to do this for another four years, or eight? Can we do it? Obama has the ability to transcend all that if only because he’s not as much a known quantity as Hillary, or even John Edwards; the country, as Sullivan notes, “is being given a chance to move beyond its vicious partisan, polarizing past, and last night, core Democrats picked the most polarizing figure in the country.”

I’m sure most didn’t vote for Hillary because they wanted to keep the Polarization Express rolling. But that may be the ultimate effect of what they have done.