Poll this

If you read No Quarter, your attention has already been drawn to these CNN poll numbers, which indicate that PUMA has become a cat with claws:

In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey completed in early June before the New York senator ended her White House bid, 60 percent of Clinton backers polled said they planned on voting for Obama. In the latest poll, that number has dropped to 54 percent.

In early June, 22 percent of Clinton supporters polled said they would not vote at all if Obama were the party's nominee, now close to a third say they will stay home.

In another sign the wounds of the heated primary race have yet to heal, 43 percent of registered Democrats polled still say they would prefer Clinton to be the party's presidential nominee.

That number is significantly higher than it was in early June, when 35 percent of Democrats polled said they preferred Clinton to lead the party's presidential ticket.

Obama won 59 percent of support from registered Democrats polled in June; now he garners 54 percent.

And then, just to prove that they still don't get it:

"These things always take time to heal," said Bill Schneider, CNN senior political analyst. "I think Clinton's supporters are waiting to see if Sen. Obama will pick her as vice president. That would certainly be very healing to them."

When will these fools understand? This is not about Hillary. It's about Obama.

The electorate -- including schlubs like yours truly, who voted for the guy in the primary -- learned too late that Barack Obama is just another crooked Chicago pol, part of the Blagojevich/Daley/Rezko "combine." And he lies and lies and lies. Incessantly. Many of us would prefer for Hillary to stay away from such a toxic running mate.

Obama's so-called "move to the center" has not garnered him any evangelical/conservative votes to make up for the PUMA deficit. Instead, he has annoyed his prog base and established a rep as the "say anything" candidate. Take, for example, his NAFTA flip flop. Most voters do not view it as an example of canny centrist positioning. They view his flip-flop as a flip-flop.

In a year in which a generic Dem beats a generic Republican by 20 points, Obama can't move more than five points ahead of McCain in most head-to-head polls. I doubt that the sitch will improve for him.

Well, the Dems could always pull a flip-flop of their own, and go for Hillary in Denver. Such a thing is possible -- unlikely, but possible. If that happened, the African American electorate would attribute the switch to racism, and there would be hell to pay. Indeed, if the Dems were to pick Clinton and McCain were to choose Colin Powell as a running mate, the black vote might well be split.

So the Democrats must head to the altar with Obama, even though the love has started to curdle.

By the way: I may be posting light this weekend. A 500 gig Maxtor external hard drive just crapped out on me. It was stuffed to the gills with data necessary to the earning of what I laughingly call a living. I extracted the actual drive from its casing in order to install it as a normal internal drive. But the thing continues to emit an ominous beep every fifteen seconds, and the computer refuses to boot up as long as the drive is attached. Most of the time, I can't even get into the BIOS screen -- and when I can, the system won't recognise the drive's existence, and won't boot Windows.)

I'm trying the "freezer trick" at this writing. This has worked for me before, but on this occasion, hope seems dim. Any other suggestions? (I'm told that data recovery costs a grand or so, and the bucks just ain't there.)