The Economist: Obama deserves the Nomination

As The Economist went to press, Mrs Clinton was publicly still promising to keep on fighting right the way to the Denver convention. That remains her right. But it is hard to see what she, her party or her country can gain from the struggle.

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If Mrs Clinton bows out in the next week or so, her reputation as a tough fighter—one who has definitively forged a personality separate from her husband's—will have been enhanced. The only justification for her struggling on (assuming the money is there for her to do so) and probably plunging her party into legal warfare, would be the idea that her opponent is somehow unworthy of the nomination—in particular that Mr Obama is bound to lose in November, or that he is bound to be a poor president.

Neither charge stands up.

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True, Mrs Clinton seems more popular among white working- and middle-class Americans. That puts Mr Obama at something of a disadvantage against John McCain, the Republican nominee. But arguments about Mr Obama's allure to white voters boil down rather too often to a coded argument about race: would America elect a black man? The United States still has big problems with race (see article), but its effect in the general election may be exaggerated.

Mr Obama's main problem with white voters may have more to do with class than race. To the white working man and woman, he has been seen too often as an aloof elitist, who can't drink whisky, displays a suspicious familiarity with the price of an arugula salad and memorably bowled a deplorable 37 in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Toffishness doomed John Kerry; but with Mr Obama, a child of a single mother who sometimes used food stamps, that picture is surely reversible.

Meanwhile, Mr Obama attracts other voters in a way Mrs Clinton never has. For every white bigot who switches sides because of Mr Obama's skin colour, there is likely to be a white independent—especially a young one—running to support him. The data show that young people, both black and white, prefer Mr Obama.