From Hillary’s Kentucky-fried stump speech, to Oprah’s unsettlingly delirious endorsement of Obama, to Hillary’s invocation of Martin Luther King’s ghost, to Obama’s Afrocentric church, and on and on . . .

Forget talk about the race card; the whole deck has been compromised, and the Democratic showdown has become the most unseemly sociopolitical spectacle in recent memory. This blight on America’s reputation as a trailblazing plurality harkens straight back to the Tom Wolfe nineteen-eighties—but it’s worse.

The full-blown multiculturalism of the nineties and naughts was supposed to have delivered us from our silly prejudices into the great Benetton rainbow of modern citizenship. Instead it put a lid on many legitimate questions facing the diverse polity that is twenty-first century America. Simultaneously, the new rules offered a how-to manual for pundits waiting on the sidelines hoping to catch public figures being “intolerant.”

Hillary Clinton’s no-holds-barred ambition, and Barack Obama’s—it has to be said—audacity have ripped the lid off the great jar of gripes, and now, a nation in a genuine war for its survival is being urged to choose their next leader by pouring over the daily parsings and damage control measures of the candidates. In 2004, the Democrats could only run against George Bush, and it cost them the White House; this time around they’ve launched a tawdry War of The Roses for which they’ll pay heavily.