I keep reading about the Clinton and Obama campaigns’ mutual bitterness. Take Charlie Rangel‘s editorial in the New York Daily News on June 10:

There may be some residual bitterness among supporters on both sides, but there’s no question the wounds will heal, and the Democratic Party will enter this election season stronger than it has been in recent years.
[...]
It’s only natural that after such a grueling campaign – which brought forth so much personal emotion – some hard feelings would linger for a while.

Of course, Rangel is busy trying to paper over the differences between the two sides. It’s pretty self-evident that the hard feelings between these two campaigns go a lot deeper than what might be considered natural after a hard-fought campaign. There have been hard-fought campaigns before. What we have never seen before is the astonishing number of hard-core Clintonites who are seething with so much anger that they are determined not to support Obama.

On the day of the Kentucky primary, exit polls showed that 71% of Obama supporters would vote for Clinton if she were the nominee, but only 33% of Clinton supporters would vote for Obama.

As Clinton herself has pointed out to her supporters, this makes absolutely no sense. If you believe in what Clinton stands for, what Clinton’s campaign was all about, how can you possibly prefer McCain as the next president? And yet, large numbers of fervent Clinton supporters still proudly proclaim that they’d rather see McCain as president than vote for Obama, let alone work for him.

Maybe, as everyone predicts, some of this bitterness will subside between now and November. Maybe most of Hillary’s supporters will eventually vote their beliefs about how this country should be run and not their Obama-bitterness.

But what baffles me is this whole phenomenon of the raging bitterness of (some) Clintonites towards Obama.

Frankly, it would be much easier to understand such bitterness if it flowed the other way. Hillary Clinton deliberately ran a deeply divisive campaign. She pulled every dirty trick she could, from shamelessly exploiting and subtly fueling Obama-is-a-Muslim rumors to covert and overt racist appeals. Long after it was clear that mathematically she simply wasn’t going to be able to close the delegate gap, she did all she possibly could do to undermine the legitimacy of Obama’s looming victory.

But when I look at the campaign Obama ran, I’m just not able to identify any rational basis for The Bitter Clintonites’ bitterness towards the Obama camp. I really wish someone would explain to me exactly what these people are supposed to be so bitter about.

*** Update, 6:49 am ***

Here’s a positive sign, from the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal national poll:

Obama is also ahead among those who said they voted for Clinton in the Democratic primaries (61-19).

Could this bitterness I was addressing just be a lunatic fringe thing? Other than Kentucky voters messing with exit pollsters, that is.