Forget the pundit-desired intra-party battle: start the campaign for the Presidency against the presumptive Republican nominee McCain right now!

We’ve seen Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton debating and campaigning against each other for nearly a year.  They both acknowledge their policies differences are slight, but they both have enormous differences with the Republican candidates.  Why not take this golden opportunity to show the voters in the remaining primary states how each candidate will campaign for the Presidency itself against the Republicans.  This is a new way, a new data point, for Barack and Hillary to display any differences they might have, campaign style, without having to go after each other.

It helps the party by promoting a sense of unity instead of playing into the media chorus for a schism.  It improves the Democratic message by yielding two simultaneous and powerful voices against the Republican machine.  And it puts the Republican presumptive nominee in a more difficult position by having to battle not one candidate, but two.

Many have been trying to convince the Democrats that not having a nominee by now puts us at a disadvantage, but nothing could be further from the truth.  The Democrats are actually an enviable position.  Add to this the fact that John McCain needs to spend the next several weeks to months moving to the right to shore up his base, thus making him an even easier target for the Democratic candidates, and Democrats can comfortably realize they should all be thrilled they have two potent candidates still actively on their side.

The last laugh as usual will be on us once all those campaign IOU’s come due.

The corporate lobbyists and their employeers have been the only ones really laughing for decades at how easy it is to con an American voter into thinking they actually have a choice as to what’s going to happen to them.