NARAL Blowback

Dana Goldstein notes that there appears to be a massive backlash from state NARAL chapters and major financial supporters against the group's decision to endorse Barack Obama. National NARAL seems to have gotten too clever by half here. They essentially endorsed Obama in an Obama-McCain race, which would have been a non-story, but by jumping the gun by a couple of weeks thought they could earn themselves some brownie points and get some attention.

But it got attention, of course, because the timing made it a bit of a shivving of Hillary Clinton even though in the real world they waited until after Clinton had dropped well below the threshold of viability. And now people are mad. At the end of the day, this seems to be a situation where a little less clever PR and a little more education and outreach could have done some work -- it's clear that many of Clinton's fans genuinely don't understand that it's not possible for her to make up the ground she needs to and view efforts to get her to drop out as unfair efforts to rig things for Obama.