Rocco DiPippo provides a riveting account of how far-leftists, notably those who dominate academe, now control the Democratic primary season and thus put Obama within striking distance of the White House:

There was a pre-Lewinsky time, before moral relativism blurred America’s vision, when associating with people like Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers would have automatically excluded someone from attaining the highest office in the land. Back then, anyone with well known connections to such America-averse personalities would have been … almost certainly blocked by the Democratic Party … The Democratic Party has devolved into a club for the illegitimately aggrieved, the self-absorbed, the self-hating and the perpetually p[***]ed-off. It is a sanctuary where solipsistic malcontents and their disjointed causes find refuge and support. It has long ceased being an earnest gathering of broad minds where man’s timeless problems are examined against the backdrop of the Constitution and solutions to them proposed based on the actual realities of the human condition. It is now the political province of the intellectually deceased, where frightened, lock-step ideologues and other small men and women concoct and promote divisive, destructive, weird and cowardly policies developed within a not-so-quaint, quasi-Marxist stricture of gender, class and race.

This intellectual-political death has been caused primarily by the intellectually dying academy, which for decades has haughtily led the club and, forsaking intellect for ideology and political activism, molded the very weird and very potentially dangerous Democratic Party.