Things certainly are in flux in the presidential races of both parties. The rise of Mike Huckabee among the Republicans has been well covered. Now the story is the rise of Barack Obama, or, perhaps more accurately, the sinking of Hillary Clinton. Peggy Noonan puts it well:
This thought occurs that Hillary Clinton's entire campaign is, and always was, a Potemkin village, a giant head fake, a haughty facade hollow at the core. That she is disorganized on the ground in Iowa, taken aback by a challenge to her invincibility, that she doesn't actually have an A team, that her advisers have always been chosen more for proven loyalty than talent, that her supporters don't feel deep affection for her. That she's scrambling chaotically to catch up, with surrogates saying scuzzy things about Barack Obama and drug use, and her following up with apologies that will, as always, keep the story alive. That her guru-pollster, the almost universally disliked Mark Penn, has, according to Newsday, become the focus of charges that he has "mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent" and that the top officials on the campaign have never had a real understanding of Iowa.
As Noonan goes on to say, the Clinton team looked on this contest less as a campaign than a coronation. I still think Clinton is the favorite, but her weaknesses have been revealed. And more revealingly, they have been exposed by herself as much as by her opponents. Take the story surrounding her campaign's lame discussion about Obama's kindergarten essays or the recent one about Obama's past drug use. There is an air of meanness and desperation in these attacks. In the recent case involving drugs one sees a typical Clinton ploy: get your surrogate to poison the well with by talking about Obama's checkered past and then attempt to take the high ground by saying, "Hey, it wasn't me, it was just this campaign lackey." Add these campaign tactics with the Clinton record of ethical lapses, and one gets a picture of someone who perhaps should not be trusted with power.
It is a shame that the grown-ups in the Democratic race, namely Joe Biden and Bill Richardson, appear to be going no where as candidates. Perhaps the Democratic voters should give them a second look just as they are now giving Sen. Clinton a second not-so-favorable look.
Here is the video of the moment Andrew Sullivan calls "One of those split-second responses in which political authority is passed from one person to another."
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