And of course, as this continues to play out it continues to help McCain’s chances:
[i]WONDERLAND
by Daniel Henninger
Why Hillary Goes Nuclear
May 29, 2008; Page A15
Hillary is right: Weird stuff really could happen in June. Rafael Nadal could lose the French Open. Big Brown could lose at Belmont. Alan Greenspan could admit error. But I’ve got a list of things that will never happen to Barack Obama this June.
This June, Barack Obama will not call for extending the Bush tax cuts.
In June, Barack Obama will not say the surge proves the U.S. should stay the course in Iraq.
Not in this or any June will Barack Obama come out for private health savings accounts.
June will freeze over before Barack Obama says the Bush warrantless wiretap program has made Americans safer. In fact, Hillary Clinton herself won’t say any of these things either.
Hillary is right. Whether running for president or playing the lottery, you never know. Here, though, is one constant in a knuckleball world: In any month she can name the past year, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been singing from the same hymnal to the same Democratic choir.
Analysts who’ve scrubbed the details of their campaigns’ policy proposals note that with the exception of one difference in their health-care plans and on talking to Iran, you’ll find more variation in the Everly Brothers than between these two Democratic voices.
Which is why Hillary keeps going nuclear.
Because of the iron law of Democratic primaries �?? Run Liberal or Die �?? she couldn’t distinguish herself from Obama in any substantive way. The last primary Democrat who tried to go to the pack’s right was Joe Lieberman. He was run out of the party. For a candidate locked left on substance, only one big piece of political artillery remains: Get personal.
Thus we heard a former two-term American president say in South Carolina that the Obama victory looked like Jesse Jackson’s one win. It’s why Hillary intimated that Obama has some weird problem with “white” voters. Or in the campaign’s greatest boardinghouse reach, after a debate interlocutor asked Sen. Obama about his relationship with the former terrorist William Ayers, Hillary added arcane detail to the Ayers story.
Whatever tangled synapses of ambition and resentment released the remark about Robert Kennedy’s assassination, candidate Clinton’s head has spent too much time believing the personal is political.
Back before this campaign began, the Hillary who left bipartisan audiences impressed and thinking well of her spoke to her strength, which is to give the impression that she does fresh thinking about old problems. At a Wall Street Journal conference on health care several years ago, she talked in interesting detail about hospitals and the need for portable electronic health-care records. One of her biggest applause lines the day I watched her do blue-collar primary venues in northern Ohio was when she’d ask how many people needed help with college debt. It was a shrewd, and legitimate, insight. The combined income of many middle-class couples puts them outside the guidelines used to give scholarship money. But after she won Ohio and Texas, with Rev. Wright raging on YouTube, her talk turned to Obama’s “white” problem.
Some say the politics of personal destruction is part of the Clinton DNA. Still, the past three Democratic primary cycles have displayed a liberalish homogeneity on policy. But when the need comes to escalate, the nuclear option is to get personal. Her team knows the drill.
John McCain is not bound by the rules of the Democratic primaries. He has an option not available to Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or Dennis Kucinich: Pull away the curtain of eloquence, and what the politics of Barack Obama reveal is a very standard liberal, at best.
His stated view of how to relieve the plight of young black men in failing school is what the teachers unions have had on offer for 20 years.
In July 2007 remarks on selecting judges, reprinted yesterday in the New York Times, Obama conveyed a philosophy grounded in a remarkably explicit obsession with class and incomes.
To the entitlement bombs of Social Security and Medicare, he would add expansions of Medicaid and subsidies to some businesses for health-care costs.
His desire to raise the cap on Social Security taxes will hit the $100,000 two-income families who applauded Hillary’s appeal on college debt.
My friends, Sen. Obama is very eloquent, but he is also going to be very, very expensive. It may turn out that an angry, inflation-pressed America just wants to vote for an aura. Feel free, so to speak. John McCain’s job will be to explain the price of voting for eloquence.
Write to henninger@wsj.com[/i]