Okay, so Hillary Clinton is a fighter who won't quit, and all Americans love a fighter, whether it's in an Olympic sport, a firefight in Afghanistan, a new iteration of "Survivor," a sparring match with Bill O'Reilly, or gun-mongering in Indiana.

The media-circus' ring-masters have confirmed that Hillary is a fighter -- as tough as any man!. And who would know better than the ring-masters themselves after she showed them deftly but definitively last Sunday that George Stephanopoulos is an intelligent mouse, sitting or pretending to stand?

It's enough to make you forget what Hillary Clinton is fighting for. It's enough to make you forget that she has come close to retartding both racial and class justice by her attempted surge in Indiana and North Carolina.

But it's also enough to remind me, at least, that Obama, with one stone, could wound the two vultures of racial and class resentment that Clinton has roused and sent to feed on him. I mean a clarion call, as only he could make it, for class-based rather than race-based affirmative action.

First I need to give the media ring-masters their due by assuring them we viewers all look forward to the day when a political leader turns the tables on the set of Meet the Press or Fox News Sunday.

We look forward to the moment when the guest starts lobbing hard questions at Stephanopoulos about how he differs from his father, a Greek-Orthodox priest, or at Chris Wallace about what he learned from his father's disgrace in court at the hands of Gen. William Westmoreland, or at Fox News' Nick Cavuto about how his adolescence in some Republican madrassah taught him to scream at and dress down strong, decent Democrats like Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin during what Fox still quaintly calls interviews.

"But... I'm not a public figure," the astonished media mouse will protest.

"You are now," the politician will answer calmly, "and it's time the American people were told who elected or anointed you to do what you're doing here today. It's time we knew what you had to do to get to that important chair you're sitting in"

But while we await that day (and I no longer know anyone who isn't waiting for it), let's indeed look at what Hillary Clinton is fighting for. She is fighting for the votes of hard-pressed, white working-class Americans. But that does not mean that she is fighting for their wellbeing, which almost everything she has actually done in this campaign has degraded.

Of course, without white working-class Americans' votes, Clinton couldn't attend to their wellbeing at all. Only naifs like Obama still believe the 1960s anti-war slogan, "There is no way to peace: Peace is the way." Clinton knows, in her fighter's gut, what all Americans have been taught, 24/7, for seven years: that war is the way to peace, that threatening to "obliterate" Iran is the way to show that she has what it takes to save Western civilization and the Judaeo-Christian Holy Land from fanatical Islam.

Clinton knows that she can get these folks' votes not by telling others (and them) that they're clinging to guns and churches in frustration; she can do it better by trading on, without acknowledging, what's all-too true in Obama's remark. She can tell the frustrated and the bitter directly, as in her mass mailing in Indiana, that Obama is two-faced on hand-gun bans. She can get their votes by proposing summer gas-tax relief she cannot deliver at the federal level.

Leadership matters, in politics and in the news media. When it's good, people are more effective and trusting. When it's bad, appealing to their lower viscera, they're more fearful and destructive and... bitter. Clinton is winning her targeted white working-class by narrowing its horizons. She is muddying its sightlines to true connections between personal struggles and public solutions.

This whipsawing back and forth between pandering and lashing out is what being a true, fighting American has become. It's what the media-circus' stand-up guys admire and what they really think is the only way to win in this fallen world. But, by my reckoning, they've missed two big ironies in today's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana, and their silence as well as their noise makes them complicit in what Clinton is doing to try to win them.

No one has noted, first, that when Obama said that frustrated people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment," he could have added just as truly that many develop cravings for junk food, trash TV, and so-called "extreme" fighting, which approximates gladiatorial combat in decadent, ancient Rome.

Had Obama noted this, of course, he'd have lost ground even more quickly and irredeemably than he did -- not because it isn't true, but because the truth hurts. That's why faux-populist conservatives pretend not to notice the epidemics of obesity, road rage, broken health, and public sexual degradation behind their lapel flag pins. The truth just hurts too much to acknowledge. People mired in trouble don't need to be reminded of it, any more than they need to be pandered to by false promises from Clinton. They'll chose the pander every time, though, if no good leaders are showing them a credible way out.

The second irony no ring-master noticed is that every kind of escapism ascribed to frustrated, white under-employed or over-worked people is present as well among millions of frustrated non-whites. What we used to call the ghetto has no shortages of bad churches, of guns, of junk-food diets and obesity, of trash TV and variants of "extreme" fighting or road rage.

Obviously, candidate Obama couldn't make this link between poor, black Southside Chicago and rural or rust-belt Pennsylvania and Indiana. He wasn't going to fold race into class.

Obama's biggest weakness, I noted here in February, is that some of his upscale liberal backers are silent about this, too, because linking race and class might threaten their own prerogatives and moral equilibrium. No, they're not self-righteous, snotty McGovernites, as the faux-populists charge; they're just innocent and ignorant of reality.

No media ring-master made the link between destitute Pennsylvanian whites and ghetto blacks, either, because the inner-city isn't in play electorally and so isn't of interest, except perhaps as a silent foil for racists who are angry at being reminded of the inner city in their own homes and hearts. That's the ur-story I told here before after the Pennsylvania.

Yet, if only we could link the two inner cities of America, we would be able to link race and class in ways that make it possible to re-imagine and reform the whole structure, starting, for example, with affirmative action that's less race-based and more class-based.

It could be Obama's way out of the race trap set for him by the Rev. Wright-mongers. When Fox News' Wallace asked him to name an issue on which he's willing to buck liberal Democrats, Obama could have said, with perfect justice, that it's time to really mend affirmative action, as Bill Clinton promised but failed to do.

Some of the white working people he's been losing would have seen past his blackness for the first time; blacks wouldn't have abandoned him, nor would idealistic, upscale whites. And Hillary Clinton would have had to defend openly the racialized preferences she has never challenged. That would have cost her votes while Obama advanced the national discussion and opened a lot of cankered hearts.

He found his moxie against phony gas-tax relief; why not against the color-coding of class injuries that are now widely shared across race lines? I'd love to have seen the expressions on Chris Wallace's and the other media ring-masters' faces.