And alas, she didn't. She's doing what she knows, and what unfortunately often works. I wouldn't have minded her pushing an experience frame, but the McCain stuff, I mean her odds don't look good if she runs on the neocon frame, not to mention distasteful. As to the Muslim thing, I keep telling myself that she is often misconstrued. That she gives cagey answers due to enduring one of America's longest gotcha games. (Although I wonder about the eerie silence on all sides that should be the loudest, What's wrong with Muslims?)

If she somehow pulls this one out, it won't be a classy win.

I've often wondered what would have happened if Hillary ran a different campaign...I think I would have had a lot harder of a time making up my mind...

A very thoughtful post. That she did follow the sleazy path just reinforced the negative "character" issue for potential supporters.

It was an indication that she could not be trusted as a president.

I would also have loved to see Hillary run that kind of campaign. Appealing to people's better natures is Barack's game right now, and she could have stolen that right out from under him. She may not be as talented an orator, but she can be incredibly charming in the right circumstances. I really wish that she had spoken to what's best in us from what's best in her.

Perhaps like Gore and Kerry before her, losing her race will free her to be a better, looser, less risk-averse Hillary.

The optimist in me wishes for that, and wishes for that better Hillary to campaign hard for Obama. Idealistic, I know, but she would change a lot of people's minds about her & maybe help win the damn election.

Excellent, thought-provoking post and comments! It goes to the heart of concerns about leadership, judgment, and character that have led so many of us to choose Obama over Clinton.

Obama did say after SC that the Clintons were not racists.

Obama did say that he regretted saying that Clinton was likable enough. His regret was a campaign strategy regret, but nonetheless he realized that the comment tended to diminish Clinton and he shouldn't have said it.

Chris Matthew apologized for his comments. The people who claim Obama is a muslim or that Wright is totally hateful have not apologized.

I agree he should have made Jesse Jackson, Jr. apologize for his remarks. I don't know why he didn't. But he forced Power to apologize immediately and then resign for her "monster" remark.

Your confirmation bias perhaps induces you to overlook these aspects of the campaign give and take.

Very funny post. The Clintons have been slimed by every network shill and Obama supporter more than Karl Rove in his heyday and you decide it is fun to start a "What if Hillary hadn’t gone to the scullery?" post. You Obama supporters just do not get it. You will lose the general election by a landslide unless you get 90% of Clinton supporters, and all you do is keep going negative and slimy. McCain will win in a landslide at this rate if Obama is able to hoodwink you trolls enough to win the nomination.

Pulling out all the stops to beat your opponent reminds too many people of the last 7 years spent with that moron as president. That's not what people want anymore.

Besides the fact that blaming the Clinton campaign for spreading the Muslim rumors is utter bullshit, can someone please explain how it would in any way be racist? Do you think the standard stereotype of black people is that they're secret Muslims? The fact is, you can't gin up enough outrage about the Muslim thing, so you have to call it racism. This is what makes Obama supporters so despicable.

And what if Obama had decided early on not to describe Hillary as a "dishonest" person who will "do anything to win"? What if his campaign co-chair hadn't gone on televison right after New Hmapshire to say that she didn't care about the Katrina victims?

Hillary tried to defend Obama on 60 Minutes, and you assholes used it as an opportunity to demonize her. I wouldn't be surprised if she told Obama to go fuck himself with the Wright thing. What you fail to point out is that she made no public statements that took advantage of the situation.

This is why she is unfit and unworthy to lead this great nation of ours.

Thank you for highlighting her stingy response to Tuesday's speech. I've been saying it, but it was good to see it in print. She could not even find the common decency to acknowledge what is a basic progressive value.

Stinginess of heart and mind is what I see with each passing day. I do not recognize The Clintons anymore.

Some say Hillary is right to fight dirty, but to what ends and what consequences? Is it okay to abandon principle and party?

Regardless if true or not, the "impression" that Hillary's only concern means winning at any cost is starting to set-in. Winning is not as important as how you play the game.

If Hillary is, as she claims to be, a fighter why not fight for moral principle? Apparently raw ambition has clouded her judgment. Her advisers may be telling her what to do, but she chose to follow their advice by playing hard-ball and using gutter-snipe tactics against Obama.

Clinton seems oblivious to the possibility that her strategy may do lasting damage to the party and/or blow the chance to seat a democrat in the WH. Is she really willing to go down that road?

Losing sight of the goal will cost much more, in the long run, than Hillary losing the nomination.

More importantly this is not about Hillary or Obama; it is about the country and the type of leadership the people expect. If she is a true leader she ought to act like one, stop the pettiness and stand up for what is right.

Allowing her advisors to dictate the terms of her candidacy Hillary, with abandoned regard for principle and party, lost sight of the bigger picture. Maybe she will regain her sight; if so it speaks to character. If not ... well, either way we will know ....

It takes courage to stand on principle.

Does Hillary have the moral courage to do so?

True, maybe I'm just equivocating, hmmm.

I do not often read David Brooks, NYTimes op-ed columnist, but this time he gets it right!

Articles alluding to Hillary's investment in her own "rightness" are becoming more frequent. Dating back to 1992 Jim Cooper( D-Tn) "warned that her [health] plan would never get through Congress. Clinton’s response, Cooper now says, was: “We’ll crush you. You’ll wish you never mentioned this to me.”

Cooper had a different health plan, but she would hear nothing of it! Hillary, pretended to play nice for awhile until the time was right to strike.... and strike she did.

A definite pattern is emerging eerily similar to Bush&Co. Hillary's political turpitude is unsettling. My distrust grows daily.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`````
The Cooper Concerns

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: February 5, 2008

I’m not a Hillary-hater. She’s been an outstanding senator. She hung tough on Iraq through the dark days of 2005. In this campaign, she has soldiered on bravely even though she has most of the elected Democrats, news media and the educated class rooting against her.

But there are certain moments when her dark side emerges and threatens to undo the good she is trying to achieve. Her campaign tactics before the South Carolina primary were one such moment. Another, deeper in her past, involved Jim Cooper, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee.

Cooper is one of the most thoughtful, cordial and well-prepared members of the House. In 1992, he came up with a health care reform plan that would go on to attract wide, bipartisan support. A later version had 58 co-sponsors in the House — 26 Republicans and 32 Democrats. It was sponsored in the Senate by Democrat John Breaux and embraced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, among others.

But unlike the plan Hillary Clinton came up with then, the Cooper plan did not include employer mandates to force universal coverage.

On June 15, 1993, Cooper met with Clinton to discuss their differences. Clinton was “ice cold” at the meeting, Cooper recalls. “It was the coldest reception of my life. I was excoriated.”

Cooper told her that she was getting pulled too far to the left. He warned that her plan would never get through Congress. Clinton’s response, Cooper now says, was: “We’ll crush you. You’ll wish you never mentioned this to me.”

In the weeks and months following that meeting, the Clinton administration reached out to Cooper. As David Broder and Haynes Johnson wrote in “The System,” their history of the health care reform effort, President Bill Clinton invited Cooper to go jogging and play golf. Others in the Clinton White House thought Cooper was right on the merits, and privately let him know.

But Hillary Clinton set up a war room to oppose Cooper, who was planning to run for the Senate in 1994. As the Broder and Johnson book makes clear, Clinton and her aides believed Cooper was pursuing his own political agenda. They accused him of crafting his plan in order to raise money from the insurance and hospital industries. They said he was in league with the for-profit hospitals to crush competitors and monopolize the industry. They did this despite the fact that Cooper’s centrist health care approach was entirely consistent with his overall philosophy.

At one meeting in the West Wing, a source told Broder and Johnson, Clinton “kind of got this evil look and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this Cooper bill. We’ve got to kill it before it goes any further.’ ”

Clinton denounced the Cooper plan as “dangerous and threatening.” Deputies were dispatched to Tennessee to attack his plan. Senator Jay Rockefeller said that Cooper is “a real fraud. I hope he doesn’t make it to this place.” According to Newsweek, Clinton brought an aide with a video camera to a meeting with senators and asked the senators to denounce Cooper on the spot.

The Clinton effort backfired. It temporarily raised his profile back home. Her health care reform failed, too. She says she’s learned the lessons from that failure, but she remains icy toward Cooper. Her health care memos, including a three-page memo drafted in preparation for her meeting with Cooper, have not been made public by the National Archives.

Moreover, the debate Clinton is having with Barack Obama echoes the debate she had with Cooper 15 years ago. The issue, once again, is over whether to use government to coerce people into getting coverage. The Clintonites argue that without coercion, there will be free-riders on the system.

They’ve got a point. But there are serious health care economists on both sides of the issue. And in the heat of battle, Clinton has turned the debate between universal coverage and universal access into a sort of philosophical holy grail, with a party of righteousness and a party of error. She’s imposed Manichaean categories on a technical issue, just as she did a decade and half ago. And she’s done it even though she hasn’t answered legitimate questions about how she would enforce her universal coverage mandate.

Cooper, who, not surprisingly, supports Barack Obama, believes that Clinton hasn’t changed. “Hillary’s approach is so absolutist, draconian and intolerant, it means a replay of 1993.”

He argues that her more coercive approach would once again be a political death knell. No Republican will support it. Red state Democrats will face impossible pressures at home. It’s smarter to begin by offering people affordable access to coverage and evolve from there.

Cooper is, of course, a man who has been burned in the past. But it is legitimate to wonder if adults can really change all that much. A defter politician would have reached out to Cooper and made an attempt to address the concerns he represents.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~````

KatJam

Exactly!!

It parallels the current pResident that suggests more of the same.