Can Barack Obama Take the Nomination After All?
Senator Hillary Clinton has been considered the inevitable Democratic nominee for President for 2008, if not the inevitable President ever since John Kerry lost the election of 2004. Recent events, plus inherent character flaws, have made Mrs. Clinton inevitable no more.Some analysts have suggested that Senator Clinton's fall began during the debate during which she mangled the answer to the question on driver's licenses for illegal immigrants. Mrs. Clinton managed multiple flip flops in the space of about three minutes, a feat that has likely never before been matched in American politics. The moment has been compared to Howard Dean's scream. (Dean, by the way, was another inevitable candidate until people decided that he was bat raving nuts.)
However it can be argued that Senator Clinton's fall from inevitability was-well-inevitable. She has all the capacity of duplicity and corruption of her husband, but none of his oily charm. She is shrill on the stump and evasive in debates and interviews. Her laugh makes her sound like the Wicked Witch of the West. And, besides, Democrats are a little tired of Clintonian triangulation. They want their issues to be unsullied by political artifice.
As of this writing, Barack Obama, a United States Senator of less than three years service, has pulled ahead in the caucus state of Iowa and is closing the gap everywhere else. This was not suppose to have happened.
Mrs. Clinton is not taking her plummet in the polls laying down. She is launching a barrage of attacks on Obama that has not been seen in a Democratic primary race since the Kennedys put away both Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. The Clinton Campaign has even dug up an old grade school essay Obama wrote about why he wanted to be President. It's proof, the Clintons say, that Obama was power mad from the cradle. Now trying to manufacture of scandal that happened when the opponent was age eight is, to say the least, brisk and bold. For a Clinton to accuse someone else of being power mad is sort of like Jack the Ripper accusing someone of liking to cut up women.
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