This is a very, very obvious flaw in her strategy. She boxed herself into a corner, and now its all she has. She is not in control of her destiny, the only way for her to win is for Obama to be diminished. She has/had an opening with Wright, but he made it small enough to where it will still be difficult to overcome.

This was the only way the party could lose in the fall, and looks like it probably will (even if Obama manages to hold onto the nomination, she'll have damaged him too much to win). All because of the selfishness of the Clintons and the gutlessness of the party leaders. Thanks for nothing, folks. I've had it. If Clinton scams the nomination, I'm sitting this one out or voting for Nader if he's on the Ohio ballot. She won't need my help to lose big, so why should I hold my nose?

Jesus, the Democratic party makes me sick.

Um...I can blame them because Hillary Clinton shouldn't be giving them their marching orders. They shouldn't just take Clinton's word for it--they should actually look and see if McCain knows what the hell he is talking about. But, of course, starry-eyed idealist that I am, that would be asking too much.

And Obama called her on it.

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/03/obama_if_we_debate_mccain_on_n.php

Senator Clinton says that she and Senator McCain have passed a “Commander in Chief test” -- not because of the judgments they’ve made, but because of the years they’ve spent in Washington.....

It is time to have a debate with John McCain about the future of our national security. And the way to win that debate is not to compete with John McCain over who has more experience in Washington, because that’s a contest that he’ll win. The way to win a debate with John McCain is not to talk, and act, and vote like him on national security, because then we all lose.

The way to win that debate and to keep America safe is to offer a clear contrast, and that’s what I will do when I am the nominee of the Democratic Party – because since before this war in Iraq began, I have made different judgments, I have a different vision, and I will offer a clean break from the failed policies and politics of the past.

"""because since before this war in Iraq began, I have made different judgments, I have a different vision"""

You certainly did Senator Obama, you decide to hang out with the America haters, those that proclaim, G-D DAMN AMERICA!, those that blame America for eveything including AIDS. You hung with terrorists like Mr. Ayers who attacked our Pentagon and our police.

And today you proclaim you want to hang with more of Americans enemies, like Castro, and Ahmedinajadh, you seem to have an affinity for anti-American types.

Must be why you took your current bride, with her inability to have pride in her country and your mentor and his inability to love the country and its people.

etc. etc. McCain will never say it, but its a good comeback.

I get the impression that certain people just like to let loose with a group of endless talking points for the sake of it. Do they point to their right wing friends and "score points" showing how many blogs they've spammed with the talking points they've been handed?

I mean-- you have so much endless b-s just strung together in a single blog comment it's almost... impressive.

Incidentally, McCain has proved himself to be too stupid to be president, so we should just accept that not only is it not going to happen, but it's also a bad idea.

John Edwards is a jerk. This is when the party needs him, and he's sitting on the sidelines. He needs to grow up and take a side.

You know, when you put it like that it looks so obvious and common sensical that you have to wonder what the hell the Clinton camp was thinking. I mean, nobody thought to themselves "hey, wait a second: what happens if all of this works and we have to face McCain? Won't this hurt our chances?" So that would seem to bring two possibilities:

a. They did think about it. And they just don't care.
b. They didn't and don't have any common sense.

Either conclusion leaves one with a sick feeling in the stomach.

Don't forget that McCain is going to pull out: "The war wasn't a mistake, we just needed the right man in charge. And look at me, I'm a strong, disciplined, ex-military man. Just the man for the job. Even the press thi--dammit Russert, quit drooling on me!"

To which Clinton would be able to forcefully reply: "....."

Senator Clinton's remarks look very bad when "interpreted" the way you did. As I recall it, her comment was that Senator McCain has "passed the threshhold" of qualification for national defense. That seemed (to me) to be a nod to his many years in the military and on the Senate Armed Forces Committee, and I took her to mean that he is minimally qualified, not that he is fully qualified, or that he is better qualified than someone else is. If you write columns about what she actually said, the consequences for the general election should not be so dire.

G-D DAMN AMERICA!

You misspelled "god." Just so you know.

If McCain were smart, he would change the argument on Iraq.

He could very well say: The fact is everyone wants the war to end. I (McCain) want it to end with Americas victory, Obama and Clinton want it to end with Americas defeat.

I fought in a war that the Democrats decided they wanted America to lose; I know what its like to serve under a Democrat President that loses his nerve under pressure and sacrifices his troops for his poll numbers. And I don't think they should get the chance to put the country through that again.

This is not that big a deal. In the unlikely event she gets the nomination, Hillary will focus mostly on the economy and domestic policy. And on these issues she'll find trillions of items with which to thrash John McCain. And, even if she has publicly acknowledged in the past that McCain has lots of foreign policy experience and even considerable expertise, that doesn't mean she still can't make the case that one or more of his foreign policy positions are wrong.

In the unlikely event she gets the nomination, Hillary will focus mostly on the economy and domestic policy.

Yep.

He could very well say: The fact is everyone wants the war to end. I (McCain) want it to end with Americas victory, Obama and Clinton want it to end with Americas defeat.

Smart or not, I think he probably will try to do this sooner or later, yes.

I fought in a war that the Democrats decided they wanted America to lose; I know what its like to serve under a Democrat President that loses his nerve under pressure and sacrifices his troops for his poll numbers. And I don't think they should get the chance to put the country through that again.

If he tries this, though, he'll have to do an amazingly good job of phrasing it and it'll still take luck for it to work, because he said the opposite two years ago, and because I don't think the Vietnam War is looked back on fondly.

"(even if Obama manages to hold onto the nomination, she'll have damaged him too much to win)."

violins please...I see the Obamapologists are already working on their talking points should he be nominated and lose

forget that he's only gotten about half of the primary vote; forget that there is this Wright issue polarizing to many (regardless of merit)...it will still be Clinton's fault

and she killed some puppies today for lunch too

Enjoy Clinton's 48-state debacle in the fall, asshole. The only consolation is that the Clintons will be radioactive in the party after that.

This is not that big a deal. In the unlikely event she gets the nomination, Hillary will focus mostly on the economy and domestic policy.

And he'll be able to point back to the primary and remind everyone about that time she campaigned on the importance of who was in the White House to answer a 3 A.M. crisis call.

She's going to have to show some remarkable sleight of hand to convince the country she really meant that phone call was about the collapse of overseas markets.

No one ought to try to paint a decorated war veteran as unqualified to be commander in chief, even if he did support the Iraq war. We have a term for that, it is called Swiftboating. It was an outrage when it was done to John Kerry by the coward George W Bush, and it would be an outrage if done to John McCain.

Hillary does not need to question McCain's experience, she only needs to tout her own, and question his policies. The key thing for Dems will be that McCain is now in no position to question Clinton's credentials to be Commander in Chief because he went along with the narrative that they both had crossed that threshold and Senator Obama had not. He has said he would have a respectful debate with Senator Clinton and that he had no doubt she could lead the country where she wanted it to go. He simply has a different vision of where he wants it to go. If McCain attempts to question Clinton's experience or readiness she can respond by saying- well that is not what you have been saying throughout this primary. With Hillary as the nominee the question of experience and readiness becomes a wash because even if McCain is more experienced, they are both experienced enough. That means the debate will be about policy and on that McCain is very vulnerable.

No one ought to try to paint a decorated war veteran as unqualified to be commander in chief, even if he did support the Iraq war. We have a term for that, it is called Swiftboating. It was an outrage when it was done to John Kerry by the coward George W Bush, and it would be an outrage if done to John McCain.

McCain's experience as a serviceman isn't germane to his ability to guide this country on matters of national security and foreign policy. His stances on Iraq and Iran demonstrate that. He should not be above question.

The reason she calls in to question Obama's national security credentials is because she knows she can't win the nomination and needs to poison Obama so that he can't win in the fall. This leaves the field open for her in 2012. Why is this so difficult to grasp?

Andrew-
Both you and Ezra are distorting the debate by throwing the term judgment in when it was never in fact used by Clinton. She granted that McCain was no doubt qualified by his experience to be commander in chief. She never said she agreed with his judgment on policy issues. If you are going to impose an ideological purity test as a requirement to be qualified to be commander in chief then you are the one tearing a page out of the Republican playbook. There is no doubt McCain is qualified to be commander in chief- you may disagree with his policies, but you can't call into question his qualifications. We can't make this a debate about qualifications, he could; but not if we nominate a candidiate whose qualifications are not super thing. Then it is a debate about policy. That is a debate McCain is not in a position to win. Obama and his supporters to compensate for his total lack of credentials have turned it into a sin to recoginze McCain's obvious possession of them. That is a truth we should simply acknowledge, counter by nominating a candidate who is not questionable in that area, and then make it a debate about whose policies will best serve the country.

Obama and his supporters to compensate for his total lack of credentials have turned it into a sin to recoginze McCain's obvious possession of them

No, Obama explicit says McCain has consistently made bad decisions, something hard to argue with given the facts.
How did that song go...bomb, bomb, bomb...

Both you and Ezra are distorting the debate by throwing the term judgment in when it was never in fact used by Clinton.

The second point is that experience makes for a bad characteristic to use in evaluating the candidates from the start. This is demonstrated by the fact that McCain and Clinton, despite more experience, got Iraq wrong. Dreadfully so.

Judgment is a superior metric. Obama showed his by protesting the war. Clinton has shown some by stating that we need to end the war. McCain has shown none by stating we should stay for 100-10,000 years, or whatever his most recent synecdoche for "indefinitely" is.

Good judgment would not be backtracking from your withdrawal promises, and would not be doing nothing on the committee they put him on, and would be dumping Wright years ago since they knew he was poison, and would not be backtracking on public financing, and would not be voting for all funding with no timeline for withdrawal, and would not be promising to invade Pakistan to get Obama since it's not Al Qaeda but every single Muslim who hates us now since Iraq...

America has never voted for an anti-war president. Never ever will.

"America has never voted for an anti-war president. Never ever will."-amberglow

There we have it. The real difference between Clinton and Obama. The only question you need to ask in this election is "Do you trust the American people to do the right thing." If you believe Americans are evil or stupid, support Clinton and the Rove/Morris politics of divide and conquer, confuse and confound, litigate and obfuscate.

If you believe that Democrats are actually right about the issues and you believe we need to forcefully take our positions to the American people with passion and purpose, conviction and compassion, then support Obama.

America will vote for an anti-war president if that candidate has the courage of his/her convictions.

(I'll also note that Obama supports the war in Afghanistan, so "anti-war" isn't even an accurate description.)

One problem with Hillary Clinton's strategy of praising John McCain's national security experience to diminish Barack Obama's credentials is that, if she ends up facing McCain, her ability to attack will be much constrained.

I do not think so. These are politicians they have learned that they can say one thing one day and the opposite the next day. While he was running for president you could have thought that Bill Clinton hated NAFTA. Bill Clinton Signed NAFTA in to law with very littel change. Bush ran anti war!

America has never voted for an anti-war candidate? With all due respect, that statement is willfully ignorant of our country's history. In 2000, George W. Bush famously pledged a "humble" foreign policy and promised an end to the policy of foreign interventionalism that Pres. Clinton had overseen.

How about President Harding, and his campaign for "a return to normalcy," along with the signing of an international treaty that banned war forever (humerous now, I know, but the League of NAtions was very proud of it).

Another example would be the 1916 reelection of Woodrow Wilson. Amberglow, his frigg'n campaign slogan was "He kept us out of war."

I'll agree that both of these campaign promises proved to be false, but you cannot say that Americans will always go with the hawk. Its demonstratably untrue.

"It is time to have a debate with John McCain about the future of our national security. And the way to win that debate is not to compete with John McCain over who has more experience in Washington, because that's a contest that he'll win,"
- BARACK OBAMA

I'm pretty sure that Obama has made the same point as Clinton right there in terms of experience.

Doyou: then you misread that statement. He concedes, like Clinton, that McCain has experience. But he also says that's not a valid qualification.

amberglow: it's nice to be simplistic in your thinking, isn't it? Blissful?

There is no doubt in my mind that Hillary is ready, willing and able to make John McCain look like a fool. Even on the foreign policy front.

You can bet she knows the difference between Sunni and Shiite, and she has the ability to drive that knowledge, and it's importance, into a hostile media. The primaries have convinced me that she can drive her story through the media in spite of the fact they don't like her.

This ability is critically important to a presidential candidate, and to a president.

Does Obama have this ability? I don't know. I hope he learns it. It doesn't have to work the same way as Hillary works it. But he has to be able to do it.