Robert Reich, who served in the first Clinton Administration as Labor Secretary, and who knew both Bill and Hillary since they were all in school, is not keen on Hillary Clinton's Win-At-All-Costs campaign either. Are the rumors true: is Karl Rove working for Ms. Clinton? I certainly hope not.
In the days leading up to the Ohio and Texas primaries, we had HRC's statement that both she and McCain have the experience to be commander-in-chief but Obama doesn't. This is the first time in my memory that a major candidate in a primary has said that the other party's nominee would be a better president than his or her own primary opponent. We also had the outpouring of negative advertising from her campaign that both candidates had largely managed to avoid up to this point.
And while I can understand her decision, bolstered by last week's results, to fight on in this primary election, the reality is that she can only win by convincing large numbers of superdelegates to join her and re-engineering the Michigan and Florida primaries to her advantage, and then taking the fight all the way to the convention in August - which if she gets that far, will be one of the most divisive in 40 years.
I suppose I should not be surprised. If HRC has experience in anything, it's in fighting when cornered. When Bill Clinton lost his governorship of Arkansas in 1980, it was HRC who commissioned Dick Morris to advise the Clintons on a no-holds-barred campaign to retake the governor's mansion. At the start of 1995, when Newt Gingrich and company took over Congress and the Clinton administration looked in danger of becoming irrelevant, it was HRC who installed Dick Morris in the White House, along with his sidekick Mark Penn, to "triangulate" by distancing Bill Clinton from the Democratic Party and moving the Administration rightward. (When Morris was subsequently discovered to have a penchant for the toes of prostitutes the White House dumped him but kept Penn on.) And now Mark Penn is the "chief strategist" of HRC's campaign.
[click to read more Comment is free: Will Clinton spoil the party?]
There really is no defense for declaring McCain a better choice for President than Obama, especially since it wasn't a slip of the tongue, and was repeated multiple times over several days.
