The Clinton Panic

Rich Lowry wonders about the panic that seems to have gripped the Clinton campaign:

Extraordinary. She's lost some altitude nationally, and a little ground in Iowa where it's always been a pretty close race, so nothing seems to suggest a need to break the glass—as in "break the glass in case of emergency." But there's broken glass scattered over the place and she's taking the fire ax to Obama's campaign. What does the Clinton campaign know about this race that we don't?

It now looks like Clinton has never really found her footing in the new post-Philadelphia dynamic of the race. I thought she had in the subsequent Las Vegas debate, but it looks like that was a blip. The brilliance of Hillary's campaign most of the year was positional—i.e., she found an Iraq position that satisfied Democrats and then spent the rest of her time positioning for the general election. Meanwhile, she could bolster her positive, and diminish her negative, ratings with an above-the-fray attitude to the rest of the field.

She could do this because she wasn't being seriously challenged by Obama or Edwards, and now that she's getting challenged, she's been flailing. Beyond her positioning—as well as touting her experience and relying on inevitability—she doesn't seem to have a core positive agenda to fall back on. Her campaign has apparently concluded she can't do much more to sell herself and has to rip down Obama. This, of course, risks confirming all the negative attitudes about her, kicking away all the work she's done this year to try to soften her image, and puncturing her own sense of inevitability. As a wrote in this column a couple of weeks ago, "If you didn’t like Hillary when she was pretending to be pleasant, just wait until she takes the bark off the first African-American ever to have a plausible chance of becoming president."

What's fascinating is how all the roles have reversed in the race: Clinton who was above responding in kind to attacks is now throwing the kitchen sink at Obama; Obama who had been attacking Hillary is trying to adopt something of her above-it-all attitude toward the fray; Edwards who had launched the harshest attacks on Hillary is getting out of the way of the Clinton-Obama feud. The stakes are still higher for Obama and Edwards in Iowa than for Hillary; she can lose there and fight another day, whereas that will be harder for them (impossible for Edwards). But the stakes are still huge for Hillary. If Obama wins Iowa, you can see a clear path to the nomination for him—going on to win New Hampshire, where independents will presumably be drawn to him, and to win South Carolina, where there are so many African-American voters. Especially with Iraq and now Iran potentially fading as issues, it's possible to see Obama winning on his Cartersque theme of national healing and a fresh start while the attacks on his lack of experience lose their force. As Major Garrett noted on Fox News a little while ago, Hillary is probably going after Obama so hard in Iowa because she can afford to have Edwards win there in a way she can't with Obama.

Given the attacks on Obama's kindergarten record, you have to wonder what the Clintons will come up with next.