It's All About Hillary

Just back from Iowa, and I've got a theory about why Hillary Clinton has been having a difficult time.

It's because she is the issue.

No politician wants to be the issue and have the debate swirl around them and their foibles. And Hillary is working overtime to make Barack Obama the issue with the whole change-requires-experience argument. But I don't see the pundits, bloggers, radio people and cable hosts sitting around debating Obama's qualifications. They're chattering about Hillary, as they have for 15 years. Even talking about her looks, thanks to Drudge.

Clinton's team, as I reported yesterday, believes the press is holding their woman to a much higher standard than Obama, and some journalists agree.

For most of the year, as HRC's election was depicted as pretty much a done deal, a number of conservative commentators seemed to be making their peace with the prospect. Hillary was more hawkish than her Democratic rivals, more experienced, and had run a surprisingly good campaign, they said. She was, in short, a grownup.

But now that she's hit a rough patch, some of the old anti-Hillary vehemence is surfacing. Take these two reports in National Review, starting with Jonah Goldberg:

"The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill -- and his cult of personality -- will go down with the ship, too. Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America 'back to the future.' . . .

"Hillary's entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed health-care plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the choice between her and Barack Obama a 'referendum on a decade.' So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination -- heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses -- I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: 'America to Clinton(s): We're Just Not That Into You.' "

Noemie Emery draws a parallel to another failed candidate:

"What is one to make of Hillary Clinton, now that her front-running campaign seems to be foundering? Pretty much what one made of Al Gore when his campaign faltered. 2008 has barely begun, but already it seems quite a lot like 2000. There is a sense of deja-vu-all-over-again as Bill Clinton's over-ambitious First Lady replays his vice president's fate.

"The former VP and the former first lady have remarkable similarities. Both Gore and Hillary wanted to be president for a most of their lives, and with an uncommon ferocity. Each one's rise through the ranks came about via family members -- his father; her husband. Both rose to fame on the wings of Bill Clinton, who is proving to be a mixed blessing for both. Each began a campaign in a position of almost impregnable power, which each one subsequently (and quickly) undermined by errors of judgment and character.

"In short, what we see here are two campaigns that began with a huge amount of familial and institutional support for candidates who rose exclusively through the power of their respective situations, and who, in the end, are inept politicians and thus in over their heads in a high-stakes campaign."