Hillary's Moment

Few liberal columnists are shedding tears over the difficulties of Clinton, who has no natural cheering section in the press. And African American writers -- The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson wrote that Obama's speech gave him "goose bumps" -- are understandably excited.

Not all conservatives have hitched a ride on the Barackwagon. "There's a lot about the Obama movement I find offensive," says National Review Editor Rich Lowry, who predicted two months ago that his campaign was going "nowhere." "There's a messianism -- 'I embody change' -- that if a Christian conservative was saying those things, people would be scared."

But even as a "self-absorbed" Obama spouts "airy cliches," Lowry says, he found himself standing on tiptoe at a recent Obama speech. "It's really something magical," he says. "You're almost not an American if you don't feel stirred by what his victory would represent symbolically. Here's a guy who 50 years ago couldn't have gone in certain restrooms and motels."

Obama's conciliatory tone may also be a factor. He speaks of transcending red and blue states with a coalition that includes Republicans and independents, while Clinton, who has been hammered by the right since her husband's 1992 campaign, boasts about battling the "Republican attack machine."

Some major conservative voices have paid only fleeting attention to Obama -- Fox's Bill O'Reilly says he "ran an excellent campaign in Iowa" and is "very charismatic" -- because they are more engaged in relishing Clinton's defeat. The Standard's cover story this week, with a shot of Bill and Hillary, is "The Fall of the House of Clinton." But that means Obama has been spared, at least for now, the kind of frontal assault that might otherwise greet a surging liberal Democrat.

For some conservative commentators, Obama, 46, embodies the turning of a different kind of page, as the candidate himself has argued. In an Atlantic cover story last month, right-leaning blogger Andrew Sullivan called Obama's candidacy "a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America -- finally -- past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the baby boom generation that has long engulfed all of us."

Even Huckabee, in ABC's Republican debate Saturday, acknowledged: "We have to recognize that what Senator Obama has done is touch at the core of something Americans want. . . . He has excited a lot of voters in this country. Let's pay respect for that."

Many journalists have a personal fondness for John McCain, who holds a narrow lead in the polls for New Hampshire's Republican primary, based on his round-the-clock accessibility going back to their rides on the Straight Talk Express in 1999 and 2000. Obama has few such relationships with national reporters, who are more in the role of passive observers of a stellar performer.

Politico columnist Roger Simon, in New Hampshire last weekend, contrasted "a compelling, almost mesmerizing, speech" by Obama, who offered few specifics, with an event in which "Clinton talked about issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail" while part of the audience filtered out.

If Obama becomes the Democratic nominee, the conservative media are not likely to urge his election by acclamation. There will be plenty of emphasis on his liberal positions and, in an echo of Clinton's criticism, his lack of national experience.

"This is a guy probably to the left of Hillary," Bennett says.

"Do I think he's right on the issues? No," Carpenter says. "But there's a perception you can work with him."

Lowry sees Obama as an elusive target: "No one's really got anything on him because he hasn't really done anything yet. He doesn't have any battle scars. You can blast Obama for what I'd consider an outrageous left-wing statement and it just doesn't get conservatives charged up the way blasting Hillary does."