Blogging Without Warning

"Senator Clinton did all she needed to do: thanked everyone and unequivocally endorsed and supported Barack Obama. One theme stuck out to me: she essentially said that even though she was careful to avoid ever saying that she was running because she was a woman and that people should vote for her because she is a woman, that's what she believes in private. That's the theme she spoke of most compellingly. She is Ellen Malcolm's spiritual sister. In the end, Clinton remains wedded to the identity politics of her generation and her time. It's a powerful message after so many long decades and centuries in which women have been denied full equality in law and society. It's a necessary message and a moral message. But it becomes circular and self-defeating when it becomes its own rationale."

Conservatives are trying to take Obama's measure. National Review's Rich Lowry draws an interesting historical analogy:

"The last fresh new thing in Democratic politics, Bill Clinton, never truly had the imprimatur of the Kennedys, even if he brandished a youthful photo of himself shaking Jack's hand at the White House as a kind of Excalibur moment. Clinton the centrist was always compromised as a liberal paladin by his compromises.

"Obama represents a rejection of triangulating Clintonism. He had no Sister Souljah moment during the primaries. Indeed, he initially embraced his Sister Souljah, in the form of a Rev. Jeremiah Wright introduced to the public in videotaped anti-American rants. Nor did Obama make any creative policy departures, like Clinton's advocacy of welfare reform in 1992. Obama is the fullest flowering of liberal orthodoxy since George McGovern. And yet he has to be slightly favored to win the presidency. He brings his formidable personal gifts to a confrontation with a Republican Party that, beset by intellectual exhaustion, congressional scandal and an unpopular incumbent president, teeters on the verge of a Watergate-style meltdown.

"So Democrats contemplate the delicious prospect of having their purity and victory, too. It would be as if the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 -- and won."

Peggy Noonan kicks Hillary around one last time:

"I like it that she spent the campaign accusing America of being sexist, of treating her differently because she is a woman, and then, when she lacked the grace to congratulate the victor, she sent her stewards out to tell the press she just needs time, it's so emotional. In other words, she needs space because she's a woman . . .

"Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her--the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

"We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party . . .

"She would never be content to be vice president. She'd be plotting against him from day one. She'd put poison in his tea.

"She brings Bill.

"She undercuts the cleanness of Obama's message. She doesn't turn the page, she is the page."