Snow White Survives

"This is the Clinton debate strategy in a nutshell -- give non-answers or cagey answers when necessary and use her new-found sense of humor and/or attacks on President Bush in the hope that people won't notice. It should get her through the primaries and it may get back to the White House."

Not much on Hillary doing a 180 on one issue:

"Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign yesterday belatedly explained that her flip-flop to oppose torture was an evolution inspired by talks with retired generals.

" 'Upon reflection and after meeting with former generals and others, Sen. Clinton does not believe that we should be making narrow exceptions to this policy based on hypothetical scenarios,' said campaign spokesman Phil Singer.

"Clinton (D-N.Y.) came out against all torture - 'period' - in Wednesday's Democratic debate after previously telling the Daily News last October it would be okay to torture a terrorist to foil 'something imminent.' "

She was for it before she was against it?

There was a seriously weird moment on par with Admiral Stockwell's immortal "Who am I? Why am I here?" Byron York has the play-by-play:

"It happened when moderator Tim Russert asked former senator Mike Gravel about Gravel's somewhat troubled financial history. A condominium business started by Gravel went bankrupt, and Gravel himself once declared personal bankruptcy. 'How can someone who did not take care of his business, could not manage his personal finances, say that he is capable of managing the country?' Russert asked.

" 'Well, first off, if you want to make a judgment of who can be the greediest people in the world when they get to public office, you can just look at the people up here,' Gravel said in a nod to his fellow candidates . . . 'So I went bankrupt once in business. And the other -- who did I bankrupt? I stuck the credit card companies with $90,000 worth of bills, and they deserved it'-- People in the audience began to laugh. 'They deserved it,' Gravel repeated, 'and I used the money to finance the empowerment of the American people with a national initiative.'

"Gravel's answer was unprecedented in the history of these debates, and, if nothing else, it seemed guaranteed to win him at least a share of the insolvent vote, even among those who have stuck credit card companies for debts far more prosaic than empowering the American people with national initiatives."

If you're familiar with the Clinton campaign pressuring GQ into killing a piece on Hillary, I've got the first on-the-record interviews on the controversy.

Remember when all candidates took public financing, which was part of the post-Watergate reform against corrupt politics? Now it's treated almost as a moral failing: