... but I agree with Drew Westen that once somebody low-blows you the gloves should come off. Obama's campaign should start attacking Clinton by pointing out that as a candidate of change she's got the most conservative record and is funded by the most corporate money of the Democrats and that she doesn't represent change so much as restoration of a former presidency.

It's not change, it's the War of the Roses. America doesn't need a father-son of one party trading the presidency with a husband-wife of the other one. America is supposed to a meritocracy but we're going to have three consecutive presidential elections where a leading candidate was a leading candidate because that person had the same name as a former president.

Everyone has known for years that Hillary would be a leading/likely choice for the Democratic choice but why? What is it that sets her apart from say, Joe Biden? Money and name recognition.

It drives me crazy that this isn't an issue in the election.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/opinion/26wills.html?ref=opinion

One problem with the George W. Bush administration is that it has brought a kind of plural presidency in through the back door. Vice President Dick Cheney has run his own executive department, with its own intelligence and military operations, not open to scrutiny, as he hides behind the putative president.

No other vice president in our history has taken on so many presidential prerogatives, with so few checks. He is an example of the very thing James Wilson was trying to prevent by having one locus of authority in the executive. The attempt to escape single responsibility was perfectly exemplified when his counsel argued that Mr. Cheney was not subject to executive rules because he was also part of the legislature.

We have seen in this campaign how former President Clinton rushes to the defense of presidential candidate Clinton. Will that pattern of protection be continued into the new presidency, with not only his defending her but also her defending whatever he might do in his energetic way while she’s in office? It seems likely. And at a time when we should be trying to return to the single-executive system the Constitution prescribes, it does not seem to be a good idea to put another co-president in the White House.

Bipartisan lobbying firms serve rosters of blue-chip corporate clients. To push the Bush administration's Medicare drug benefit bill on Capitol Hill, the pharmaceutical manufacturers hired Democratic lobbyists Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman; David Beier, who had been a chief domestic policy adviser to Al Gore; and Joel Johnson, a former top aide to President Clinton and Senator Daschle [who also became a lobbyist after failing to get re-elected]. To push their side, the generic drug manufacturers hired Chris Jennings, who had helped devise Clinton's unlamented health plan, and former Republican Mark Isakowitz, who had helped defeat the Clinton plan. Similarly, in 1998, when tobacco companies wanted to sell Congress the settlement they had reached with state attorneys general over tobacco health claims, they turned for help to both Republican and Democratic lobbyists, including former Gore aide Peter Knight, the former Demcratic governer Ann Richards, and George Mitchell, former Democratic Senate majority leader.

While nonbusiness interests have better access to power under Democratically controlled government than under Republican, businesses have excellent access under both. Upon leaving office, more than half of the senior officials of the Clinton administration became corporate lobbyists. Clinton's first legislative director left his post after less than a year to become chairman of Hill & Knowlton Worldwide. Clinton's deputy chief of staff departed in less than a year to run the U.S Telephone Asociation. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1998 and 2004 more than 2,200 former high-ranking federal officials, from both Republican Democratic administrations, registered as federal lobbyists, as did over 200 former members of Congress. By 2003, more than half the total number of former members of Congress who were registered lobbyists had served as Democrats. Almost all were lobbying for large corpoarations.

--Robert Reich, Supercapitalism

This isn't exceptional, given that the revolving door is now the norm of politics, but if a candidate wants to affect change this is one of the biggest problems that has to be confronted.

"Do people completely check their rational faculties when they decide to support a candidate and become entirely unable to tolerate any criticisms? Is this normal?"

Yep.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2006/04/partisan-brain.html

We all know that political discussions are emotional, just witness some of the comments people leave on this blog whenever I write about politics or religion, rather than, say, science or philosophy. A recent study by Drew Western at Emory University showed how this looks from inside the brain, and the results highlight in a spectacular fashion how difficult it is to engage in rational discourse.

Western conducted his study during the 2004 Presidential campaign. He selected a group of committed Republicans and Democrats, and presented them with a series of statements by candidates Bush and Kerry – all while monitoring their brains inside an MRI machine. The statements in question came in pairs, with the second pair contradicting the first one, simulating a classic case of “flip-flopping.”

Not surprisingly, both Democrats and Republicans judged the opposing candidate very harshly for being inconsistent, but were lenient, or not bothered at all, by the inconsistencies of their own candidate. What was interesting, however, emerged from the brain scans: there was very high activity in regions of the brain regulating negative emotions (when reacting to the opposing candidate) and stimulating forgiveness (when considering the favorite man’s position), but very little going on in those regions usually in charge of rational reasoning!