act all preciously poignant, prancing around their assumed divine icon like princes in the court of Napoleon. They lavish great care on emphasising that all others need to defer to Miss Hillary's personal wish that she continue her sled trip through purgatory at her command.

Were these compliant worms to bother to be this generous with their condemnation of her many flaws, we might get somewhere.

As many pointed out in other letters, Miss Hillary stood down for the past seven years, as did all the other simps in the Dum party, as this country's laws and rights and checks and balances were run through the shredder by the supposed opposition.

Nuf said.

Ron Paul

Walter Shapiro quotes Governor Ted Strickland on Hillary Clinton:

"She understands that life is tough, that people struggle ... that, although people work really hard [and] do the best they can, they feel like life doesn't give them a fair shake."

I have no doubt that what Governor Strickland says is 100% true. I also have no doubt that the exact quote could be used for Obama and it would also be 100% true. The Clinton campaign complains about her unfair treatment at the hands of the media. But I believe that the media along with Clinton's supporters have constructed a narrative that is equally unfair to Obama. Governor Strickland's quote is a perfect example of the "Hillary story". As is Mr. Shapiro's closing sentence:

"She is going out (if that is her fate) as she came into the political orbit three decades ago -- as a smart, serious and sound policy maven who leaves to others soaring rhetoric and stirring emotions."

The "Obama story" goes this way: Obama's "soaring rhetoric and stirring emotions" is just smoke and mirrors used to hide the truth that Obama is an inexperienced lightweight who wouldn't even be able to find the light switch when he moved into the White House, let alone muster the resources to lead this country out of the mess it is in. Maybe I need to re-check the definition of "fair" but as I understand the meaning of "fair" pigeon-holing Obama as nothing but an "empty suit" seems to me anything but fair.

The narrative is presented as either/or: one cannot be both a master of "soaring rhetoric" and "a smart, serious and sound policy maven." Why on earth not?

Where is the evidence that Obama is any less smart, serious and sound on policy than Clinton? Believe me, I was just as bored reading Obama's "Blueprint for Change" as I was reading Clinton's policy positions and proposals on her Web site. (Not so much with McCain - there's not enough "there there" to even get to the point of boredom.)

Going off on a complete tangent: can anyone explain "Picnic at Hanging Rock" to me?

She is not facing anything she expected, or for that matter anything that any of the smart rats expected. Obama is the surfer-boy riding the waves of hope in a nation that has had hope squeezed out of them. While he can take credit, it ain't sci-fi.

It's so odd that Hillary does well with the working folks, but not her own. Is it because her competitors haven't yet been successful enough to hold her trade votes against her? Maybe it's just because they aren't smart enough to catch the wave, which is not to say I hope they won't in the general election.

At least, those who have seen what the media can do can be thankful they aren't throwing pot shots at her as much as when she was the frontrunner. (Dowd was an exception again this week. Her hatred is palpable.) It's not sour grapes; it's a fact I documented probably a dozen times so far. I didn't start out with that view. If Obama gets any health care reform enacted at all I will be surprised.

So she sits there proud as a peacock. I wouldn't use the word defiant. She is the first woman who got this far running for the presidency of the United States--who proved her competency and her steadfastness through one of the most lengthy and intense campaigns in the nation's history. It sounds like the next generation isn't even going to give her credit for that.

She leaves no doubt for those who saw past the peanut butter that she will be just as proud if she experiences defeat as if she experiences victory.

I think this is how leaders are supposed to act. If nothing else she will leave that model. I strongly doubt if she will do a sniveling Nixon. If we are defined by our enemies, she and her husband haven't done that bad a job. Certainly, it makes any other attitude but pride out of the question.

I'm amazed, at this point, that Ms. Clinton still seems to be holding ground in Ohio, that she manages to find any shelter at all under precariously hanging rocks. Her campaign has been a dismal failure, though this is only part of the explanation of why she won't win the nomination.

The real problem with Hillary Clinton, the reason she can only occasionally "find her voice", is her utter lack of authenticity. As a rather vivid demonstration of this, I saw that yesterday, she suddenly began dropping her r's, noticeably talking down to her largely blue collar audience. Suddenly, our Wellesley and Yale educated candidate began to speak of Obama "runnin' " on such and such a platform and "toutin' " his policies. I was truly embarassed for her, this foray into the vernacular as awkward a spectacle as President Bush attempting an African tribal dance.

Why seize on these seemingly unimportant moments? Because they're revelatory of a deep-seeded problem of integrity, the same issue that led her to vote to authorize war in Iraq so as not to appear weak (keeping in mind that she would, in the near future, be running for President); the same personal flaw that was revealed even earlier, in fact, when she suddenly appeared in New York with a Yankees cap and announced that she would be making a bid for the senate, that she had a Jewish grandparent, and so on.

Somewhat successfully, she has managed to convince some of her supporters that there has been a media bias against her, and Clintonites willingly accept this explanation of her lack of success in the past few weeks. On an alternative tack, she and her campaign have constructed the "Obama as Messiah" delusion, or the idea that Obama is a purveyor of a particularly insidious snake oil-- that of false hope. None of this could be further from the truth, of course. The hope that Obama offers is based on pragmatic policies that are spelled out in detail on his website, though discussed only in generality during debates. There's an interesting article in both the NY Times and the New Republic that attest to Obama's economic and foreign relations acuity (from which springs the hope of his supposedly "rapt" supporters):

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a&k=12040

Interestingly, the article got me thinking about Clinton's precipitous reversal of fortune, and my explanation for it is simply that she has been found out, and on a grand scale. Original support for Senator Clinton was tentative, based as it was on irrational thinking. She was the default choice, annointed as the Democratic fron-runner, a concept that had been marketed from the time her husband left office. Many Clinton supporters liked her simply because so many others seemed to (and so many on the right seemed to affrim her credentials by reviling her so much). Never mind that she was associated with a moderate administration that consistently betrayed its more left-leaning constituents, as others above have noted. As Thaler and other behavioral economists have discovered, people sometimes accept irrational default choices if the alternative of "opting out" requires effort, in this case the intellectual exercise of evaluating Obama. Given how easy it is to approve of Obama as an alternative, as I say, I'm surprised that Clinton's still in this thing; I'm surprised that rationality hasn't already prevailed and snuffed out her illusion.

Mark W