The Weekly Standard on Hillary Clinton:
She's running a right-wing campaign. She's running the classic
Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and
use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran
against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and
then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan--"The Bear in the
Forest"--ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she's
doing it with much the same symbols...
Her ads are like the ones McCain would be running in her place, and
they'll doubtless show up in McCain's ads should Obama defeat her. She
has said that while she and McCain are both prepared to be president,
Obama is not. They act, he makes speeches. They take heat, while he
tends to wilt or to faint in the kitchen. He may even throw like a girl.
And better--or worse--she is becoming a social conservative, a feminist
form of George Bush. Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs
out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to
God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to
the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of
Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father
(the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes
on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name
she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she'll start talking
Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on
Embassy Row.
Read the whole thing (which prominently features our own Jon Chait as liberal foil) here.
--Christopher Orr