Hillary proves the Republicans' point

Rich Lowry:

SOME of the air went out of last night Democratic debate early on - when Hillary Clinton, in response to an attack by John Edwards, accused him of taking a page "right out of the Republican playbook." The audience applauded, and when Edwards went after Hillary harshly later on, he got booed. After that, the fireworks were mostly over.

Why did Hillary's line resonate? Well, maybe because it's true.

Consider: In the early 1990s, few right-wing bugaboos loomed as large as Hillary Clinton's secret health-care task force. Conservatives who still routinely invoke the task force can seem obsessed with rehashing the greatest anti-Clinton hits of yore. But look who was talking about the task force just the other day:

"They took all their people and all their experts into a room, and then they closed the door, and they tried to design the plan in isolation from the American people," said . . . no, not Rush Limbaugh or Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani, but the nation's foremost liberal tribune of hopefulness, Barack Obama.

This turn in the Democratic primary race may be the best thing to happen to Republicans since the 2006 elections. Two high-profile Democrats, Obama and John Edwards, are validating a core part of the anti-Hillary case that Republicans have made for years - that she's a slippery cynic who cares only about power.

In the initial phase of the Democratic primary fight, her opponents attacked Hillary for voting for the Iraq War and refusing to apologize for it. This was an ideological attack that Hillary cleverly defused, while remaining more hawkish - and therefore better positioned for a general election - than her opponents. To the extent such attacks from the left make her seem more centrist, they help her.

The latest round of criticisms is more insidious. They aren't so much ideological - though they still come from the left - as character-ological: Hillary is a calculating and poll-driven double-talker.

This line of attack amounts to millions of dollars' worth of free advertising for the eventual Republican nominee and for conservative groups that will attack Hillary on these grounds next fall.

The character attacks box Hillary in. Her primary strategy so far has been to placate the left of her party while not saying anything that will hurt her in the general election. The strategy involves careful positioning that necessarily opens her to the charges that she's calculating and evasive. Hillary has a bitter choice: either to hew to her (otherwise sensible) primary strategy and get tagged as a shrewish triangulator, or to swing left and risk alienating general-election voters.

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The candidates are always somewhat wounded by the primary process. Al Gore delivered a fatal wound to Gov. Dukakis in 1988 and most of the democrats did not even notice. In Fact they still blame Bush 41 for brining up Dukasis' furlough program that led to another murder by none other than Willie Horton, but it was Gore's opposition research that discovered the episode and he that brought it up. What Clinton is asking her opponents to do is to ignore her faults and let her win. In the meantime she will be back at something the Clintons excel at, the personal destruction of their opponents. Edwards and Obama better fasten their chin straps.