A wounded Hillary, and a license to attack

James Pinkerton:

The Democratic presidential front-runner is charging ahead, blowing past weak opposition. A lagging Democratic rival raises a critical issue in a candidates' debate, but does so in a halfhearted manner that gets little traction among Democrats. So the front-runner stays out front, as the others falter and fall out.

But damage has been done to the front-runner. A wound has been opened, a slow hemorrhaging has commenced, even if Democrats don't notice.

Over on the other side of the aisle, Republicans see the crimson trail - and smell blood. So they sit back and wait, until the general election.

That's the story of the 1988 presidential campaign. I know, because I was there. And that's also looking to be the story of the 2008 campaign.

But first, a little trip back in time, back two decades.

In '88, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was leading the Democratic White House hopefuls. On April 12, he debated his remaining Democratic rivals in Manhattan. One of them, Sen. Al Gore, mentioned the Massachusetts prison furlough plan that Dukakis had defended. Under that particular program, criminals - even murderers sentenced to life in prison without parole - had been granted, Gore noted critically, "weekend passes." But Dukakis dismissed Gore: "Al, the difference between you and me is that I have run a criminal justice system. You haven't."

In fact, grass-roots opposition to such furloughs, coming up from within the mostly Democratic Bay State, had already forced a change in the program, over Dukakis' vehement objections. The Massachusetts governor's tin ear for this criminal justice issue should have been a warning sign to Democrats, but it wasn't. He soon clinched the nomination.

In that same spring of 1988, Dukakis was also beating the Republicans, forging ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush by 17 points in the polls. Of course Dukakis was ahead; after eight years of Republicans in the White House, voters couldn't be blamed for thinking "time for a change."

But Dukakis wasn't destined to be the change that voters were looking for. He had been fatally wounded, politically, by Gore, back in April; he just didn't know it. That seemingly little issue of the weekend passes for first-degree murderers just wasn't going to go away.

In fact, it was my job, as the director of research - as in "opposition research" - in the George H.W. Bush for President campaign, to help make sure that talk about the passes didn't go away. The Bush campaign took the state matter of prison furloughs and turned it into a national issue. The voters agreed: Bush 41, once written off as a wimpy loser, crushed Dukakis in a November landslide.

Now fast-forward to 2007. I'm long out of partisan campaign politics, but Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton reminds me a lot of Dukakis. As he was two decades ago, she's from a big state, has a lot of money, is ahead in the polls - and she's been grievously injured. This time, the issue isn't prison furloughs, but driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in her "home" state of New York. Clinton has broadly defended Gov. Eliot Spitzer's unpopular plan, even as most New Yorkers have reviled it.

...

Hillary is different from Dukakis in that she has no real principles that she will defend against polling results to the contrary. She will dump Spitzer and his plan quickly/ She will go from saying she understands why he is doing it to saying she understands why people oppose it. Her biggest wound from the debate is her double, triple and quadruple speech being exposed. Her real exposure was as a candidate whose core belief is in saying whatever it takes to be elected.