Hillary Clinton has adopted a campaign pitch that seems almost designed with a "me or nobody" quality to it. As quoted in this post on the Chicago Tribune's blog, here's what Hillary is saying:
“There are certain critical issues that voters always look to in a general election. National security experience (and) the qualifications to be commander-in-chief are front and center. They always have been. They always will be,” she said.
She said she and McCain had traveled to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan together as she repeated a line that surfaced from the campaign trail. She and McCain “bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, Clinton said, while “Sen. Obama will bring a speech he gave in 2002.” (emphasis added)
Let's hope that someone from the McCain camp is filming some of this, because it's almost tailor made for effective use in a McCain-Obama match up.
Has any primary candidate ever poisoned the well so completely for a rival of her own party? It's almost as though Hillary doing what she can to guarantee that the Democrats will lose if she's not the nominee -- an outcome that (perhaps not coincidentally) would allow her to run again in 2012 against an incumbent President McCain, rather than waiting eight years (and bumping up against the age of 70).
If I were a Democrat, I would find it disqualifying that she'd rather see the party -- and the ideas that she claims to be so important to her -- defeated, if she can't herself win. If she can't be the village's savior, it seems that she'd rather see it burn.