Swopa

Josh Marshall last night and Attaturk this morning wrote about the kinds of unsubtle race cards the GOP is looking to play against Barack Obama. But what we're really seeing is the re-animation of the same zombie logic the Republicans trot out against Democratic presidential candidates every four years.

Here's a bit of a McCain-free break for you all, switching the spotlight for a moment to one of the few politicians who might be willing to swap his or her current situation for St. John's. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has reached the point where people are rushing to write its obituary, or at least politely offering to arrange for last rites.... How did it come to this?

In an interview on Tuesday with ABC and some website, Hillary Clinton laid out her new line of contrast with Barack Obama: "I think that anyone who goes through the Republican attack machine, which I have for a number of years, will have their negatives driven up. That's just the way politics works...."

I wrote a month ago in this space that the greatest threats to the Obama and Clinton campaigns were their own campaign strategists, who were too infatuated with their own long-held theories of politics to adjust to the particular demands of this year's electorate. So I'm disappointed to read that in the wake of Super Standoff Tuesday, and Barack Obama's rise to at least co-frontrunnerhood, guru David Axelrod still thinks it's all about his conceptual genius.

In just a few minutes, there's going to be another Democratic presidential debate -- the last one before next week's Supernova Tuesday flock of primaries/caucuses, and the first to feature only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And it comes at a time when the polls show Obama is closing in rapidly on a tie with Clinton nationally, as well as in many of the states holding contests on Feb. 5th. Think there might be a tiny bit of pressure on Hillary and Barack when the TV cameras are on them tonight?

In the FISA fight that Christy and Jane have been chronicling so diligently here today, a perennial complaint has been why the Democrats (at least some of them) are so afraid of the Republicans' inevitable accusations that they will be "soft on terrorism" if they don't give Dick Cheney all the eavesdropping power he wants. If they were really smart, they wouldn't just stand up for themselves, but engage in some preemptive warfare of their own.

There's nothing shocking or scandalous about candidates, during the course of a presidential campaign, adjusting their message as they go along. The double standard that mainstream media outlets apply in reporting on these changes, though, can be pretty outrageous.

In her campaign's first chaotic flailings after losing the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton and her husband surrogates clumsily sought to differentiate her from Barack Obama by claiming bluntly that she was "a doer, not a talker." With the breathing space afforded by a week and a come-from-ahead-and-then-behind win in New Hampshire, they've found a slightly more artful way of questioning the value of Obama's indisputable speechmaking skills.

When I wrote in this space last Thursday, kinda-sorta-but-not-really predicting an Obama win in the Iowa caucuses, I said that Hillary Clinton had dug herself a hole by creating "doubts about her passion and commitment," which she needed to address in order for her to make a comeback. Is it safe to say her campaign got the message, and that this had something to do with Clinton's surprise victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday?

A couple of months ago, I ruffled some feathers here by suggesting that a personality-rooted commitment to solving problems (or "true grit," for short) was the essence of what Democratic primary voters would be looking for, and thus far Hillary Clinton was doing the best job of fitting that profile. What's happened since?