I like Hillary Clinton, and once her presidential ambitions are put to rest, I think she’ll go on to make a superb majority leader. If she wants to, she can be the next Ted Kennedy, a lion of the Democratic Party with a national voice and an undisputed mastery of the Senate. There’s nothing but good things in her future.

But I despise the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it’s a dislike that has grown stronger as the primary season has gone on. For example:

Dana Milbank reports on a tragicomic breakfast meeting between members of the press corps and the Clinton campaign, and notes that the campaign “used the occasion to complain about the press’s failure to examine Obama’s ties to violent radicals who were part of the Weathermen of the 1960s.”

This is preposterous for any number of reasons, not the least of which being that Obama was seven years old in 1968. Perhaps he spent his mornings writing kindergarten essays about wanting to be president (every paragraph must begin with a subject sentence!), and his recess periods fomenting sectarian strife within Students for a Democratic Society.

To be fair to the Clinton press office, they probably mean that Obama might currently know someone who used to be a campus radical forty years ago. I take that to mean “aging hipster attends the same church as Barack Obama” (see the update — it’s actually “aging hipster works in same city as Barack Obama”), which is about as meaningless to me as that previous piece of opposition research from the Clinton campaign, “Obama’s minister’s daughter’s newsletter employed a writer who published an article favorable to Louis Farrakhan”. If that “tie” has received any press attention at all, it’s too much.

I suppose this is part of the “kitchen sink fusillade” which Clinton has decided to launch against Obama. A previously invincible campaign in its last days — jumping from state to state in search of a win; advancing increasingly implausible arguments as to why all these other states don’t count; throwing half-baked smears against the wall in the destructive hope that undercooked batter will splatter everywhere — is ugly and vaguely embarassing to watch, and its only redeeming feature is that it’s over soon.

(*) Update The fatuous Jonah Goldberg takes up the cry of the “60s radical” smear. Apparently (this is true), Obama and the guy who used to be in the Weather Underground are both professors at different universities in the very same city. And not only that, but they both sat on the board of the very same charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago.

I’m not sure why the press isn’t reporting this very important story, but in any event the Los Angeles Times has decided that the beyond-parody Goldberg is a worthy addition to its op-ed pages, and thus this garbage just finds its way into our political discourse as if by magic.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 2:24 pm, 26 February 2008 and filed under 2008 Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.