Joe Klein: The Race Goes On (TIME Magazine)

This article is published in the current issue of TIME magazine (March 17th).

Thursday, Mar. 06, 2008

The Race Goes On

By Joe Klein

On the Friday before her resurrection, Hillary Clinton seemed exhausted, played out. She attended a funeral in Dallas for a policeman who had been killed in a traffic accident while accompanying her motorcade. Her campaign plane seemed funereal as well, reporters and staff sick — the dry, incestuous campaign coughs reverberating through the fuselage — and spent after the most intense eight-week run in the history of American politics. She wandered into Waco, Texas, that afternoon, uninspiring before an unimpressive crowd. In San Antonio that night, her stump speech collapsed into unstructured chaos. She yelled hoary Democratic clichés at the crowd — "Health care should be a right, not a privilege!" — and it was easy to assume that she had thrown in the towel, that this was coming to an end.

And then something happened. From a distance it seemed that her charming, self-deprecating appearance on Saturday Night Live — and SNL's reprise of a debate skit in which MSNBC moderators gang up on her — might have changed the zeitgeist. "Do I really laugh like that?" she asked her doppelgänger Amy Poehler, whose Clinton laugh resembles Clinton's laugh only in its awkwardness. Poehler nodded, laughing, and Clinton's "Yeah, well ..." response seemed more spontaneous than anything she had done on the stump in a month of electoral massacres. If nothing else, SNL had tapped into the slow boil that many of Clinton's female supporters had experienced during Obama's February — that feeling of taking a backseat to the egos of others who might not work as hard or know as much as they did. A feminine fury was abroad in the land; on March 4, women represented a staggering 59% and 57% of the Democratic electorates in Ohio and Texas, respectively.

But there were more prosaic, political things working to Clinton's advantage as well. Tiny fissures were beginning to appear in Obama's shining armor. I thought he won the Texas and Ohio debates with his elegant counterpunching and cool demeanor, but I was wrong: Clinton's policy details — her specificity and passion on health insurance during the 16-min. volley with Obama that was later, foolishly, derided by the media — apparently conveyed a degree of caring and preparation that seemed more reliable than her opponent's shiny intellect and rhetoric. On the ground in Texas and Ohio, she began to seem more real than he did.

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You can read the full article here:
www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1719898,00.html

He's a anti-Dem hack who would be unemployed if "anti-Dem hack" weren't an essential qualification for a job in Big Media.