In the course of giving John McCain advice on how to run in the general election, Michael Medved delivers what looks an awful lot like a post mortem on the campaign of Senator Clinton — even though Ohio and Texas are still two weeks away.

Clinton made a decision to avoid an ideological battle with her rival and decided to frame the race as a choice between “experience” and “charisma,” between “work” and “words.” In other words she decided to fight Obama on personality, rather than the issues, and in terms of a compelling, appealing personality, Obama obviously wins.

Clinton could have won an issues election – mobilizing the broad middle of the Democratic Party and leaving Obama to run to her left. She could have criticized him for preaching surrender on the war, for minimizing the reality of the terrorist threat, for calling unequivocally for big government and higher taxes, for rejecting the free trade heritage of Clintonism. Instead, she insisted that she and her opponent hardly differed on the issues, and it was only a question of who is better “prepared to take over as commander-in-chief from day one.”

By emphasizing my “thirty-five years of work fighting for change” Hillary not only made herself sound older, but high-lighted the meaningless, trivial nature of the change she sought and, allegedly, achieved: most Democrats don’t like the results of the last thirty-five years of government policy.

Anyone who believes that the nomination struggle was actually centered on substantive issues should try to answer two fundamental questions: who’s more liberal, Hillary or Obama? And who’s more moderate, Hillary or Obama? It’s telling that in the Democratic Party both liberals and moderates seem to be breaking for Obama. In the absence of any clear distinction on policy prescriptions, they all feel free to vote for him as an expression of the fact that they just like the guy, or as an indication that they long (like nearly all Americans) to reject our terrible history of racism, or as a reflection about incurable unease about the alternative…

Senator Obama doesn’t much have to change his tune as he appears to transition from primary campaigning to the general election. Though now he is increasingly referring to John McCain by name in his speeches, his denunciation of the “politics of yesterday” would seem to be applicable to either opponent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, New Media, Republicans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.