HarperLee

From Clinton's Real Choice, E. J. Dionne, Jr., Washington Post, April 1, 2008:

For all Democrats, the worst thing that has happened since January is the tarnishing of the Clinton brand. Clinton haters: Don't laugh. The truth is that when this whole thing began, the vast majority of Democrats -- including Obama supporters -- and a fair number of independents had largely positive views of Bill Clinton's record and Hillary Clinton's merits.

In light of today's economic crisis, most Americans look back fondly on the rapid and widely shared growth of the 1990s. What neoconservatives see as a "holiday from history" in foreign policy, most Americans see as a time of peace when the United States was respected in the world and even rather liked.

And while Bill Clinton's triangulation (and his scandal) did damage the Democratic Party, Obama himself has acknowledged that Clinton was right to pull the party back from "the excesses of the '60s." Clinton, Obama told me in an interview last fall, "deserves some credit for breaking with some of those dogmas in the Democratic Party."

As for Hillary Clinton, nobody doubts her intelligence. Those who know her reject the media-built image of Clinton as a cold, calculating machine. Such a person would not inspire the loyalty she has earned from her partisans. If Obama does win, he will draw on her policies, some of which are better crafted than his own.

Yet much of this has been lost. Bill Clinton's approach to the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign's effort to ignore everything it once said about the irrelevance of the Florida and Michigan primaries, Hillary Clinton's willingness to say (or imply) that John McCain is better prepared to be president than Obama -- all this and more have created a ferocious backlash against the Clintons. The result is that when the word "Clinton" crosses their lips, many Democrats sound like Ken Starr, Bob Barr and the late Henry Hyde.

"Chill out" is good advice. Hillary Clinton has every right to keep fighting. But her campaign has suffered from a ricochet effect. Attacks aimed at her opponent and efforts to exaggerate her experience have weakened rather than strengthened her claim to the nomination.

This is obviously a problem for Hillary Clinton herself, but it is also very bad for a Democratic Party that cannot afford to see the entire Clinton legacy discredited.

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