Why in the world are you still beating the same horse about Hillary not having had a security clearance, ergo she can't have been involved in discussions in the White House? The same people who criticize her for being the first First Lady with a West Wing office and for being too involved now do a bait-and-switch and claim she really wasn't involved at all. I doubt she wanted an office in the West Wing just to play tiddlywinks.

For the record, the President doesn't have a security clearance because he doesn't need one. Classifying documents is an activity based on the President's authority as Chief Executive. As the ultimate classifying authority, the President can consult whomever he wishes on any matter. Are you suggesting that Hillary was never consulted by President Clinton about anything? For that matter, the First Lady doesn't need a security clearance, either. When she goes on trips abroad representing her husband she naturally receives a classified briefing. Hillary visited around 80 countries as First Lady; that's a lot of classified briefings.

For the record, "first lady" is not an elective office.

It is exquisitely hypocritical for you to complain that HRC is being judged by a bait-and-switch double standard, when that's a standard that she erected herself. The hope, I assume, of her handlers (easily the worst stumblebums since the coke-addled clowns who ran the McGovern campaign), was that we'd all assume she was intimately engaged in Bill's successes and not-so-involved in his failures (NAFTA, e.g.).

This is the kind of scorched-earth campaign that ruins a party. The only one who profits from this ad is McCain who, though a PTSD poster boy, somehow looks like the kind of protector president that Republicans support by reflex.

My own personal answer to the question the ad puts out there is, none of the above. The claim HRC COULD have made, in the ad, is that as a woman she's less inclined to push the Strangelove Button than testosterone-crazed men are. This might work except 1.) Obama is about the least visibly testosterone-crazed man on earth, now that Fred Rogers is no longer with us, and 2.) this flies in the face of the Maggie-Thatcher-in-a-Pantsuit campaign she's run so far.

HRC appears atthis point to be running some kind of incredibly devious quintuple-reverse-in-the-backf­ield campaign. I don't understand it. She gains nothing with this latest switcheroo, and just hurts Obama in the General Election. That couldn't POSSIBLY be her goal, could it? I mean, spiteful, destructive, vengeful; who's ever described HRC with that kind of language?

Looks can be deceiving. Wasn't Fred Rogers a Navy Seal?

No. He was a Presbyterian minister.

Ah, on checking I see that's an urban legend.

it is so funny (yet not) that you obamers CLAIM you are running a DIFFERENT campaign....BUT YOU ARE NOT

you post shows NO hopefulness OR coming together

so quit acting like obama is NOT a politician right there in the gutter politics with everybody else

quit dreaming and start thinking

your right again dems, that add was all about hopefulness and coming together! She is killing the chance for the dems to take back the white house with these tactics and trashing any chance for her to ever be relevant again.

Jeeze kids, why don't we all grow up real fast?

No, this isn't all about the actual personalities of two people who are competing to run for high office. It's partly about that, but it's other stuff besides; it's a bunch of decisions made by their campaign staffs and by people outside their control who operate for and against the candidates for reasons (often idiotic and strange) of their own. All or nearly all of the people posting on this board fall into that outside-the-control category, and lots of us are strange, that's for sure.

In general, a politician is a brand. This gets learer as the pol gets older and has spent more time in office. Do you think people were actually voting for Strom Thurmond the person the last couple times he ran? No. They were voting for the brand; for his staff and amateur enthusiast aura, and their history, which was, amazingly, not all of it bad. There was a time when Thurmond's staff was about the only entity in Washington taking the issue of civil rights in China seriously.

So Obama is both a person and a brand right now, and you support him (or not) depending on the broad strikes of what he stands for. HRC likes to talk about concrete proposals and platform but that's all crap -- six months in it won't be an issue and it won't be remembered. Right now, you vote for Obama, (or don't,) because you believe hope is a realistic alternative to fear. If you think fear is all we've got to believe in any more, your choice is between Clinton and McCain, and between the two of them I'd go with her, because he is not altogether sane. And because his fiscal and spending policies are pretty much what we have now. Whether you believe in the broad strokes of the fine print, McCain is not a sensible choice, though these days Hillary is making it easy to loathe her as well.

"you obamers CLAIM you are running a DIFFERENT campaign....BUT YOU ARE NOT"

Well, I can only speak for myself as an "Obamer", but let me assure you that I am not running a campaign, different or otherwise.

IRS eyes UCC over Obama's Hartford speech - The IRS said in the letter that it was concerned about articles posted on the church's Web site and on other sites stating that Obama had addressed nearly 10,000 people at the event. The agency also said Obama volunteers had staffed campaign tables "outside the center to promote his campaign." <link>

It would be most interesting to see the IRS go after all churches that step over the line. Selective prosecution in this case would smack of dirty politics.

Less vituperation, please, Melvyl. I am merely pointing out facts. Yes, we all know that the First Lady isn't elected but then none of the president's advisors -- with the exception of the vice president -- are elected. Even a cursory look at U.S. presidential history would find that several first ladies (Mesdames Reagan, Carter, E. Roosevelt, Wilson and so on) have advised their husbands and been involved behind-the-scenes in their administrations. If your complaint is that she has tried to associate herself with her husband's successes and run from his failures (and what politician doesn't do that?), then you can you can assign her a share of both if it makes you feel better.

As for HRC running a "scorched earth" campaign, that is a laughable notion. This is no LBJ "girl picking daisies under a mushroom cloud" ad. Even the NYT's Maureen Dowd, no fan of HRC's, said that she didn't get what the ad was trying to say. So, differing minds can reach different conclusions. But, you know, the Republicans are already aware of the Obama/Experience angle. The reality is that one of the difficulties HRC is having is that she isn't attacking Obama as she would a Republican for fear of damaging him.

So your defense of the ad is that it didn't work? That's rich and strange.

So advisors are not elected? That will be news to all the folks who voted for Bush because, supposedly, he'd be getting all this gravitas-laden advice from the republican all-star team of Powell, Rumsfeld and Cheney, only one of whom was actually on the ticket. There's a chance of bait and switch when you do that: you vote for Powell but you get Wolfowitz instead. But that was the deal.

I don't know how you conclude that HRC is not attacking Obama on the "experience" angle/issue/meme/bullshit. While her record of achievement is not arguably worse than his, it isn't arguably better, either. And she's still on the attack. And the ad was part of the attack. Are you really claiming it's not? As Lyndon Johnson used to say, don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining.

Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement in her husband's job was dictated by unusual circumstances: he was confined to a wheelchair, and while the electorate was engaged in the fiction that he was not crippled permanently by polio, pretty much everybody knew the score. She had an agenda of her own, but was only able to pursue it most actively after he died. And she was pretty active. Does HRC have something like the UDHR or UNICEF to her credit? If so, it's escaped me. She's been an okay senator from New York. Obama's been an okay senator from Illinois. I call that even.

And the others: Nancy Reagan? You're basing an argument on her? Yes, Wilson's wife was an influence, famously at Versailles, doing considerable harm, sowing the seeds of the next european war. Another positive example? Others, like Rosalyn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson, have worked quietly as their husband's consciences and sympathetic auditors. If Laura's been George's conscience, she should look a lot more tired than she does. And HRC, a corporate lawyer, as the President's conscience? That only makes sense if you loathe both of them, which I actually as yet don't.

And of course it's a scorched earth campaign. At this point she has to knock him way back if she's going to win and represent a united party. She has to do it fast if she can do it at all, and the numbers don't support her earlier program of winning early on attrition and then having time to make nice before the convention. The best thing she could do for the party now would be to concede and wait for next time, when she might have a record of her own to run on and won't have to bullshit everybody about how her husband's achievements were hers as well.