I contend that Senator Clinton lost that Democratic debate of earlier this week. Today, she continues to take a pounding--not merely for her performance in the debate, but now for her campaign's post-debate spin. Good roundup here--some choice quotes: A moment of silence, please, for Invincible Hillary. She left us at 11 am ET yesterday, in Wellesley, Mass., a victim of her own hand. She was 10 months old. She is survived by Victim Hillary. "In so many ways this all women's college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said yesterday at her alma mater, Wellesley College....
"Clinton essentially hid behind her pantsuit in response to a public shellacking," AP's Ron Fournier writes in his "On Deadline" column, noting that Clinton "is no stranger to 'piling on' " herself in playing the aggressor in political combat..."
"But Clinton's candidacy has always been about far more than being the first woman to launch a viable presidential candidacy. She's wanted us to view her as tougher than the other candidates in the race, the candidate equipped to handle the challenges of the job on Day One. She's been the candidate who's ready to "deck" her critics (and remember who dealt the first blow after Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said he'd meet with leaders of rogue nations?)."
Obama this morning, on the "Today" show: "I am assuming and I hope that Sen. Clinton wants to be treated like everybody else. And I think that that's why she is running for president. You know, when we had a debate in Iowa a while back, we spent the first 15 minutes of the debate hitting me on various foreign policy issues. And I didn't come out and say 'look, I'm being hit on because I look different from the rest of the folks on the stage.' . . . We're not running for the president of the city council. We're running for the president of the United States of America."
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus isn't buying it. "Those other guys were beating up on Clinton, if you can call that beating up, because she is the strong front-runner, not because she is a weak woman. And a candidate as strong as Clinton doesn't need to play the woman-as-victim card," Marcus writes. "Using gender this way is a setback. Hillary Clinton is woman enough to take these attacks like a man."
"here is such a thing as protesting too much. Lashing out at her critics "contradicts a central part of Clinton's own message: The notion that she is a battle-tested veteran ready for anything the Republicans can throw at her," Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh writes. "If so, she should prove it by engaging with her rivals and defending her positions -- not by having her campaign protest each and every time another Democrat says something critical about her."
