Democratic Debate Proves You Can Hit a Girl: Margaret Carlson

Commentary by Margaret Carlson

Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. presidential debates have been largely a bust, unless you go in for stilted round-robin interviews that reward memorization and neatness over substance.

All those ``raise-your-hand-if-you-agree questions'' reduce the candidates to schoolchildren begging the teacher for a hall pass.

Given the setting, Hillary Clinton won every encounter, even though she has sounded like an operator droning that, due to an unusually high call volume, she will be unable to answer your question at the present time.

Thanks primarily to former Senator John Edwards, Tuesday night's Democratic debate was different. He was out to prove it's OK to hit a girl. He hit Clinton so many times that as the night wore on, she began to seem punch drunk, unsure of what was on or off the table and which tough issues needed yet another study by a fuzzy bipartisan commission tied up with a blue ribbon.

When Clinton again dodged specifics on Social Security, she was confronted with a private conversation she'd had with an Iowa voter, overheard by an Associated Press reporter, in which she said she might require the wealthy to pay more in payroll taxes.

Clinton snapped back that ``everybody knows'' that's one possibility, and ``I don't advocate it.''

Good or Bad Idea?

Clinton was caught again when she was asked whether it was a good idea for New York Governor Eliot Spitzer to offer driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. In the course of two minutes, she gave two different answers while trying to give none at all. Her reply was as dense as the heat in the room, saying Spitzer was trying to address a problem left to fester by President George W. Bush's failure to overhaul immigration.

When Senator Chris Dodd, who had his best night ever, jumped in, saying licenses are ``a privilege'' that ``ought not to be extended,'' she retorted that she'd never said ``it should be.''

Then NBC's Tim Russert came back with a hard fact check: an interview in a New Hampshire newspaper in which she'd said otherwise.

Rather than address immigration, about which there is no answer to please everybody, Clinton called a foul. ``You know, Tim,'' she scolded, ``this is where everybody plays `gotcha'.''

No More Cackling

A few weeks ago, Clinton was able to laugh at questions she didn't like, cackling as if interviewers like Bob Schieffer and Chris Wallace had lost their minds by trying to pin her down.

Before Tuesday, Clinton was protected by her own meticulous preparation. She was also helped by the fact that none of her male opponents wanted to be former Representative Rick Lazio of New York, who entered the 2000 Senate race after Rudy Giuliani got out after announcing he had prostate cancer and that he was separating from his second wife.

Lazio, with his boyish looks, seemed soft, playing into the label affixed to him by actor Ben Affleck at a campaign rally of ``running around the frat house in his underwear'' while ``Hillary was out fighting for working families.''

When Lazio decided to get aggressive by walking across the stage at a debate to wave a piece of paper practically under Clinton's nose, it backfired. The only thing worse than being too soft is being too hard if your opponent is a woman.

Lazioed Again

No one broke out from behind the podium to invade Clinton's space this week, but everyone verbally Lazioed her. When Giuliani was quoted as saying Clinton had never run anything in her life, she said the Republican's obsession with criticizing her was evidence she would make the best president. Edwards countered that it was evidence ``they may actually want to run against you.''

If history is any guide, Edwards may have fallen into the Dick Gephardt trap, in which the one (Gephardt) who decks the front-runner (Howard Dean) clears the way for the kinder, gentler candidate to win (Kerry). They don't like hand-to-hand combat in Iowa.

By that measure, Barack Obama won the night, gently saying he couldn't tell what she was for or against. Before the debate, he said of Clinton, ``You're not ready to lead if you can't tell us where you're going.''

Lasting Image

Too bad the debates are almost over now that some sand has been thrown in the gears of the genetically engineered candidate. Everyone is focusing on Clinton voting to label Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, which proves she didn't learn her lesson over giving Bush a blank check on Iraq. Still, the more lasting image may be Clinton dissembling over who's keeping the Clinton administration's papers secret. She says it's the National Archives ``moving as rapidly as the Archives moves.''

Russert said it was because of a letter from her husband asking them not to release the documents until 2012.

This may put an end to Clinton bringing back those gauzy days of yesteryear, when a non-cookie baking first lady semi- presided over curing the deficit and reforming welfare.

No, what keeping her papers secret brings back is those impossible-to-find billing records, her inability to remember just how she made a killing in cattle futures, and her advice to stonewall on everything from the travel office to the composition of her health-care task force to Paula Jones.

What came across Tuesday is that Clinton is too clever by half. We've always known she was smart and often wondered if the person whose emotions run the gamut from A to B, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, had a heart.

We know she has a thin skin. Hours after the debate, her campaign released a video called ``The Politics of Pile-on.''

To contact the writer of this column: Margaret Carlson in Washington at mcarlson3@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 1, 2007 00:06 EDT

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