Winning an election isn't the same as passing an examination - EJ Dionne

[groovedaddy]

CONCORD, N.H. -- Hillary Clinton may have unintentionally written the obituary for the Iowa and New Hampshire phase of her presidential campaign, and perhaps her candidacy, when she told voters on Sunday: "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."

Clinton has not heeded her own lesson. She is campaigning in prose and has left the poetry to Barack Obama. She has answers to hard policy questions, but he has the one answer that voters are hungering for: He offers himself as the vehicle for creating a new political movement that will break the country out of a sour, reactionary political era.

The most telling laugh line in Obama's stump speech is his description of the dreadful charge his opponents make against him. "Obama's talking about hope again," the candidate says, mimicking his foes. Then his tenor drops to a low, conspiratorial pitch: "He's a hope monger." His audiences roar.

There is a certain melancholy in watching Clinton do battle, aware that the bottom is falling out from under her here. By way of proving her tenacity and the depth of her policy knowledge, she subjects herself to unremitting rounds of questions from voters about every issue from health care to global warming.

http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080108/OPINION04/801080332/1054/OPINION