The Teflon (tm) candidate

Is Hillary Clinton the Teflon (tm) candidate of 2008? Last night CBS News had an analysis piece by Jeff Greenfield, called "Clinton Seems a Done Deal." He showed her fending off Obama's call for change by painting herself as the candidate of "Change with Experience," and parrying Edwards' charge that she's the tool of lobbyists by calling herself the champion of the middle class. The report made being all things to all people sound like a good thing.

Somewhere along the line, the MSM seems to have decided to give Hillary a pass. The episode of Norman Hsu, Democratic supporter and fugitive fraudster, could have been a serious setback for Clinton's campaign, which reaped the lion's share of his largess, but the story quickly faded. Her prolonged shilly-shallying over the Iraq war is another potential disaster for her, especially among Democrat Primary voters, but that issue hasn't caught on, either.

Clinton--and, indeed, all media-savvy candidates--benefits from the slapdash and slipshod "coverage" of campaigns that has become the norm. Positions on issues are described, if at all, in a sentence or two, and debates and polls are covered as if they were real news. When something does get reported, it is likely to be a meaningless story blown out of all proportion--as with Clinton's support for a local earmark to give a million dollars for a museum of the Woodstock Concert of 1969.

So far, especially given the rage of Repubs against Clinton over the past 15 years, Hillary's free pass is as remarkable as the "new Nixon" of 1968, and even more surprising than the general failure to examine W's credentials--or the lack thereof--in 2000.

The danger for Clinton, and Democrats, is that this could change. The Woodstock story has been picked up by GOPhers who are getting desperate for things to hurl at Hillary. That one, in particular, makes an easy target, and is a simple way for them to portray her as no better than anyone else in Washington--i.e., to blur the distinction between Repubs and Democrats. The press, also eager for easy targets, could shift into attack mode on Clinton and play up attacks on her the way they aired the fake swift boat controversy in 2004; this is all the more likely because of powerful forces, such as Fox, all ready to give vent to the venom of the right.

One of the hazards for both parties this year is that they are likely to have picked their presidential candidates eight or nine months before the election, leaving plenty of time for devastating secrets (or just plain old smears) to emerge when it's too late to find someone new.

Is this anyway to run a democracy?