Until now, I haven't written a column about Hillary for a few reasons.
First, there's nothing I can say about her that hasn't been said a million times by pundits, columnists and random people on the street. Hillary has been vilified, lionized, demonized, mocked, praised, honored, celebrated, joked about, spat upon and everything in between. She's a walking, talking Rorschach ink blot - everyone sees different things in her.
Secondly, she's sort of a boring story, at least to me. She's a solid but not a flashy campaigner. She doesn't make entertaining gaffes or screwups. She doesn't have any quirks or witty jokes. Her message is dreadfully sensible, cautious, and scripted. She's raising boatloads of money, relentlessly locking up endorsements and putting the pieces of a winning campaign together slowly, methodically and carefully.
Boringly.
Of course, the woman is trying to win her party's nomination, not provide amusement for political junkies like me. Still, sometimes I wish she'd say something outlandish, make a dirty joke or get pissed off, just so I don't have to open the paper and see another story about how she made a perfectly acceptable stump speech.
Her dominance is making the race for the Democratic nomination much, much less interesting than the Republicans' contest, which is an all-out slugfest with no clear frontrunner.
But lo! There may be hope for some mudslinging yet. Last week, at a debate at Drexel University, the Democratic candidates got their hands dirty for the first real time. Obama finally unveiled his inner Mr. Hyde, John Edwards went into full-blown attack-dog mode, and even little-known Chris Dodd took some well-aimed potshots, with an aggression borne of desperation. All three of them had their guns pointed squarely at the clear frontrunner, Hillary.
This isn't entirely unprecedented. The rest of the Democratic field has targeted Hillary at debates before. Those are, after all, the rules of the nomination game: The frontrunner tries to fend off his or her challengers to the throne, while the rest of the candidates have an unspoken agreement to lay off each other until the big cheese is toppled. Then someone else is the frontrunner, and the game begins anew. Whoever is ahead when nomination time rolls around has won.
So no, the targeting of Hillary wasn't unprecedented in this race (though the strength of the opposition was much stronger this time around than ever before). What was different was that it worked. It actually threw Hillary off her game. She looked uncertain, she contradicted herself, she parsed and split hairs.
For the first time this race, she looked like just a regular candidate, a mortal among fellow mortals on the debate stage. It shattered the illusion of "Hillary and the rest." During that debate, Hillary was one of the rest.
This is a pretty big deal. Previously, attacks by her rivals seemed to roll off her, leaving her unharmed. A quick, sensible rebuttal, and she'd be on her way, deftly changing the subject from her own troubles to the errors of President Bush or Congressional Republicans. Like her husband, the Teflon President, Hillary was the Teflon Candidate: Nothing they threw at her seemed to stick.
No longer.
The other candidates smell blood in the water for the first time. The news media senses, at long last, a story on the Democrats other than "Hillary Continues to Dominate." Hillary's polls have dropped a bit in Iowa and New Hampshire.
The race for the Democratic nomination might just be interesting after all.
Michael Sherry is a junior majoring in political science. He can be reached at michael.sherry@tufts.edu.
