Hillary -- tough, but to what end?

Excerpts from a day-after primary editorial at thephoenix.com:

Clinton’s impressive comeback has many of her supporters touting her experience and toughness as her bedrock virtues. Both are considerable. But voters in the upcoming primaries would do well to remember that Clinton’s style of hardball spawned Travelgate, which wounded her husband’s presidency before it could take flight. Her tough stance on Whitewater allowed the national press to develop an issue that could have been contained before it morphed into the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which led to Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Her ham-fisted management of the Clinton health-care initiative lead to this important issue being sidelined for almost 10 years. And her vote for Bush’s Iraq War gave that adventure a patina of bipartisan respectability. There is no doubt that Clinton is tough. But to what end?

Her grit has been displayed on the primary battlefields, with husband Bill playing the race card in South Carolina, her campaign disseminating a picture of Obama in African tribal dress, and her own Nixonesque answer to a 60 Minutes question about Obama’s religion in which she toyed with the idea that Obama might be a Muslim before she conceded what she very well knew: that Obama is a practicing, churchgoing Christian. America has enjoyed enough of this style of tough. Clinton should cease and desist.

More troubling than these garden-variety ploys is Clinton’s sleeping-children-ringing-red-telephone commercial, which was apparently so successful in Texas. The unavoidable message of this ad is that she is ready to be commander in chief and Obama is not. If the single most important vote of her Senate career is any indication, she was without a doubt tough on Iraq. And look where the nation is now. That commercial takes a page from the McCain strategy book. It hurts Obama, but it also helps McCain. It is naked self-interest. It is based on a concept of the imperial presidency that has compromised America’s standing throughout the world. The surface of Clinton’s attack does raise an uncomfortable and legitimate question about Obama. He would be wise to answer it forcefully if he is to put it to rest.

If the chattering of the conservative media mouths is any indication, Republicans would rather face Clinton in November than Obama. And with good reason. Polls, for all their limitations, show that McCain has a far better chance of beating Clinton.

The greatest peril Democrats face at the moment is that Clinton, in trying to beat Obama, will play into Republican hands.

Even when Republican misdeeds are factored out of the past two national elections, we are left with a nation in which a very narrow margin separates the politics of light from the politics of darkness. This is also true of the margins within the Democratic Party. The next 90 days will determine which side will prevail. Sometimes style is substance.