The American Spectator

With little more than two weeks to go before the 2008 presidential primary voting begins, things are finally heating up. Day after day new tales of mud-slinging arise and subterfuges unwind, while out on the hustings kindergarten kapers abound.

The biggest news is Hillary Clinton’s plunge in the polls, and the question of whether or not she can rebound is on everyone’s lips. Even her husband Bill conceded that she might lose in Iowa. But is she doomed to defeat because she is losing ground in the early primaries?

While the old saying “familiarity breeds contempt” seems written just for her, it’s not just the voters who are seemingly turning against the world’s smartest woman; many liberal pundits have also grown cold and are singing rival Barack Obama’s praises.

p>One Obama backer is New York Times columnist Frank Rich, who laid out a rather odd but predictable reason that his man will win; hypocritical, hyper-religious, racist Republicans. In decrying the “collective nastiness of the Republican field,” he wrote: br> /p>

This country has had its fill of often hypocritical family-values politicians dictating what is and is not acceptable religious and moral practice…the Oprah [Winfrey]-Obama movement practices an American form of ecumenicalism. It preaches a bit of heaven on earth in the form of a unified, live-and-let-live democracy that is greater than the sum of its countless disparate denominations.

br> This “unified, live-and-let-live” attitude must not include Republicans because Rich continues, “I’d argue instead that any sizable racist anti-Obama vote will be concentrated in states that no Democrat would carry in the general election.”

After calling GOPers religious tyrants and racists, he concludes: “For those Americans looking for the most unambiguous way to repudiate politicians who are trying to divide the country by faith, ethnicity, sexuality and race, Mr. Obama is nothing if not the most direct shot.”

BUT IF MRS. CLINTON continues her downward spiral and is abandoned by those who are always first to desert a sinking ship, will Obama get the nod?

p>I don’t believe so, and the reason has nothing to do with race or religion. Even his supporters acknowledge that he hasn’t much experience, though that hardly matters to the infatuated. Try this rhapsodic gushing from the Boston Globe