The American Spectator

/p> p> The voters in Iowa spoke loud and clearly that they want change, reconciliation, and hope and an end to the polarization and lying the Clintons are so famous for. The voters in New Hampshire will need to decide whether they want a candidate like Barack Obama who will bring the nation together to solve the problems we face and has an excellent first lady in his wife Michelle, a woman of intelligence, class, grace, and dignity, or whether they want to go back to the good old days of the Clintons and Monica, Travelgate, White Water, Vast Right Wing conspiracies, unending lying and polarization. I for one, a lifelong Democrat, choose Barack Obama, and thus choose change, reconciliation and hope. br> — Mark Jeffery Koch /p>

Phillip Klein’s column about Hillary is beautifully crafted, but in the end he ignores the demands of his own logic when he proclaims that Mrs. Clinton is history. “Though some would hesitate to be so bold,” he says, “as far as this observer is concerned, the era of the Clintons is over.” He is echoed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, where Peggy Noonan declares that, “There’s something about [Hillary] that makes you look, watch, think, look again, weigh and say: No.” Once thought to be inevitable, Mrs. Clinton is now deemed to be too shopworn to defeat a smarmy little lawyer and a first term senator with a past. Despite her best efforts and the help of her friends, she is too obviously flawed to be the people’s choice. It’s wishful thinking.

Recall the days when Reagan’s decision to ignore Iowa was sure to cost him the nomination, when no one as seedy as Nixon could win a national election, when no cornpone liberal with satyriasis and a bitchy wife could trounce George Herbert Walker Bush, Conqueror of Iraq. More ominously and closer to home, let us remember the day when Watergate-exhaustion so soured the public that they sought the embrace of a Georgia bumpkin with an idiot’s grin and the backbone of a candy bar. Sweet reason seldom inhibits the American electorate, nor will a national gag-reflex slow Mrs. Clinton’s progress. She is going to be nominated, she is going to be elected, she is going to drag America to the brink of civil war.

Only the fact that beneath the cosmetic surgery and the Tammy Faye makeup she is ugly as a piece of medieval iconography can undo her; only prolonged exposure to her Midwestern twang can tarnish her appeal, or if the media start showing file photos of those hats she wore to previous inaugurations, the ones with the wide brims that make her look like a bird feeder. In short, her crude behavior, deathless commitment to silly ideology and absolute lack of charm can hurt her only if the public is given opportunity to discover that she is less telegenic than Huckabee and Romney, and the news jocks won’t let that happen.

p>But that’s not the worst of it. If Mrs. Clinton is eliminated from the conflict early, which of the other Democrats running is better suited to the nomination and the office than she? Which Republican is best equipped to pilot a nation deeply polarized and at war with most of the world? Which is intelligent enough to grasp how much trouble we are in, and that all the hard choices postponed for so long must now be made? Which candidate in either party is better suited to the highest office than the Carteresque man who holds it now? br> — Edmund Dantes br> Coshocton, Ohio /p> p> I share Mr. Klein’s enthusiasm over “The Last Days of the Clinton Dynasty.” The Clintons’ influence over our nation’s institutions and national dialogue has been profoundly negative, corrupting and corrosive, and their departure from the national scene would surely be the most positive development for America since the ascendancy of Reagan in 1980. br> —