Peggy Noonan On Hillary's Revelations

Peggy Noonan redeemed herself with a great article in the Weekend Wall Street Journal concerning Hillary's behavior in the recent Democratic candidates' debate. She articulated clearly something I've felt about Hillary all along.

Noonan writes,

"The story is not that Mrs. Clinton signaled, in attitude and demeanor, who she believes is her most dangerous foe, the great impediment between her and an easy glide to the nomination. Yes, that would be Tim Russert.

The story is that she talked about policy. Not talking points, but policy. In talking about it she seemed, for the first time, to be revealing what's inside.

It was startling. It's 1993 in there. The year before her fall, and rise.

But the larger point is that her policy approach revealed all the impulses not of the New Centrism but the Old Leftism. Her statements were redolent of the 1990s phrase "command and control." They reflect a bias toward the old tax-raising on people who aren't rich, who aren't protected, the old "my friends and I know best, and we'll fill you dullards in on the details later."

The problem for Mrs. Clinton is not that people sense she will raise taxes. It's that they don't think she'll raise them on the real and truly rich. The rich are her friends. They contribute to her, dine with her, have access to her. They have an army of accountants. They're protected even from her.

But she can stick it to others, and in the way of modern liberalism for roughly half a century now, one suspects she'll define affluence down. That she would hike taxes on people who make $150,000 a year.

But those "rich" -- people who make $200,000 and have two kids and a mortgage and pay local and state taxes in, say, New Jersey -- they don't see themselves as rich. Because they're not. They're already carrying too much of the freight.

It seemed to me she made it quite possible to assume you know who she'll be making war on. And this -- much more than the latest scandal, the Chinatown funny money and the bundling -- could, and I think would, engender real opposition down the road. The big chink in her armor is not stylistic, it is about policy. It is about the great baseline question in all political life: Whose ox is being gored?"

It pleases me to see someone else also finally feel that Hillary's basic tax-the-middle-class-and-spend policy is the problem. It's such a throwback to the old, losing ways of her party that you wonder how she can believe she'll win with that message.

This is where I think that content can trump form. As I wrote here recently, of an acquaintance who reminded me of Howard Dean's fall from front-running grace four years ago, money and momentum in no way assure victory- either for the nomination, nor for the Presidency itself.

In their own self-interest, Hillary's largely-hapless or worn-out competitors are at last beginning to chip away at her Teflon coating. The inconsistencies are showing through, as are the megalomaniac projects and dreams of vast new Federal programs, paid for with vast new tax revenues from ever-less-wealthy Americans.

Call me naive, or too simple, but I think that Americans instinctively protect their wallets when threatened with such a free-taxing and -spending politician.

I think that reality is at last beginning to catch up to Hillary's campaign. And money won't protect her when it does.