Dirty Harry’s Place…

I didn’t watch the debate. I was spending $300 at Wal-Mart. On what, I don’t know. There is Season 1 of The Andy Griffith Show in there somewhere, but the rest seems to have disappeared. Anyway…

Jim Geraghty says Hillary won, hands down, no doubt about it.

The Democratic primary is over. Hillary Clinton ran away with this thing tonight.

Roger Simon says she shot herself in the foot:

In a debate against six Democratic opponents at Drexel University here Tuesday, Clinton gave the worst performance of her entire campaign.

It was not just that her answer about whether illegal immigrants should be issued driver’s licenses was at best incomprehensible and at worst misleading.

It was that for two hours she dodged and weaved, parsed and stonewalled.

Mark Halperin uses the last word the Clinton campaign wants to hear: Shrill:

[Clinton] [f]ell off the tough-shrill balance beam onto the “shrill” side — with a THUD. More defensive than usual, and at times too political and too hot tempered. Borderline disastrous moment at the end when she gave an equivocal answer about drivers licenses for illegal immigrants in New York; it opened the door for her opponents to pounce by turning it into a character issue — and pounce they did. The failure of her performance was cumulative, however, so only those watching the whole debate would see how weak her evening was. If she loses the nomination, tonight will go down in history as the first step to her defeat — no fatal “Dean Scream” catastrophe, but far from her finest moment, to say the least.

What’s nice about political debates, most especially Democrat political debates, is that you need not watch them to know who won. It’s the campaign most effective at spinning their performance afterwards that decides who won. And if this Drudge Flash is right…

CLINTON INNER-CIRCLE BLAME ‘UNFAIR’ MODERATOR TIM RUSSERT. ‘HE BORDERED ON THE UNPROFESSIONAL,’ TOP HILLARY ADVISER CHARGES. ‘HE BROKE DEBATE RULES AND WAS BELLIGERENT’…

…Hillary knows she lost.

I’ve been zipping around the three cable news channels and the consensus is that Hillary’s flubbing of the drivers’ license for illegals issue will be the narrative for the next few days. And it won’t be the issue itself, rather her Clintonesque straddling of it that makes Democrats nervous because wanting it both ways ruined both Kerry and Gore.

With Iowa so close and the media panting for a Hillary Versus Obama storyline, what happened last night was that for the first time Hillary slipped, showed weakness, and a vulnerable spot. Her appeal up to now was her inability to make a mistake. Last night she did and how much further that crack will spiderweb over the coming days will depend on how deft her opponents are at exploiting it.

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