Are the Democrats celebrating yet?

With the Republicans splitting up the party the way they are this week (see post below), it would seem like the occasion to drop the balloons and declare this thing over as far as who wins the White House next year. Except…the Democrats still have to decide who they want to send, and it’s less clear and more interesting for them this week, too.

I heard Lou Dobbs on Larry King Live this week on the notably liberal CNN, and both Dobbs and CNN regularly criticize the Bush administration and the Republicans as a matter of daily ‘reporting.’ But this time Dobbs was railing about all the candidates, in both parties, as in a pox on both your houses! None of them qualify to lead this country, he declared, and conservatives have a right to feel let down just as much as the liberals should feel let down, and all Americans should hold off and wait for that great leader out there who has yet to rise to the occasion.

Well. That was intersting. I did not disagree with much of what Dobbs was saying this time, at least the few minutes of it I heard.

So this is not a done deal after all for Hillary Clinton, though some major media would have you think so.

Peggy Noonan’s last two columns analyze Mrs. Clinton better than anything else I’ve seen, and in more fairness to the whole field and process and in the context of American history. Here’s what she said after the last debate:

I spent a day going over the transcripts so I could quote at length, but her exchanges are all over, it’s a real Google-fest. Here, boiled down, is what she said.

Giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses makes sense because it makes sense, but she may not be for it, but undocumented workers should come out of the shadows, and it makes sense. Maybe she will increase the payroll tax on Social Security beyond its current $97,500 limit, to $200,000. Maybe not. Everybody knows what the possibilities are. She may or may not back a 4% federal surcharge on singles making $150,000 a year and couples making $200,000. She suggested she backed it, said she didn’t back it, she then called it a good start, or rather “I support and admire” the person proposing such a tax for his “willingness to take this on.”

She has been accused of doubletalk and she has denied it. And she is right. It was triple talk, quadruple talk, Olympic-level nonresponsiveness.

This is clear and not mean-spirited. It’s startling accuracy in not only not spinning the politics, but in unwinding them and seeing what we have here.

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.”

You nod, almost impulsively, at the recognition that this is true.

Today’s column looks at the way the Clinton campaign is handling criticism of her, and how that says more about Hillary Clinton than her detractors. Especially compared with other women leaders.

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don’t use what they are. They don’t hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he’s not criticizing me, he’s criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.

When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. “When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the ‘boys club.’ ” But when “legitimate questions” are asked, “she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules.”

Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: “Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops.” It was all so incongruous…

A word on toughness. Mrs. Clinton is certainly tough, to the point of hard. But toughness should have a purpose. In Mrs. Thatcher’s case, its purpose was to push through a program she thought would make life better in her country. Mrs. Clinton’s toughness seems to have no purpose beyond the personal accrual of power. What will she do with the power? Still unclear. It happens to be unclear in the case of several candidates, but with Mrs. Clinton there is a unique chasm between the ferocity and the purpose of the ferocity. There is something deeply unattractive in this, and it would be equally so if she were a man.

This is interesting analysis. It is fair-minded and thought provoking, and evanhanded.

I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.

I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: “We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well.” But we won’t. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.

Exactly.

On the other side of the political critical spectrum (usually), Lou Dobbs is basically saying the same thing. It is dispiriting.

The great American spirit is not being ennobled and elevated and encouraged to soar. ‘America is great because she is good,’ Alexis de Tocqueville famously said in Democracy in America, and we feel like we are neither right now, because we are battered and confused and dispirited. Who will lead? Right now, my bet is on the people in the grassroots.