Democrat race gets tougher

It’s early, but inevitable. The long knives are coming out in the Democratic race for the presidency.

Peggy Noonan has a good analysis of what you’re going to hear on all the weekend news shows about the effort to marginalize Hillary Clinton.

Only a Democrat could hurt her, and a Democrat just did. Hollywood titan David Geffen, who now supports Barack Obama, this week famously retagged the Clintons as an Ivy League Bonnie and Clyde. Bill is “reckless,” Hillary relentless–“God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary?” In an interview that seemed like an audience, with the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, Mr. Geffen said, “Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.” In this he was, knowingly or unknowingly, echoing Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator, who said in 1996 of the then-president, “Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?” Mr. Kerrey suffered for the remark and was shunned within his party for a while, but didn’t retract.

In her column Ms. Dowd labeled the campaign operation “Hillary Inc.” but Mr. Geffen got closer to the heart of it: It is the Clinton “machine” and it “is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

He’s probably about to find out how true that is.

Mr. Geffen should be braced for a lot of bad personal box office–negative press, searching profiles, strained relations. We’re probably about to see if the Clinton Machine can flatten him. Little doubt it will try. John Dickerson wrote in Slate this week of Bill Clinton’s generously sharing his campaign wisdom: “Your opponent can’t talk when he has your fist in his mouth.” Among some Democratic political professionals this kind of talk is considered tough and knowing, as opposed to, say, startlingly belligerent and crude.

But the outcome of the Geffen-Clinton episode is worthy of watching because it is going to determine whether it is remembered as the moment in the 2008 campaign when it became clear you are allowed to criticize Hillary–or as the moment it became clear you are not.

There are still plenty of American voters for whom a “scorched earth campaign” and tough talk about a fist in the mouth are still startlingly belligerent and crude. It will be interesting to see which way the Democrat base shifts throughout this political battle.

Hillary’s spokesman says that if Obama is a good man, he’ll have to renounce Geffen’s comments and give back the money he raised in a huge Hollywood fundraiser.

Mrs. Clinton has never gone after a fellow Democrat quite the way she’s going after Mr. Obama, and it’s an indication of how threatened she is not only by his candidacy but, one suspects, his freshness. He makes her look like yesterday. He makes her look like the old slash-and-burn. I doubted he could do her serious damage. Now I wonder.

What Mrs. Clinton is trying to establish is this: to criticize her–to speak of her critically as a human being, as a person with a record and a history and a style and attitudes–is, ipso facto, to be dirty, and low, and destructive. To air and raise questions about who she is, how she operates, and what can be inferred from her past actions is by definition an unjust act.

But Americans have always–always–looked at and judged the character and personality of their candidates for president. And they have been right to do so. It mattered that Lincoln was Honest Abe, Washington had no personal lust for power, that FDR was an optimist and a manipulator, that Adams was a man of rectitude and no small amount of stubbornness. These facts, these aspects of their nature, had policy implications and leadership implications. They couldn’t be more pertinent. They still are.