Frank Rich has my vote (alone with the always right-on Bob Herbert)as best NY Times op-ed columnist lately. (I still admire Paul Krugman despite his singularly unquestioning commitment to Hillary Clinton's cause lately.)
In his latest piece (just up) Rich looks at Clinton's political handlers and analyzes why she's been losing ground against Obama.
It's instructive, I think, to link her declining fortunes to her style, and that of her handlers. After all, the last thing we want is a repeat of 2000 or 2004, when that style prevailed.
Hillary paid to put on her own "Town Hall Meeting" (tightly scripted, as usual) on the Hallmark Channel on the eve of Super Tuesday. Remember how she advertised it during the closing moments of the California debate?
If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to "who knows how many" Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the "Yes We Can" Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)
The full piece is here. It's something Hillary's new campaign director should read immediately. Somehow, I doubt he will take it to heart, and that's OK with me -- I already voted for Obama and my vote looks better and better to me all the time.