It looks like the right-wing is rolling out the welcome mat for Hillary Clinton.
The conservative magazine Weekly Standard has found an "exceedingly strange new respect" for Hillary. "She's running like one of our own," they say.
Click here to read the ringing praise. Some excerpts follow.
Some excerpts
A tactical hope to see her campaign flourish--to keep the brawl going and knock dents in Obama--has changed to, at least in some cases, a grudging respect for the lady herself. Actually, they may not have changed quite so much as she has (who knows, perhaps merely changed in her image and tactics), but the Hillary of May 2008 is radically different from the Hillary of two months ago, much less the one of last year, or of eight years back. And this one (at least till the nomination is settled) has some traits the right wing can love.
She's running a right-wing campaign. She's running the classic Republican race against her opponent, running on toughness and use-of-force issues, the campaign that the elder George Bush ran against Michael Dukakis, that the younger George Bush waged in 2000 and then again against John Kerry, and that Ronald Reagan--"The Bear in the Forest"--ran against Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale. And she's doing it with much the same symbols.
there's more...
And better--or worse--she is becoming a social conservative, a feminist form of George Bush.
Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father (the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she'll start talking Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on Embassy Row...
The article also points out that Hillary is making their hearts "flutter" because:
- She has become the first Democrat to wave the bloody flag of 9/11 (her Osama ad)
- She is leveling the same criticisms against Obama as McCain is
- She is becoming a social conservative, "a feminist form of Bush", against the backdrop of an arugula-eating opponent who disses guns and hangs out with radicals
- she is driving the New York Times and the rest of the liberal world crazy.