Ben Smith: "Clinton wears GOP hate as badge of honor"

Ben Smith:

Republican loathing for Hillary Clinton used to be viewed as her Achilles' heel.

But Tuesday night in Philadelphia, she wore Republican hate as a badge of honor, fending off her Democratic rivals' sharpest attacks yet by casting herself as a kind of partisan warrior queen.

Barack Obama, pressed for weeks by his donors and by the media to take on Clinton more directly, came out swinging against her, moving from uncertainty to a more confident criticism.

She parried an early blow from him, an accusation that she is too close to President Bush and his party on Iran.

"I don’t think the Republicans got the message that I’m voting and sounding like them," she told the Illinois senator.

"If you watched their debate last week, I seemed to be the topic of great conversation and consternation – for a reason."

The heart of Clinton’s case was that if Republicans hate her, she must be doing something right.

"The Republicans, in their constant obsession with me, they obviously think I am communicating effectively," she said later in the debate.

But Obama came back sharper.

"Part of the reason Republicans are obsessed with you, Hillary, is I think that’s a fight they’re very comfortable having," he responded, adding that "what we don’t need is another eight years of bickering."

Skillful attacks

John Edwards kept up the pressure most skillfully on Clinton, putting his courtroom skills to use to build a case, at times mockingly, against the New York senator.

After almost two hours of largely fruitless sparring with Clinton, accusing her of “double-talk,” Edwards drove his point home when she refused to say whether she supports New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants.

“Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No," Clinton said.

"But do I understand the sense of real desperation of trying to get a handle on this? Remember, in New York, we want to know who is in New York, we want people to come out of the shadows."

Edwards pounced.

“Unless I missed something, Sen. Clinton said two different things in the course of two minutes,” he said.

Obama said he supports the plan. An Edwards aide, Mark Kornblau, said after the debate that Edwards also supported the plan.

Keeping cool

Clinton, positioned in the middle of the stage with a row of men in suits on each side, turned to her left to listen to Edwards and her right to hear Obama.

She largely responded calmly, diminishing the policy differences between the candidates.

When Edwards tried to draw a difference between his plan to fight terror in the Middle East and hers to run combat missions against Al Qaeda in Iraq, she dismissed the gap as “semantic.”

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, for his part, came to Clinton’s defense.

"You know what I’m hearing here — I’m hearing this holier-than-thou attitude toward Sen. Clinton ... close to personal attacks that we don’t need," he said. "I think it’s important that we save the ammunition for the Republicans."

The debate later took a turn to the weird, with Rep. Dennis Kucinich confirming that he had seen an unidentified flying object in the company of the actress and spiritualist Shirley MacLaine.

(Immediately after the debate, Richardson offered more ammunition to UFO fanciers in an MSNBC interview: "The federal government has not come clean" on UFOs, he said.

Later, he seemed to backtrack. "I don't believe there are UFOs but the government has not handled this well over the years.")

The UFO exchange also gave Obama, finally fully relaxed, his clearest line of the night.

"What I know is there's life here on Earth, and we're not attending to life here on Earth," he said.