You know things are going well when Maureen Dowd -- who loves to skewer everyone -- writes something like this:

By the time she got to New Hampshire, Hillary was reduced to urging voters not to buy into “false hopes.”

At a hangar in Nashua, with chatty Bill and chatless Chelsea, Hillary tried to purloin more of the Obama message. Besides saying the word “change” as often as possible, she said she was particularly reaching out to young people to help them “reclaim the future.” She claimed that she disliked the red state, blue state terminology — “We are one country,” she said, echoing Obama — even as she added that she should be the nominee because she’s the best one “to withstand the Republican attack machine.”

What she doesn’t mention is that she knows how to fight off the Republican attack machine because she and her husband were so adept at revving it up.

The last line below is so true -- witness the WSJ editorial yesterday that practically fawned over Obama.

 

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January 6, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

Voting for a Smile

By MAUREEN DOWD

www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06dowd.html

CONCORD, N.H.

The Hillary forces at the Plymouth Church caucus in Des Moines weren’t averse to bribes.

They were passing out See’s chocolates to Richardson supporters.

And they weren’t averse to threats. “My wife told me I’d have to join them or I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight,” said Ed Truslow, a compact 68-year-old manufacturing representative. He was still wearing his Chris Dodd sticker when he lumbered over to his wife’s side. A Clinton organizer slapped a Hillary sticker over the offending Dodd sticker, and with a frantic cheeriness told him: “Hillary now, right? God bless!”

They weren’t averse to bending the rules. When they realized that they might not have enough people to get even one Hillary delegate, they sneaked out of their assigned room to Red-Rover their neighbors over, before they’d been officially counted themselves.

It was understandable that Hillary’s “Golden Girls” acolytes would freak out when they saw the throngs of young Obama hopemongers swarming the caucuses. As one Dodd supporter said, looking for her little Dodd corner, “I’m lost in the Obamas.”

A caucusgoer drily noted that it did not seem the most propitious harbinger for Hillary that the fateful evening began with a threat to withhold connubial bliss.

But that’s the way the tough cookie crumbled Thursday night. The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again.