Bill Kristol on the Geffen blurt

Once unleashed, this series of thoughts is subversive. So much of the Hillary Clinton candidacy depends on an aura of inevitability, supported by oodles of money and a fear of retribution if you're not on board. But what if she's not inevitable? And what if the retribution isn't so all-powerful?

That's what is now being tested. Now that it has been raised, the thought that Hillary isn't the ideal nominee might spread. Hence Team Clinton's need to enforce omertà. Hillary's attack dog, Howard Wolfson, couldn't even take the time to do some basic fact-checking before rushing out an attack email demanding Obama denounce the remarks of Geffen, "his campaign's finance chair." But Geffen is not and has never been Obama's finance chair. He has no official role in the Obama campaign.

I think Kristol is a little confused. Geffen didn't open the gate, he simply pointed it out . Clinton's inevitability has always been more media myth than reality--easily disabused if you read the lefty blogs with any regularity. If fact the whole reason for Obama to be in the race is that the consensus has been that Hillary is anything BUT inevitable.

He is correct though in one regard--Geffen's stature lends authority to the nagging doubt a lot of people have been nursing about Hillary. I strongly suspect that this will be seen as the moment the wheels came off the Clinton campaign.

Dontcha just love politics? One moment you're a titan, the next your John Kerry.

I suppose its possible that Hillary can recover--for all her deficiencies, she's has enormous personal resources at her disposal. Which ever way it goes though, Obama is in a lot of trouble.

In the short term, Obama will reap the rewards, but as it becomes clear that he's advancing and Hillary is falling behind, two things are inevitable. First; he gets dubbed the frontrunner by the media. He's having a hard time coping with the media now, but after that happens, our hot house flower is going to wilt under the pressure. Secondly he will be the target of some of the nastiest political dirty tricks every conceived. The far-left complain naively and bitterly about Rovian tactics, but the Clintons are Shaolin masters of political knife-fighting. Maureen Dowd doesn't call him Obambi for nothing. The very thing that has made him so attractive as a candidate is a fatal weakness.

John Edwards may pull a Lincoln and slip right through the middle of all of this.