PHILADELPHIA – By sheer, drowsy default, Hillary Rodham Clinton won last night’s debate against Barack Obama.
Only because she came the closest to describing why everyone in America is so tired of this whole endless psychodrama.
It came as she was trying to explain why she and Obama have both been making up so much nonsense on the campaign trail lately.
“We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate,” Clinton said. “You know, that happens when you’re talking as much as we have talked.”
Going into last night’s debate, optimistic American voters had hoped it would be a knock-down drag-out fight that would finally bring an end to this Democratic race, which has been on life support for months.
For so long, we’ve heard both of these featherweights claim the worn-out mantle of Rocky Balboa, boxing their way to ultimate but unlikely win.
Expecting a decisive victor last night, instead, we got a pillow fight, only less entertaining.
Both got in their snotty little digs.
Obama – feigning to defend Clinton – reminded all those white blue-collar voters in Pennsylvania of the time the former first lady hotly rejected the notion of staying at home to “bake cookies.”
Clinton tried advancing the recent fracas over Obama’s elitist comments about bitter voters in Pennsylvania clinging to religion and guns by going on about the importance of her own Christian faith, slyly suggesting that Obama is somehow a fake Christian.
And in substantive news, Obama promised to raise your taxes, although in doing so he invented an ingenious euphemism for “broad new tax to punish everyone.”
“We’re going to have to capture some revenue in order to stabilize the Social Security system. You can’t get something for nothing,” he lectured, as if it were taxpayers and not Congress that’s been looting Social Security for years to fund their pet political projects.
And equally disastrous, Clinton last night vowed to retreat as recklessly as she voted to start the war, no matter what her generals say.
So, while Clinton may have won the debate because she did the least badly, the real winner wasn’t onstage: John McCain.
He could deck either of these featherweights.