http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118254785028645232.html?mod=googlenews_wsjHillary Clinton doesn't have to prove she's a man. She has to prove she's a woman.
She doesn't have to prove to people that she's tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief. She doesn't have to show she could and would wage a war. She has to prove she has normal human warmth, a normal amount of give, of good nature, that she is not, at bottom, grimly combative and rather dark.
This is the woman credited with starting and naming the War Room. Her staff has nicknamed her "The Warrior." Get in her way and she'd squish you like a bug. This has been her reputation for 20 years. And it is her big problem. People want a president to be strong but not hard.
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But there is another side of the Clinton campaign, and I found some of it this week. It is a new Web site called HillaryIs44.com. It is rather mysterious. It does not divulge who is running the site, or who staffs it. It is not interactive; it has one informative voice, and its target audience seems to be journalists and free-lance oppo artists.
And it reads like The Warrior's Id. Hillary "took on" a journalist this week and "beat him into submission." Bloomberg has "stripped himself of allies" in "New York's cutthroat politics." "Expect stormy days ahead for Bloomberg," who will wind up "lonely." Republicans "will attempt to rip him to shreds." "A May surprise announcement will be met with mounds of research accumulated over the next 11 months."
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Encouraging readers to send in "confidential tips," its primary target and obvious obsession is Barack Obama. "Senator Barack Obama (D-Rezko) is busy lately lying about President Bill Clinton" and "attacking entire communities." "We have written extensively on Obama, and his indicted slumlord friend Antoin 'Tony' Rezko. We have repeatedly warned David Axelrod, Michelle Obama and Barack Obama that this story is not going away." The Obama campaign is "still posing as innocents incapable of doing anything unsavory even as evidence mounts that unsavory is their favorite dish." "Dirty Obama Smear" and "Obama's Dirty Mud Politics are two recent headlines.
This appears to be the subterranean part of Hillary's campaign, the part that quietly coexists with the warm, chuckling lady playing the jukebox with her husband. It coexists with the Maya Angelou part, the listening tour part, the filmed parts.
It is the war room part. I suspect the site is a back door to that war room.
Politics ain't beanbag. It is not, generally, an ennobling profession.
But if Mrs. Clinton's aides want to understand better her likability problem, they should look at this site. It's dark in there.