Jonah Goldberg on Clintons on National Review Online

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjkzOGI4NDIwZTM1YmI3OTFkYmE1ZTI4M2ZkZTg0NGI=&w=MQ==

Indeed, shocking as this may be to people naive enough to believe that a woman with no executive experience, no security clearance, no significant successes under her belt, who was catapulted to presidential prominence solely because her husband treated her like a cautionary tale in a country-music song, was nonetheless a co-president for eight years: It turns out that the Bride of Clintonstein was an awful chief executive. Infected by her husband's passive-aggressiveness, she stood paralyzed as the HMS Hillary took on more and more water, until even the string quartet on the deck was leaping for the flotation devices.

As Green pulls memo after memo from the great white's carcass like so many Florida license plates, we discover that the Clintons knew long, long ago that they couldn't beat Barack Obama to the nomination. But winning was secondary, carnage was king. You might even say of her decision to stay in the race: This was no polling accident.

The Clintons adopted a deliberate strategy of diminishing Obama's victories, and Mark Penn, Clinton's trusted campaign manager, pushed for a strategy of ridiculing their black, funny-named opponent as insufficiently American. Such memos, if found in the underbelly of a Republican campaign, would be immortalized by the liberal establishment as permanent proof of conservative racism. When plucked from the bowels of a Democratic campaign, the response is some mild tsk-tsking.