MoDo enjoys the race

We are witness today to an odd phenomenon: Maureen Dowd saying someting positive about Hillary, even if it's positive in a tangential, slanted, sideways,"Hmm, well, maybe sorta" kind of way.

"Whether or not she wins, Hillary has already given noble service as a sophisticated political tutor for Obama, providing her younger colleague with much-needed seasoning. Who else was going to toughen him up? Howard Dean? John Edwards? Dennis Kucinich?"

Some have questioned whether or not Obama was tough. I answered that a long time ago; I've always thot he was tough. But I have to admit that part of his being tough was, at the start of this campaign, more potential than actual. He has the resilience to respond to difficult situations, but he had not had to respond to them on the national stage. Hillary has had that experience, and, in a perverse way that MoDo points out, this has been good for him.

"Without Hillary, he never would have learned to be a good debater. He never would have understood how to robustly answer distorted and personal attacks. He never would have been warned about how harmful an unplugged spouse can be. He never would have realized how a luminous speech can be effective damage control."

He addressed all of those issues almost as quickly as they came up, and therefore toughened up before our eyes. Which, ironically, Hillary did not anticipate. And what she particularly did not anticipate is that he answered her toughness with eloquence.

But MoDo misses something. It's not just to Obama's benefit in the primary and the general election that he has been through the fire in the primary. McCain has not. Of course, McCain has been through the fire in ways that no one else has or can even imagine. William Kristol, in a very good column (I finally appreciate why the Times hired him), appropriately titled "Biography Is Not Enough," points out that military veterans have not always won the general election; otherwise George H. W. Bush, Al Gore, and John Kerry would have won their elections.

"When we elect a president, we’re not giving a lifetime achievement award. We’re choosing someone to govern for the next four years. The qualities of a young military hero may not be those of a successful president."

McCain will run on his biography, not his domestic policies or vision. And while the Democratics are having at each other, those domestic policies of McCain will lie unexamined until the general. At which point Obama will be very well prepared for him. So it's not just that Obama is getting tougher by the day; it's that McCain is not being forced to sharpen his knives.