David Limbaugh

A sweet aroma of irony fills the air as the Clintons' loathsome, sinister tactics, being used against fellow Democrats for the first time in a big way since Bill's first presidential primary contest, are coming back to bite them.

This brings home a truth many of us have always understood: The Clintons, despite Bill's charm and their nonpareil adroitness at ruthless politics, are virtually powerless without their liberal enablers in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media. If Democrats hadn't sold their souls, Clinton would have been convicted in his impeachment trial, and they both would have been written out of the party for Travelgate alone and who knows what else.

Another reality has also come back to the surface through this unfolding of events. The legacy of the Clintons, even for many Democrats, is a two-edged sword. Depending on which side you examine, this legacy is either a period of prosperity or one of unspeakable scandal. Anyone having to run on that mixed legacy -- like Al Gore -- has to walk a fine line, hoping to fix the voters' focus on the prosperity side.

Had the Clintons not crossed the line in their strategy against Obama, Hillary might have enjoyed the undeserved luxury of being permitted to continue walking that fine line, even though it would have been a disgusting fiction since she was in the thick of many of those scandals. But their gambit of injecting race into the campaign and otherwise flagrantly lying about Obama's positions was too smart by half. It will probably have the irreversible effect of dredging up in people's minds the worst memories of the Clintons.

When you contrast this negative side of the Clintons against Obama's image of hope and change -- as shallow as that might sound to us conservatives -- the Clintons might have just written the final chapter on themselves, just maybe.

As one who has never been an admirer of the Clintons, I would be celebrating over all this but for the stark reality that Obama could very well be much tougher to beat than Hillary Clinton. So it is with a profound sense of the bittersweet that I observe what could be the Clintons' political demise.

David Limbaugh


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