Fireproofed—and Firing Away

Hillary Clinton said she was wearing her "asbestos pantsuit" in Las Vegas, but, more important, she was wearing a smile and carrying a fistful of ammo and sound bites. It was time to drop her rising challenger, Barack Obama, and she did it with the grin and grace of a Park Avenue gun moll. Asked at the end of a ragged CNN debate whether she preferred diamonds or pearls, she answered "both."

Follow your favorite NEWSWEEK columnists

Customize the Newsweek homepage to feature the latest word from your favorite columnists.

By that time, in other words, she was confident enough to joke about the very thing critics had been blasting her for the previous two weeks: her penchant for taking all sides of all issues.

Better rested and more relaxed, Clinton raced to the center of the ring throwing punches at Obama, claiming that his health plan would leave 15 million people uninsured and that his Social Security plan would require a "trillion-dollar tax increase." Obama counterpunched, but the point is that he was backpedaling for a change.

CNN's Campbell Brown did Hillary the favor of asking about the "boys" who were supposedly attacking her. The senator from New York was ready with an aria of lines—surely written by Mandy Grunwald and maybe even focus-grouped by Mark Penn. Clinton denied that she was playing the "gender card" but, rather, the "winning card." "I understand," she said, that "people are attacking me not because I am a woman but because I am ahead." However prefab, they were good lines—and they worked.

There was even some residual, albeit minimal, virtue in Hillary's having flipped and gyrated on the issue of driver's licenses for illegals. Having decided to change positions—and privately nudged, through intermediaries, Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York to do the same—she was able to give a one-word answer to Wolf Blitzer's straightforward question: Do you favor giving licenses to illegals. "No," she said.

Obama, by contrast, was uncharacteristically bobbing and weaving, saying at one point, "I'm not proposing that we do it," before giving up and agreeing with his own previously stated position. Obama also refused to give a direct answer to Blitzer's question about whether American national security is more important than human rights. Intellectually, Obama was correct in saying that it was a false choice. But that did not prevent Hillary from doing her Thatcher-Meir Iron Lady act. "The first obligation is to protect and defend America," she scolded.