Jonah, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I agree with you, of course, about the Democrats’ extreme Left and it’s control over the party’s nomination process. That’s why I believe only someone with Hillary’s advantages could have carried off the high-wire act we’re talking about.

As offended as the hard Left would have been by an attack on Obama’s radicalism, what that faction cares about more than anything else is winning. If Hillary had not been so compromised by Clinton’s record (and her own) on coddling radicals, she could have made the case that Obama was tainted and that, as much as it pained her to do it, she was stressing that problem because the Republicans would eventually go to town on it. The blue collar Dems would have responded to the substance of the critique on Obama’s radicalism, and enough of the hard Left would have swallowed hard and said, “He can’t win and she can.”

She fumbled condemning Obama’s radicalism not because it was an argument that couldn’t work with the Left but because, given her (and Clinton’s) record, she couldn’t advance the argument credibly — the hard Left was able to say, “Our guy is no more vulnerable to a Republican attack on radicalism than she is.”

Admittedly, there is a certain unreality to this analysis. After all, Hillary probably would not have been a serious candidate, and Clinton probably would not have been president, unless they’d had pasts that gave them cred with the hard Left. As a strategy for winning the nomination, Hillary’s feint to the center worked only because the hard Left knew she was with them, precisely because of her past. Otherwise, she’d have been just another Biden (except with less experience). In any event, I think she could have pulled it off if all she’d had was her student radicalism. The Weatherman pardons killed her.