The Clintons are smart, but they are running out of cards to play. They saw that the incendiary sentences from Jeremiah Wright were about patriotism, in the white sense, not about race, in the white sense. So they played the patriotism card, just as Rove played it against Vietnam vet and triple amputee, Max Clelland back in 2002. There is not much original about these two.

You’ve heard the Bill Clinton remark: in sounds worse in writing, with some poetic emphasis and additions on my part.

“I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country. And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff [race, uppity freshmen senators, votes against the war in Iraq, change, a new politics, comity] that always seems to intrude itself on our [me and the Mrs.’] politics.”

Thankfully he was called on it by General Merrill A. McPeak who was young enough to remember Joseph McCarthy’s misrepresenting the patriotism of ordinary Americans and made the association clear. Of course, Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton’s Ari Fleisher, said it was “a deliberate pathetic misreading of what the president said”. Oh yeah, how so Mouth.

It was Bill Clinton who said voting for Obama would be a roll of the dice, a gamble. Now it seems that is all this shadow of his former self has left.