Following up the last post …

I also agree with Avedon —

One of the main problems with Hillary’s entire “experience” thing, which is the basis of her whole campaign against Obama, is that it works even better as an ad for John McCain. “Experience” also translates as “old” and “been in Washington for a long time” – both negatives for substantial parts of the voting public. Another problem is that we already know she was in Washington for the last 15 years – but so what? A lot of ghastly people who shouldn’t be there at all have been there even longer. So why spend millions of dollars telling people something they already know? Hillary does have some positives that are special to Hillary Clinton, but she isn’t really concentrating on them – and that’s been a big mistake all along.

In fact, yesterday I found a few commenters who said they thought the “3 a.m.” ad was a McCain ad, and were surprised at the end to learn it was a Clinton ad. Makes me wonder if a Clinton-McCain general election contest would end up being something like the SNL “Who’s More Grizzled?” skit with Robert Duvall from a few years back.

Colbert King writes in today’s Washington Post that “Clinton sets a standard for political opponents that she wouldn’t think of applying to herself.” I’m not going to quote it here, but it’s worth reading.

Todd Beeton says of the “3 a.m.” ad,

What this ad does do though is give Barack Obama the opportunity to show how deft he is at hitting back against this sort of campaign tactic, which no doubt John McCain intends to use this year no matter who the nominee is. I’m actually glad we’re seeing this argument play out now, maybe we’ll be spared it later on once it is proven to be ineffective as I expect it will. Barack Obama likes to say “I look forward to having that argument.” Now we get to see what he means.

Todd presents the Obama campaign’s responses so far; you can judge them for yourself.

Update: See also “Gun Toting Liberal.”