“[A]nyone who has spent time in close quarters with these two cats already understood” that, writes New York Magazine’s John Hellemann on Clinton and Obama:

Maybe it was inevitable that the campaign—this historic rumble between the first credible female and African-American aspirants to the highest office in the land—would end up here, but until quite recently, it didn’t seem that way. For one full year, we were treated instead to a mutually self-serving (or self-defeating) narrative, dominated by prettied-up personas and tissue-thin false dichotomies: change versus experience, novelty versus familiarity, idealism versus pragmatism. Presidential campaigns are always highly scripted affairs, of course. But the endless wonder of them is that eventually, invariably, the story line goes careering off the rails, veering into more visceral and personal territory—in the process revealing much about the candidates, the country, and even ourselves.

That opener creates expectations the article can’t quite fulfill, but Hellemann has been close to operatives of both campaigns, and has talked privately with Clinton herself. Nothing blazingly new is revealed, but there are a lot of telling details.

• Hillary’s team definitely sees the world in terms of combat, not reconciliation. In response to concerns that Obama is more electable because he can draw independents and even Republicans, they say Obama has a “glass jaw” and that if he’s the candidate in November, “the Republicans will carve him up like a piece of processed lunch meat.”
• Obama’s chief political operative David Axelrod has described the candidate as “too normal to run for president” — which of course is just the pitch they’re trying to make, playing on our doomed longing to find, at last, the politician who is . . . not a politician.

Hellemann concludes that the real divide here is between “hard-eyed realism” and romanticism — “the thrill and terror of letting yourself dream again.” Clinton’s prediction of a vicious November fight will, of course, be a self-fulfilling prophecy if she’s the candidate. The Clintons are one side of the past two decades’ vicious polarization. They can’t conceive of transcending it, only of fighting more viciously and lethally than the other side. They predict that as much as Republicans may feel Obama’s attraction (and they’ve been candid about it), for just that reason they will feel obligated to eviscerate him — and will find it easy to do. That is, even if the electorate is repulsed by their stop-at-nothing tactics, they will succeed in sowing just enough doubt about Obama’s inexperience, his history of hard-left liberalism (which I for one am convinced he’s genuinely moving away from), and even his race.

Cross-posted at AmbivaBlog

H/T: RealClearPolitics