Hillary gives the GOP its best chance at being the party of change.?

Hillary gives the GOP its best chance at being the party of change.

The most interesting thing to come out of the umpteenth Republican debate Sunday is confirmation that the GOP is dying to run against Hillary Clinton. Like Don Rickles flaying a heckler, each candidate whacked at Clinton as if she were a pants-suited pi帽ata. When they were done with their one-liners, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee deadpanned: 鈥淟ook, I like to be funny. There鈥檚 nothing funny about Hillary Clinton being president.鈥?br>

No, but there鈥檚 something deeply advantageous to having her as an opponent. So far, the commentary about the Republican offensive against Hillary has focused mostly on how it reflects poorly on the GOP (those Clinton-hating wing nuts are at it again!). What鈥檚 not been fully grasped is how Hillary gives the GOP its best chance at being the party of change.

Newt Gingrich, for one, has been pointing this out for months, using the May electoral triumph of Nicolas Sarkozy in France as an example. A cabinet minister for the unpopular Jacques Chirac, who鈥檇 served as president for a biblically long term of 12 years, Sarkozy ran against his own incumbent party鈥檚 complaisance as well as his Socialist opponent, Segolene Royal, arguing that she represented a return to a failed past and more of the same.

America isn鈥檛 France 鈥?obviously 鈥?but Democrats may be misreading America nonetheless. It seems incandescently clear that voters want a change, and up to now, change meant little more than Democratic victory and no more President Bush. But Democrats got a significant victory in 2006, when they took control of both houses of Congress. And now Congress is even less popular than Bush. In other words, the clamor for change in Washington is much bigger than Bush.