Inevitable is a high-risk game

Death, Taxes and Mrs. Clinton: Only two of them are inevitable

Excerpt:

The Inevitable is a high-risk game. You can get far being the inevitable choice. A lot of people will believe it and support you, especially the weak, and the pragmatic. They give you early support and early money. Others see the endorsements and contributions. Another level of giver and supporter kicks in. It starts to show in the national polls. Everyone knows you're inevitable.

But there are two problems with this strategy. One is that your support is by definition broad but shallow. You have a lot of people, but they won't crawl over broken glass for you. When I talk to Hillary supporters they mostly enact a facsimile of what they think passion is, and are reduced to a dulled aggression. "We're gonna win."

The second part of the inevitability problem is that once you seem no longer inevitable--once the polls stop rising or start to fall, once that air is out of the balloon and the thing that made everyone fall in line is gone--well, what do you do? If the main argument of your candidacy is you're inevitable and suddenly you're evitable, where does that leave you? What does it leave you with? Mere hunger. Insistence: "It will be me."

Comment: More great Peggy Noonan! Re Hillary, I predict an Obama surprise in Iowa. More on the "one-time Lady Macbeth of Little Rock" below:

Washington Times: The Maginot Line doesn't always hold

Excerpt:

The one-time Lady Macbeth of Little Rock — before she scraped the Arkansas buckshot mud off her sturdy matronly pumps and became a New Yorker — looked invincible at Halloween and for a few weeks afterward but suddenly her campaign plane over Iowa looks a little like a broom and a prayer.

Some polls there put her running behind Barack Obama, with John Edwards trailing not far behind. The trouble she made for herself a month ago, with garbled answers to a simple question about driver's licenses for illegal aliens, continues with yarns about dirt on Mr. Obama that she's saving for a later kill. Now there's a new controversy over the suspicion, utterly believable, that her campaign connived with CNN to plant questions meant to sabotage Wednesday night's Republican debate.