Hillary and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Will remained true to his electoral progeny throughout much of the primary season. He wrote of the Clinton campaign on January 17—when it had won one and lost one—that it was "floundering around, like a dinosaur drowning in a tar pit." He reviewed its "serial misadventures in the racial minefield" and "its synthetic racial and other sensitivity-mongering" 10 days before Bill Clinton ever uttered Jesse Jackson's name. After Super Tuesday, Will devoted a column to deploring early voting, attributing Obama's California loss to "impatient voters" who had rushed to judgment before it was apparent to all that Obama was "the party's most potentially potent nominee." Will still apparently believed that when he assaulted Hillary Clinton's experience claim in a February 21 column, claiming that America's "worst president," James Buchanan, was also its most experienced.

But now, like so many of his brethren, Will is sending mixed messages. He amended his earlier rationale for Obama's candidacy, saying that "you can only be a novelty once and for a while," as if Barack had already worn off. "He's worked one pedal on the organ quite enough now," Will declared, dismissing Obama's rhetorical skills as "banal eloquence."

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Rapidly losing the love of conservative pundits

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He muttered darkly about the candidate's "Farrakhan problem" and assailed Michelle Obama, turning her expression of newfound "real pride" in America into the "leaking out" of "a kind of adversarial stance to mainstream American patriotism." Media Matters, the website that is changing political discourse in America, even caught him falsely claiming that McCain had attracted more independent voters than Obama—a strong hint of where Will may be moving himself.

Will is unmistakably still rooting for Obama to be the Democratic nominee, but his earlier praise for the Illinois senator looks more and more like a Grand Old ruse.

Additional research by: Kimberly Chin, Shaunna Murphy, Shea O'Rourke, Marguerite A. Suozzi, Adam Weinstein, and John Wilwol