Missing in action

Hillary Clinton.

The White House should send a search party to track down Hillary Clinton. America’s foreign policy chief has been missing from the world stage for several days, and has become as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel at the height of the French Revolution. I wrote earlier in the year that Clinton had become the invisible Secretary of State, and her current absence certainly reinforces that impression.

Hillary pulls it out

Exciting, isn't it? Geez, the Dems are strange. A primary and a caucus in Texas. Superdelegates. Stripping states of delegates--Florida and Michigan.

A well-rounded eater

Hillary Clinton likes lamb, very buttery popcorn, ethnic food and ... Boca Burgers?

Next, I interviewed Walter Scheib, who worked as the White House chef for the Clintons (and, briefly, for the second Bushes). Scheib recently published a cookbook memoir, White House Chef, which offers many clues to Hillary's preferences. Had she ever asked for an Oliveburger or Hillaryburger, I asked?

"No, but I always kept Boca Burgers in the freezer," he said, referring to a brand of soy protein patties. "She liked them for snacking." When I obtained some Boca Burgers and pan-grilled them, as directed, they turned out to be miserably limp, grassy-tasting little disks that might have been produced by Rubbermaid.

They are truly disgusting. But I suppose Hillary was trying to eat healthy. Still, not a mark in her favor.

But what about the rest of the candidates?

Barack Obama looks like he hardly eats at all, but that could just be his metabolism. Likewise, I'm already committed to John McCain, but he would lose a smidgeon of my respect if I found out he was a fussy eater. Or one of those pains in the ass who quiz the wait staff about whether the food is trans-fat-free. But I don't imagine that a man who spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton would let a little trans fat get to him. He probably laughs in the face of peanut butter, too.

Congratulations, John McCain

He wouldn't be my first choice, but he ranks high above Huckabee on my list.

McCain's win--and Hillary's--make this whole race a lot more interesting.

So whaddaya think:

Did Hillary's tears give her the edge?

Will Edwards drop out before Super Tuesday?

Will Thompson?

What about Rudy?

It's not Hillary's tears that get me

It's the early Christian martyr complex:

It’s not easy. It’s not easy. And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. I have so many opportunities for this country. I just don’t want to see us fall back.

The faux apocalyptic concern:

And so, when we look at the array of problems we have, and the potential for getting, it spinning out of control, this is one of the most important elections America has ever faced.

And the megalomania:

This is very personal for me. It’s not just political, it’s not just — I see what’s happening. We have to reverse it. And some people think elections are a game. It’s like, who’s up or who’s down. It’s about our country. It’s about our kids’ futures. And it’s really about all of us, together.

And some of us who do this put ourselves out there and do this under some pretty difficult odds. And we do it, each one of us, because we care about our country.

My first 2008 prediction

The day after Hillary loses the nomination to the Obama/Oprah ticket, she files for divorce.

À la recherche du temps perdu

The NYT waxes nostalgic about 1968 and Hillary Rodham's campus activism.

Hillary, it seems, was one of the good protesters.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s course was set, in large part, during the supercharged year of 1968. “There was a sense of tremendous change, internationally and here at home which impacted greatly how I thought about things,” Mrs. Clinton said in a telephone interview about that period, which encompassed the second half of her junior and first half of her senior years.

It was a time at once disorienting and clarifying, a period that would reinforce the future senator and presidential candidate’s suspicion of “emotional politics” while stoking her frustration with what she considered the passivity of her classmates.

Her political itinerary that year resembles a frenzied travelogue of youthful contradiction. She might have been the only 20-year-old in America who worked on the antiwar presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire that winter and for the hawkish Republican congressman Melvin Laird in Washington that summer.

...

The day after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain, she joined a demonstration in Post Office Square in Boston, returning to campus wearing a black armband.

“People become experiences,” Ms. Rodham wrote about all the ferment in a Feb. 23 letter to John Peavoy, a friend from high school. She added later, “The whole society is brittle.”

HillaryCare, take 2

Because it worked to well the first time around: Clinton sets health care as key issue.

Mrs. Clinton's strategy to emphasize health care so early in her campaign serves two chief purposes, analysts say. It highlights her experience on the issue, and it shifts the focus away from Iraq and the hard questions Mrs. Clinton has faced about her 2002 vote authorizing the war.

From a policy standpoint, many voters outside New York remember Mrs. Clinton most for her unsuccessful bid to overhaul the nation's health care system as first lady during her husband's administration. The debacle drew stinging criticism to Mrs. Clinton and, many say, helped contribute to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Yet as senator, Mrs. Clinton has sought to confront the defeat head on, and often with a sense of humor, saying repeatedly that she has learned from her past mistakes and is now better prepared to try again.

The benefit of bringing her past out early and proactively could serve Mrs. Clinton well later in the campaign, a Democratic consultant who is the interim dean of Boston University's College of Communication, Tobe Berkovitz, said. "If you can turn a weakness into a strength, that is a huge strategic success," he said.

That's a pretty big weakness