Clinton's lead continues to slip

From The Washington Post:

The top three Democratic presidential contenders remain locked in a close battle in Iowa, with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) seeing her advantages diminish on key issues, including the questions of experience and which candidate is best prepared to handle the war in Iraq, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) draws support from 30 percent of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa, compared with 26 percent for Clinton and 22 percent for former senator John Edwards (N.C.). New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson received 11 percent. The results are only marginally different from a Post-ABC poll in late July, but in a state likely to set the tone for the rest of the nominating process, there are significant signs of progress for Obama -- and harbingers of concern for Clinton.

The factors that have made Clinton the clear national front-runner -- including her overwhelming leads on the issues of the Iraq war and health care, a widespread sense that she is the Democrats' most electable candidate, and her strong support among women -- do not appear to be translating on the ground in Iowa, where campaigning is already fierce and television ads have been running for months.

At the heart of the Democratic race has been the dichotomy between strength and experience (qualities emphasized by Clinton, Richardson, and Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut in their appeals) and the ability to introduce a new approach to governing (as Obama and Edwards have promised to do).

Iowa Democrats are tilting toward change, and Obama appears to be benefiting from it.

Hillary is most likely going to get the nomination. Democrats are the kind of people who trust the mainstream media and Hillary is the anointed candidate of the MSM. However the harder Mrs. Bill Clinton has to work to get the nomination the better for Republicans.

Right now the only thing keeping liberal Rudolph Giuliani in the lead of the Republican race is the thought that Mrs. Clinton is going to be so hard to beat that we can't afford to run a real Republican against her.

If she is stripped of her aura of invincibility perhaps Republicans will come to understand that she is beatable, perhaps the most beatable of all the Democrat frontrunners.

And by the way, what does this tell us about the level of confidence that Republicans have in the ideals of their own party? At the national level when a real conservative runs, as as conservative, against a liberal the conservative wins.

Reagan was a true conservative and he won two landslides. George H.W. Bush pretended to be another Reagan and won then revealed himself to be a RINO and lost. Bob Dole was the "tax collector for the welfare state" and lost. George W Bush ran as a conservative and won then revealed himself to be not so much a conservative but was reelected because there was a war on and his opponent was an idiot.

The trend here should be obvious even to a politician. Pick a conservative candidate. Run as a conservative. Paint the Democrat as a liberal. Victory is the result.