JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Bill and Hillary Clinton usually stay at least 72 hours ahead of me. It's on that third day that I begin to say, "Oh, now I see."

There was the time when Bill was governor of Arkansas and out of state and his Democratic primary opponent was holding a news conference in the state Capitol to blast his chronic absenteeism. Hillary just so happened to walk by and interrupt. "Oh, give me a break," she bellowed toward the unsuspecting challenger, then lectured him as the TV cameras turned her way.

The poor candidate couldn't figure out how to fight back against an opponent's heckling wife -- having never before encountered one -- and was quickly reduced to rubble.

My instinctive reaction was that the Clintons had erred by sending a wife to do a husband's job, behaved altogether boorishly and engendered sympathy for the challenger. Not so. People loved it. They talked about her spunk rather than that her husband was seldom in a state that he was presuming to get re-elected to govern. The political dynamic was tweaked. The race was over. The Clintons won again.

Roles may reverse, but brains stay the same.

We had that business last Sunday in which Bill went off on Fox News, showing publicly what some have seen in more profane versions privately.

My instinctive reaction was that the attention-starved former president had merely galvanized the polarized, meaning he'd solidified himself as the champion of hardened Democrats while solidifying Fox as the champion of hardened Republicans. I thought he'd made a good case that he'd done more than Bush to try to get Osama bin Laden. But I thought he'd come across as megalomaniacal and narcissistic. I thought he'd let the ABC terrorism movie get to him, and lost his temper unattractively.

As political analysis went, that turned out to be merely the outermost and thinnest layer of the onion.

It was on the third day when I noticed that the American political conversation had begun to shift ever so slightly, which might be quite enough for an electorate pretty much tied 50-50.

The war on terror was no longer conceded as the Bush administration's home field.

Bush wants us to think of the war on terror generally and to think supportively of the disastrous war on Iraq as simply part and parcel of that -- to morph Saddam Hussein and bin Laden.

Democrats have been wanting to separate the war in Iraq to consider it independently -- on its own failed merits and not as part and parcel of the war on terror, but as a drag on it. Democrats haven't wanted to take on Bush directly regarding al-Qaida, figuring they'd lose.

Now Clinton's episode on Fox has some people reconsidering, irrespective of Iraq, whether the war on terror and the pursuit of bin Laden is really Bush's strong suit. The issue has been put on the table for discussion.

Democrats don't need to change a lot of minds. Take a hundred voters. If two of them part with Bush over Iraq, and one more abandons Bush over bin Laden, then you've got yourself a new Congress in November and a more electable Democrat for president two years later.

Bush had his own angry moment last week. It was over a leaked intelligence report that seemed to say, at least in the leaked part, that the war in Iraq had actually strengthened the terrorist threat against the country.

Did Bill and Hillary calculate all this from the beginning? Or did they get together afterward to concoct a way to spin their way out of the mad fit he'd thrown on national TV?

Beats me. I just know that, either way, a delicate political balance teeters.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.