JOHN BRUMMETT Advertisement

Barack Obama erred badly in a recent debate. The manner in which he and his supporters have tried to spin out of it surely would come back to haunt him in a general election campaign.

It may even have destroyed Obama's running mate credibility, though Hillary Clinton could always say she was putting him in the second spot to learn and mature.

Obama's blunder is being played against the backdrop of Clinton's caution and arduous challenge. She is trying to win the Democratic nomination without doing what Obama has done: Hand the Republicans ammunition for their inevitable assaults in the general election.

Can Clinton advance to the general election without pandering so much to the impractical Democratic base that the Republicans can damage her in the general electorate's decisive center?

There's your story line: Can Hillary party on the wild side, but not get too wild?

Obama was a candidate gone wild when he said yes, absolutely, upon getting asked in a debate if he would commit to sitting down without conditions for diplomatic talks with hated leaders of enemy states.

To the same question, Hillary said hold on. She said we indeed need to return to vigorous diplomacy and talk with our enemies. But she said we'd need to do planning on agenda and rules. Otherwise, she said, some of those characters might use the exercises merely for an anti-American agenda and their own vile propaganda, in which case we would have accomplished nothing other than to look stupid and weak.

She was playing to the general electorate, which deems America well-intentioned if temporarily misdirected and in need of new leadership. Obama was playing to the party base, which deems America itself arrogant and bellicose.

She was right on merit. But Obama couldn't simply say, "Oops, my bad." Confessing ineptitude on foreign policy is not a ready option for a presidential candidate.

Barack and his spinners set out to establish that he was truly new and that Clinton was talking the same old tired establishment jargon that got us into the mess we're in.

Obama's position thus came down to this: Elect me president and I'll go see demagogic people who hate us, and I won't prepare.

He wants to trade in this America wholesale for some new model -- meeker toward enemies, but, as it turned out, apt to haul off and attack an excuse for an ally, Pakistan.

Obama suggested that days later, apparently in an woeful over-compensation for his debate blunder.

Some on the Democratic wild side profess to be positively enamored of such nonsense as Obama's, at least the meek diplomacy part. They are badly outnumbered in regard to the electorate as a whole, a fact the Republicans would make clear in a general election campaign.

One cannot understate the difference in what matters to the Democratic base early in a primary and what will end up mattering to the general electorate by November. A pander during the former can well be suicide by the latter.

This is the same dynamic that became evident when Clinton and Obama recently took different positions on whether the federal government ought to provide funding for needle exchange programs to try to combat the spread of HIV through drug use.

Obama said it should, a position the Republicans would cast in a general election as not only condoning illegal drug use, but encouraging it.

Hillary balked. When a man in the audience challenged Clinton for lacking spine, she said we need to try to govern with as much spine as we can.

He's running to win once and cross the second bridge when he gets to it. She's running to win twice.

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.