Clintons' one-two punch exploits her strength and compensates her weakness

While everyone focuses on the cry heard around the world as the reason for Hillary Clinton’s comeback in New Hampshire, I see a one two punch from Bill and Hillary that exploited Obama’s chief weakness and repaired Hillary’s.

Going into the New Hampshire primary contest, you could generalize that Sen. Obama’s strength was his perceived authenticity and his perceived weakness was his lack of experience. You could also say the reverse was true for Sen. Clinton -- her strength was experience and weakness was authenticity.

Two clips received heavy rotation on news channels prior to the election. In one Pres. Clinton railed against Obama’s experience as a fairy tale. In the other, Sen. Clinton broke down in a tearful moment.

It’s hard to draw a clear cause effect relationship from those two events, but it would seem that Pres. Clinton raised doubts about Sen. Obama’s record and experience and Sen. Clinton erased doubts about her authenticity. In a one-two punch, they eliminated her negative and exploited their opponents’.

Going forward, Sen. Obama will need to deal with the experience issue head on if he has any hopes of being elected. Now that the Clinton’s have seen that their argument against his perceived inexperience can move the needle, expect them to hammer him mercilessly on that point. He will become the caricature of the impetuous youth impassionately arguing to get the keys to the car before he has the age or maturity and Sen. Clinton will be the responsible adult who thoughtfully restrains him.

If Sen. Obama is able to survive the Clinton beating, the Republicans will surely take up the cause to good effect. If Hillary Clinton is no longer seen as cold and unfeeling, that shifts the spotlight to Barack Obama in a way he surely doesn’t need.

Sen. Obama can do a couple of things: First, directly address his experience and why he thinks it is relevant for the office he seeks. He will never win the Washington experience argument, so he has to make his outside the beltway experience his strength. He has tried to do this in his stump speech, but now he needs a major event or speech where he deals specifically and only with the experience issue. Get it off the table once and for all. (Say what you want about Romney but nobody is bothering him about being a Mormon anymore.)

Second, he needs to make Hillary Clinton defend her 35 years of experience claim. Again, he’s dealt with it tepidly, but he needs to force her to defend exactly what Sen. Clinton did for 35 years. Put her on the defensive for not releasing her White House records. Ask her specifically which policies she helped to influence and exactly what was her contribution. Then we need Clinton’s cabinet member to corroborate it. Raise the standard on what we will allow as the threshold of her experience.

Tell us why his experience matters. Make us doubt why hers does. Sen. Obama needs to do those things quickly because soon the narrative will shift, and he’ll be answering questions about a different kind of change -- one from the voters.