Bob Herbert reads Hillary's mind

It's time to get the swami graphic out again because Bob Herbert is pretending to read minds (my emphasis):

More serious was Senator Clinton’s assertion that she was qualified to be commander in chief, and that John McCain had also “certainly” crossed that “threshold,” but that the jury was still out on Mr. Obama.

In other words, if a choice on national security had to be made today between Senators Obama and McCain, voters — according to Mrs. Clinton’s logic — should choose Senator McCain.

That is a low thing for a Democratic presidential candidate to do to a rival in a party primary. Can you imagine John McCain saying that Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney or even the guitar-strumming Mike Huckabee might be less qualified than Hillary Clinton to be commander in chief? It couldn’t happen.

But Senator Clinton never gave a second thought to opening the trap door beneath her fellow Democrat.

Of course, Herbert has no idea what Clinton has given "a second thought" to during the campaign. But he pretends that he does anyway.

Comments

[Micah]

"Never gave a second thought" is a turn of phrase that you are giving too many second thoughts to here. But I think that Herbert's implication is that had Hillary given it a second thought she wouldn't have done it. It's pretty shocking, really, the way that she has gone not only after Obama (expected and fair to draw contrasts) but after her party (tragic given the circumstances). Particularly irksome to those of us who can add is the fact that she is doing this at a point at which Obama has amassed a nearly insurmountable delegate lead, even if Florida and Michigan do-over their elections. Not that I think this thing is over, not by a longshot. But I think that Hillary could refrain from overtly campaigning for McCain ...

[certainly]

Brendan, it's a figure of speech, a somewhat imprecise bit of language in a column whose basic point is quite clear. What Herbert likely means in context, given his previous sentence about the Clinton campaign's proclivity for provocation, is that this behavior on the part of Senator Clinton fits a pattern in her choices--exemplifies a "Thou-shalt-attack-a-fellow-Democratic-primary-contender-when-it's-convenient-in-ways-that-could-help-Republicans" tendency in her campaigning style. If you disagree with this implicit assertion, why not critique it directly? When you engage in this kind of superficial faultfinding, you seem as though you harbor some phobic aversion to metaphor and vernacular language, which are the common coin of political discourse not only in America but I daresay the world over. It's not your best quality as a blogger.

[Jay Livingston]

What the other commenters said. Why would you pick on something this small and irrelevant?

And if you want to focus on the literal meaning of Herbert's words, "never gave it a second thought" is charitable to HRC, given what she said. It makes her statement sound like a spur-of-the-moment comment that she might retract after further reflection. Compare it with, "After considering the matter at length, HRC decided to compare her fellow Democrat unfavorably with McCain."