Clinton 2008 Looks Oddly Like Gore 2000

Hillary Clinton is riding high in the polls now, but so was Al Gore around this time in 2000, Frank Rich warns. Worse, the New York Times columnist says, Clinton displays an alarming number of the ex-VP’s worst qualities as a campaigner. During TV appearances, she provides “rambling and often tedious Gore-like filibuster,” coming off as a “pontificator and an automaton.”

Like Gore's, the staging of Clinton’s personality is a clumsy affair, Rich says. Her big, hearty laugh, which seems to have been added to her repertoire recently, to counter accusations of detachment, has “all the spontaneity of an alarm clock buzzer.” But the frontrunner’s biggest challenge is convincing voters she isn’t a politically calculating follower, since she tends to hold her fire on tough issues until  speaking up is opportune. (More Hillary Clinton stories.)