Opinion: How to argue that night is day

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Pity the poor spin-meisters, especially when their job requires them to ignore reality (or, more precisely, reality as decreed by pundits aplenty).

A consensus quickly developed in the political world that Hillary Clinton exposed some vulnerabilities during Tuesday’s candidate debate. Indeed, as The Times’ Peter Nicholas and Michael Finnegan report in today’s story here on our website and in Thursday’s print editions, her chief rivals in the Democratic presidential race -- for the first time in recent months -- sense a crack in her seeming invincibility.

But lots of folks get paid to bathe her in a positive glow, regardless. So here’s the lead from the memo that, playing off Barack Obama’s slogan, provided Camp Clinton’s view of Tuesday’s proceedings: ‘What happens when the ‘politics of pile-on’ replaces the ‘politics of hope?’ Hillary comes out on top.’

That, at least, is what was offered for public consumption. We would guess the chatter behind closed doors was less upbeat. You can read the rest of the memo here.

And you can contrast this missive with the memos that came from the Obama and John Edwards campaigns (here and here).

We imagine those two were easier to write.

-- Don Frederick