Hillary Clinton's strategy of emphasizing her experience may account for her sudden vulnerability in the Democratic nomination race, say Dick Morris and Eileen McGann at RealClearPolitics:

The decision that Hillary should run as the candidate of experience was an enormous blunder. In a Democratic electorate that's in the party precisely because it so intensely dislikes things as they are and wants change, experience is the wrong virtue to stress.

Democrats back insurgency and political insurrection - but Hillary offers them only a synthetic and imagined incumbency. She has ceded the field of change to her rivals and sequestered herself with those pining for the 1990s, like fans at an old-timers day baseball game.

To voters who want change, she offers only nostalgia.

Read the whole column at the link above. Morris wasn't playing this dirge for Hillary two or three months ago, though - it seems to me he was arguing she had it all locked up in late August. It's a bit early to count her out, too.

Still, I agree with his current point: there is nothing the Democratic base wants more than that will-o'-the-wisp, "Change." The word is one of the so-called "god terms" in rhetoric, words that evoke a near-universally positive reaction in the listener - "Progress" being another political favorite. Of course, you don't have to go out looking or voting for change, since things change all the time, all by themselves.

But voters still love the thought. Like a generic candidate, they see in "Change" all the wonderful things they can hope and imagine, all the sweetness and light and love and peace and rainbows, la-ta-dee-da, and never the equally possible result of "Change," that things could be made worse.

Hillary could have used this as her theme. She hardly needs to remind anyone that her husband was President for two terms, and that she was involved in many political decisions and events. She might have left the obvious unspoken and concentrated on the "changes" she would effect as President (being, of course, changes from Bush policies).

Morris is correct that this positioning as the establishment candidate of "experience" will make it more difficult for her to rebound from her recent difficulties, but it is hardly impossible. She still commands significant numbers of the "super-delegates," and has brought on board much of the Democratic establishment organizations in many or most primary states already. She has money. She has a highly professional staff. She has Bill.

Hillary isn't out of it - not by a long shot. Her campaign needs to stop shooting itself in the foot first, but it is still the same formidable machine which Morris considered virtually inevitable a very short time ago.