The veil has at last been lifted from Hillary’s flimsy veneer of strength and competence: she has been exposed for the corrupt and unprincipled politician she is. In Tuesday night’s debates at Drexel University, finally Democrats rose to the occasion and called a spade a spade: Hillary is a liar, shifts her positions like the wind and is unfit for office.

This is not news to conservatives who have been saying this about the Hill-Billies since the 1990’s. However, Tuesday night marked a watershed. On national television, leading Democrats agreed. John Edwards and Barack Obama unequivocally stated that Hillary does not say the truth, nor is she consistent in her views and as a result is not presidential material. All the candidates at one point or another indicated that her responses were either deliberately confusing or completely contradictory. Hillary has now been tagged: flip-flopper and double-speaker.

Hillary proved them right. On four occasions, her responses to questions were so evasive they were simply disingenuous. She stumbled on her recent vote to impose sanctions on Iran which she insisted does not accept President Bush’s foreign policy but is a “form of diplomacy.” She was caught in a blatant lie in her response to questions on Social Security —as NBC’s Tim Russert, one of the moderators pointed out. She was accused of undue secrecy in her unwillingness to open the archives of her correspondence to Bill while she was First Lady. Finally, she was especially tongue-tied in her statements on whether she approved of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan of granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Edwards stated in dismay: “Sen. Clinton said two different things in the course of about two minutes. America is looking for a president who will say the same thing, who will be consistent, who will be straight with them.”

This will mark a turning point in the campaign for two reasons. There is now video footage of all her fumbling which can be played over and over again by any Republican candidate in a national campaign. It is harder to make the case to the average voter that a candidate is a flip-flopper in print; the charges take longer to stick. But it is almost impossible to evade the brutal lens of the camera: when a candidate is shown to flip-flop with the camera rolling, it is difficult to repair the damage.

In a national campaign, a Republican candidate can simply use footage of Hillary’s flip-flops in ads and combine this with footage of fellow Democrats stating that she is unprincipled and unfit to lead. This will greatly damage her chances of winning the presidency.

Tuesday night’s debates were also a watershed in another sense: her aura of invincibility has been shattered. The Democratic candidates were more and more emboldened to challenge her. With each assault upon her, another candidate mustered the courage to utter publicly what has mostly been said only in private amongst Democrats. At one point, Chris Todd blatantly declared that her national poll ratings illustrate again and again that she is not likely to be elected since 50 percent of the public are dead opposed to her.

It is well known that Democrat leaders dislike the Clintons and recognize they behave in a repugnant and sleazy manner when they are in office: their flagrant disrespect for the law, their use of thuggish tactics and their failure to uphold even the most basic standards of public decency (like don’t have oral sex at work) repulse even Democrats. In this campaign, Democrats have been silent on the long record of Hill-Billie misdeeds mostly because Democrats have believed until now that they could make this bargain: turn a blind eye to the vices of the Hill-Billies and in exchange ride their coattails to office. However, if Hillary fumbles and appears increasingly unable to win in a national election, Democrats will turn on her as quickly as Bill dumps his mistresses and as fast as Hillary packs presidential China into her get-away car.

More alarming still is Hillary’s cold, icy stare when her opponents began to get under her skin. What happens if Hillary begins to use the same tactics of intimidation and blackmail on her colleagues that she and Gangsta Bill have used on their Republican challengers, Bill’s lovers or on his victims of rape and harassment? Hillary’s Democrat challengers are now riding a tiger. They had better keep on pounding, in unison, and knock her out of the race. Otherwise, they too will learn, first-hand, what other opponents of Bill and Hillary know very well: when you mess with the Clintons, the Hill-Billies will destroy you—no matter what the cost.

In the final analysis, for the Hill-Billies, an election campaign is not just an election campaign: they have sold their soul for power and are locked in a hell-grip with one another. So what’s a mere individual who stands in the way?

-Washington Watch is a column published in Insight (www.insightmag.com)