In the aftermath of last night’s Democratic presidential debate, the consensus seems to be that Hillary’s “change you can Xerox” line was an embarassing, disingenuous clunker and that her closing comments were a genuine moment that effectively showed her soft side.

Slate’s John Dickerson seems to capture the CW. He calls the Xerox line “a bad moment,” an unclever remark “cooked up by committee.” He called her closing remarks “her best of the night” because they “showed her heart and a little humanity.” I beg to differ.

Here is what she said (video), in response to the question of how she had been tested in a moment of crisis:

CLINTON: Well, I think everybody here knows I’ve lived through some crises and some challenging moments in my life. And…

(APPLAUSE)

And I am grateful for the support and the prayers of countless Americans.

But people often ask me, “How do you do it?” You know, “How do you keep going?” And I just have to shake my head in wonderment, because with all of the challenges that I’ve had, they are nothing compared to what I see happening in the lives of Americans every single day.

You know, a few months ago, I was honored to be asked, along with Senator McCain, as the only two elected officials, to speak at the opening at the Intrepid Center at Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, a center designed to take care of and provide rehabilitation for our brave young men and women who have been injured in war.

And I remember sitting up there and watching them come in. Those who could walk were walking. Those who had lost limbs were trying with great courage to get themselves in without the help of others. Some were in wheelchairs and some were on gurneys. And the speaker representing these wounded warriors had had most of his face disfigured by the results of fire from a roadside bomb.

You know, the hits I’ve taken in life are nothing compared to what goes on every single day in the lives of people across our country.

And I resolved at a very young age that I’d been blessed and that I was called by my faith and by my upbringing to do what I could to give others the same opportunities and blessings that I took for granted.

That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what motivates me in this campaign.

(APPLAUSE)

And, you know, no matter what happens in this contest — and I am honored, I am honored to be here with Barack Obama. I am absolutely honored.

(APPLAUSE)

Whatever happens, we’re going to be fine. You know, we have strong support from our families and our friends. I just hope that we’ll be able to say the same thing about the American people, and that’s what this election should be about.

First, she for the umpteenth time perversely and unsubtly alludes to and somehow tries to take credit for the fact she chose to stay married to a lying, philandering scumbag for decades in order to advance her political ideas. It’s mind-boggling.

Second, she segues ever-so-crudely into the prefabricated, prescripted heart-tugging anecdote in a transparent effort to demonstrate to voters she is not just an adding machine wearing a blonde wig and an ugly outfit. The moderator could have asked Hillary to explain the quadratic equation and she would have uncorked this manipulative nonsense. I imagine advisers Mark Penn and Howard Wolfson unzipping the back of Hillary’s blouse during one of the commercial breaks and pulling down a flap in the middle of her back to reveal a bunch of circuitry, a la Vicky in “Small Wonder“:

Penn: Where’s the “emote” button on this damn contraption?

Wolfson: Ugh. The male version of this robot was great at emoting. Had trouble controlling the mating function, though.

So it was a prefab, partly borrowed “genuine moment.” So what? In a way, that makes it worse when you parse what she actually said because you realize she spent all day practicing this claptrap and didn’t realize how horrible it was.

She says the par-for-the-course political attacks she’s received thanks to her vaunted 35 years of experience are nothing compared to the struggles of other Americans, especially soldiers who have been crippled in battle. But to whom, exactly, would it even occur to make this comparison? In what galaxy is Hillary a sympathetic or pitiable figure?

Let’s see. She is one of the richest people in the richest country in world history. Win or lose this campaign, she is virtually assured of two or three more decades as one of the 100 most powerful people in the world’s most powerful deliberative body — her incumbency to be perfunctorily interrupted every six years by a campaign against an underfunded, overmatched opponent. Yes, of course, she is “going to be fine.” More than fine. Who would suggest otherwise, except in a bogus attempt to “connect”?

Even Hillary’s vain (in both senses of the word) attempt to acknowledge her incredible good fortune is undercut by her self-serving evocation of wounded soldiers. The ugly truth that sits astride Hillary’s talk of faces disfigured by roadside bombs is that it was her vote, and her vocal support, that helped send those soldiers to the war where they were wounded. She has never even had the simple decency to apologize for the war she realized too late was not just wrong but tragically so, because to do so might weaken her politically.

And now, now, now, now — she has the audacity to use the victims of the war she helped to start as mere decoration for a concocted vignette in a vile effort to aid her own, fast-fading hopes for the presidency!

What kind of a disgusting human being thinks this way, believing not only that this is something short of an admission of callous indifference to her own role in perpetuating human suffering but that it somehow speaks well of her? How upside down is our thinking that people watch such garbage and hail it as demonstrating “humanity”?

Forget it, Jake. It’s campaign season.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of Angry Blog.)

Mitt Romney has, so far, reportedly spent $35 million on his failing campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Just think about it for a moment — $35 million. Inhale deeply, put your pinky finger up to your mouth a la Dr. Evil and say with me: Thirty-five meeeellion dollars!

What else could Romney have done with that money? He could, of course, have plowed it back into his entrepreneurial efforts and made lots of people lots more money — returns four times better than the S&P 500 if the Bain & Co. promotional materials are to be believed.

But apparently he wants to “help” people, not just make them money. Well, with $35 million he could have helped send more than 3,000 low-income children to private school from kindergarten through the 8th grade. The number would actually be higher because the money could be invested and the pot could grow even larger while the kids worked their way through school.

Or, he could have expressed his deep love for the faith of his fathers by giving the dough to the LDS welfare services operation, which assists the victims of disaster all over the globe. Sticking with education, he could have handed the money over to his alma mater, Brigham Young University, on the condition that it go to pay full freight for Mormons from low-income families.

Or, he could have used it to help the National Multiple Sclerosis Society — “the single largest private sponsor of MS research in the world” — fund efforts to find a cure for the disease that his wife Ann has so courageously battled.

Or … whatever. I’m not normally in the habit of telling obscenely rich people how to spend their money, but the truth is that nearly any use of the money would have made more sense, and been more laudable, than the purpose to which it has gone. Not only has Romney wasted $35 million (so far) on a broken political sector that cannot be “transformed” by a single man — yes, even the president — but he has done it in service of ideas that make “garden variety” seem exotic by comparison.

(New Jersey’s Jon Corzine is even guiltier of this offense, spending more than $100 million of his fortune to win a Senate seat and then the governorship. Wow, a liberal Democrat governing New Jersey? There hadn’t been one of those since … the guy who immediately preceded him!)

One could argue that a rich man pouring money into a political candidacy in service of an idea that otherwise won’t get a fair hearing — Steve Forbes pushing a flat tax, Ross Perot stressing fiscal discipline — is doing something to, in an inchoate fashion, nudge the national debate in a different direction. I’m not sure political campaigns are the best way of promoting out-of-the-box ideas, but at least a plausible case could be made.

But the hallmark of Romney’s campaign has been his painfully awkward lurches to grab hold of the most widely shared and worst ideas the Republican Party has to offer — everything from doubling the size of our illegal detention camp in Guantanamo Bay to impeding promising scientific research to building a wall in a vain effort to stop peaceful people from crossing an imaginary line to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Thirty-five million dollars. What an enormous waste of scarce resources, and done in the name of helping people. That amount could supply 2,500 pumps to bring clean drinking water to African children, one of whom dies every 15 seconds from a water-related disease. Instead, Romney spent $35 million to buy TV ads to tell voters why he has recently come to support the National Review’s line on the issues.

No, it is worse than that. Because the truth is that the differences between Romney and McCain are not significant. Both support a war without end in Iraq. Both (now) support building a wall on our border without doing anything to make legal the freely exchanged labor of people without the proper government permission slips. He has steadfastly refused to criticize the spectacularly terrible Dubya & Co. except in superficial, technocratic terms. So, what excuse does Romney have left to explain why he wasted $35 million on politics when it could have been put to manifestly nobler ends?

The answer: ego. Mitt Romney is apparently the kind of man who looks at the $3 trillion federal budget and says, “The only thing wrong with this mess is that someone else is in charge of it.”

The notion that what the country needs is the same old government-centric approach to solving problems but someone just a little bit smarter to implement it is profoundly and tragically misguided, but Romney’s delusions of grandeur are especially laughable given his mediocre record in political office.

After all, the signature achievement of his governorship in Massachusetts is that he helped give a tax, spend (and spend again!), mandate and regulate approach to health care a Republican imprimatur.

Whether Romney’s decision to waste $35 million (so far) on politics is driven more by a disturbing distrust of civil society, a naive faith in the power of government, or a truly alarming and totally unjustified messianism is unclear. I do know this much: He could have bought a lot of magic underwear and hair gel with that money. It would have been money much better spent.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of Angry Blog.)

Apparently, it’s “Don’t be evil afraid to use the threat of government prosecution to intimidate the competition.” I guess it replaces their most recent slogan, “Don’t be evil showing Chinese users how their government is censoring the Internet.”

After Microsoft announced its $41 billion offer for Yahoo! in a bid to remain relevant online, Google was quick to send its top lawyer to the blogosphere to man the barricades. And so we get this entreaty for politicians across the globe to please stop Microsoft from grabbing a truly frightening 30 percent share of the search market. Unfortunately, some Congress critters are only too happy to oblige.

Here is Google, which every day is pointing the way toward a Web-based form of computing that could render the operating system obsolete, engaging the same tired Microsoft scaremongering that was demolished 10 years ago.

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz recently lamented Google’s opening a lobby shop in D.C., complaining of “how the government lured Google into the political sector of the economy.” Looks to me like they’re taking to politics like a fish takes to water.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)