Battle has become a clash of class - and Hillary Clinton proves she has none

Mike Lupica, New York Daily News, Tuesday, April 15th 2008, 4:00 AM

Dunand/Getty

Hillary Clinton addressed the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee on Monday.

So here we are now with a fight for the Democratic nomination that increasingly has the charm of mud-wrestling.

We are supposed to believe that Sen. Barack Obama hates you if you live in a small town. At the same time we are supposed to believe that Bill and Hillary Clinton - who have banked more than $100 million since he left office - are more regular than Bingo Night.

What started out as one of the most thrilling races in the history of any party, one that was supposed to be about race and gender and new ideas and possibilities, has suddenly become one about class. Or, in this case, no class.

Here was one of Hillary Clinton's spokesmen the other day, a self-appointed spokesman for just plain folks named Phil Singer, responding to Obama's remarks about bitter Americans clinging to guns and religion: "Sen. Obama's speeches won't hide his condescending views of Americans living in small towns."

Does even a flack like Singer, sounding like he is reading from William Kristol's giddy attack on Obama in The Times, actually believe this? Does anybody? Do they actually believe that the first African-American candidate to get this close to his party's nomination got here because his message only resonates with readers of The New York Review of Books?

It is all kind of wonderful, especially on the 61st anniversary of Jackie Robinson running out to play a baseball game for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making April 15, 1947, as much a point of light in the civil rights movement in this country as anything that would come after it.

Obama is supposed to be the elitist of this campaign and Sen. Clinton is a shot-and-beer girl who remembers hunting with her grandpa and remembering just in time for the Pennsylvania primary how devoted she is to the Second Amendment.

Now that we know how much Sen. Clinton loves guns, it can't be long before she changes her Bosnia story again and tells us that when the snipers opened up on her that day, she started firing back.

You'd be right to say that Obama, who has lifted the whole discourse from the start with his use of words, finally tripped over his language and himself.

But it is as easy to understand what he was trying to say as it was once, as his campaign has pointed out, when Bill Clinton was running against George H.W. Bush and told Time magazine how the other side's game was to find the most "economically insecure white people and ... scare the living daylights out of them."

Nobody believes that Sen. John McCain really wants to stay in Iraq for the next 100 years, either, but we sure knew what McCain meant. Obama jumped him, even understanding the point McCain was trying to make.

Now Obama gets jumped the same way for what he said about disenfranchised Americans. It is a hardball league they are all playing in, and everybody needs to wear a helmet.

But the idea that Obama is the elitist and Bill and Hillary Clinton are practically a mom-and-pop restaurant is the dumbest thing to happen yet in a campaign that gets dumber, meaner and more of a slog by the day.

Bill and Hillary Clinton are the royalty of American life. They got rich off the White House, rich beyond what anyone knew until they were dragged kicking and screaming into releasing their tax returns. But they want you to know neither one of them has lost the common touch. The other day, Hillary Clinton was talking about the last two presidential elections, looking around for reasons why she thinks Al Gore and John Kerry lost.

"Large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand or relate to or frankly respect their ways of life," she said.

Now she is saying that Obama is no better. She says that in every possible way on the campaign trail. It is her constant message to the superdelegates and maybe to the boys in the bar when she is throwing back shots with them - Obama is the worst kind of snob and can't win.

This coming from someone married to a man who thinks he is the greatest, smartest politician who ever lived, smarter than everybody, but more desperate, occasionally in a grubby way, to get back to the White House.

OBAMA IS A presidential candidate and therefore a lot of things. You are allowed to think that he can come across as half-a-phony sometimes. Still the idea that he is the elitist in this race is as much a fiction as Hillary's fiction about her trip to Bosnia.

Sometimes Obama must think that the people he is up against lie just to stay in practice.

mlupica@nydailynews.com