THE KNOCKOUT PUNCH

Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama is Hillary Clinton’s knockout punch. A little history: Chris Dodd is the son of the venerable Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who was senator before him. I love Wikapedia, which tells us the elder Dodd was elected as a Democrat to the House of Representatives in 1952, and served two terms. He lost a Senate election in 1956 to Prescott S. Bush, father of President Bush-I and grandfather of the current President George W. Bush, but was elected in 1958 to Connecticut's other Senate seat and then re-elected in 1964. Before becoming a U.S. senator, Thomas J. Dodd was hired by Guatemalan dictator Carlos Castillo Armas to lobby for Guatemala in the United States for $50,000 a year. As chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile   Delinquency, the elder Dodd worked to restrict the purchase of mail-order handguns, and later shotguns and rifles. These efforts led to the Gun Control Act of 1968, which the elder Dodd introduced. In 1967, the elder Dodd was censured by the U.S. Senate for using campaign funds for personal purposes. In 1970, after suffering a heart attack, he chose not to run for re-election and Democrats nominated Joseph Duffey to replace him. However, the elder Dodd ran for re-election as an independent, took less than a quarter of the vote, and Duffey lost to Republican Lowell Weicker. Months after his defeat, Thomas Dodd died from a heart attack at his home. Chris Dodd, his son, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980. Folk singer Phil Ochs referred to Chris Dodd in his song "Draft Dodger Rag": "I believe in God and Senator  Dodd and keeping old Castro down." “This is a time of unity in our country,” Dodd said in endorsing Obama –- a time to get together behind a candidate who is a uniter rather than a divider. That was a sharp slap against Hillary Clinton, whose campaign had just issued a picture of Barack Obama in African garb when he visited an African country – an obvious effort to generate racial hackles and besmirch Obama’s affinity for his African roots. It was an affront, racially  based, and caught Hillary Clinton fair and square, even though she denied knowledge of spreading of the picture. Oh yes, blame it on the staff. I know Hillary Clinton, covered her as a newspaperman for several years, and she’s very controlling. There’s no way she did not know of the spreading of the picture in an attempt to smear Barack Obama. Clinton's claims to the contrary are patent lies. Nothing happens in Hillary Clinton’s environs without her knowledge and approval. She keeps such tight control of everything she makes you nervous every time you’re around her lest you do something she doesn’t like. I know. She wouldn’t talk to me for years as a news reporter because she didn’t like The Washington Times, for whom I worked and scorned me anytime she saw me. She’s got an angry, hateful personality, and Arkansas state police officer Larry Ferguson told me in 1992 of the time she threw dishes and other china at Bill Clinton in the kitchen of the governor's mansion in Little Rock when he came back in the middle of the night one day after a midnight soiree with Gennifer Flowers. Clinton had used Ferguson's personal car to drive over to Flower's house for another sexual liaison. Hillary woke up, saw Bill was gone and went downstairs to ask secuurity detail officer Ferguson where Bill Clinton was. She waited until he returned and threw everything she could grab out of the kitchen cabinets when he walked in the door. Hillary once also angrily threw a bible in the eye of a Secret Service agent in Oklahoma City, causing him to have to get several stitches at the hospital, when the governor’s car during a presidential visit did not drive Bill and Hillary up to the front door of a church they were going to, but instead went round the back for security reasons. Hillary Clinton has a maniacal angry demeanor. She would be a horrible president quite apart from her liberal-left views on issues that are the same as Obama's, because of her bad temper. Democratic voters have apparently sized this up, and this is major reason that Obacka Barama is soaring. He's a nice likeable man, former Harvard law review editor, very smart, a smooth performer, probably left of Hillary policy-wise. But Hillary's spiteful punches against Obama, such as the photo stunt, haven't worked with Democratic voters.  It’s nice versus not-nice-spiteful on the Democratic side. Hillary’s dead in the presidential race, even if she pulls out the Democratic nomination. John McCain, a man with a temper in his own right, would wind her watch in the general election. Against Obama, the race would probably turn on who were their vice presidential running mates to offer a real choice for American voters.