Video: Hillary tackles the tough issues; Update: Lead over Obama widens

She’s better in this format than she is in front of a crowd, where she has to play pretend populist. And in her defense, this sort of dopey, trivial pander is perfectly geared to the mentality of YouTube regulars.

But dear god, are some of the choices awful.

Obama’s got the youth vote so they’ll have to pass on the more recent tracks, and there’s no way Hillary could make her entrance to tunes as hard-charging as the U2 selections without the audience laughing, so it’s a contest between the Chicks and Motown. Prediction: they go with the boomer bait. “Get Ready.”

Update: How does she do it? What compelling reason could there be to prefer the Glacier to the Messiah? If I were a lefty, I’d be strapped into the co-pilot’s seat on Starship Obama. Is it just pure name recognition?

Meanwhile, Politico floats the tantalizing possibility of two independent candidates running if Rudy wins the nomination. One, per this morning’s post, would be Bloomberg. The other:

The chance for a single-issue candidate to win the presidency is small, but the chance to affect the course of the election is great. Ralph Nader received 2.7 percent of the national vote in 2000, including 97,000 votes in Florida that Democrats will never let him live down.

A couple of Republican pollsters estimate that a credible anti-abortion candidate running in 2008 could take 4 percent of the national vote if the GOP nominee isn’t seen as sufficiently opposed to abortion.

A mainstream Republican wouldn’t torpedo the party by opposing the nominee so it’d have to be a slightly more fringe figure whose moral commitment to the issue would spur him on. Hillary versus Rudy versus Bloomberg versus Gary Bauer?

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