PARIS—There is nothing like the view from abroad to spot all the nonsense and bulljive coursing through the presidential campaign. Nonsense such as trying to project a general election winner from the results of a primary.

Does anyone really believe that the Democrat, Barack Obama in particular, would lose states such as New York, Massachusetts or California because Hillary Clinton carried them substantially—or conversely that Clinton would lose Illinois because Obama wiped her out there?

Does anyone expect a Democrat to win Alabama, even though Obama carried it handily? Conversely, Clinton carried Tennessee by a landslide, but neither of them is likely to win it against John McCain.

So it goes in perhaps three quarters of the states, although there are prospects for either to put new states into play. Clinton might be able to pull off Arkansas, while Obama could turn Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado or Nevada from 2004 red to a 2008 shade of blue.

There is also much talk about whether Obama can connect eventually with older folk and blue-collar workers against McCain.

Tell me, then: Will seniors still shrink from Obama’s youth and perhaps his color when they are hit full force with the fact that McCain still wants to privatize social security? That’s just for starters. Pennsylvania and Ohio may not be nearly as shaky as some would like to tell us.

Then too, McCain has been caught in more little lies about the war than Bill Clinton has about sex. Remember McCain’s claims of strolling through a Baghdad market as if it were Lincoln Park? Until those annoying cameras showed him protected by half a dozen tanks and a battalion of armed guards.

The odds are still strongly with Obama for the nomination, despite the psychological boost Clinton got from her near-double-digit win in Pennsylvania. He will, of course, have to avoid further stupid sociologizing, like suggesting it is merely Bush’s economy that makes “bitter” small-towners “cling” to God, guns and racism. Those cultural roots run much deeper.

Hillary’s problem is she would have to rack up similarly big wins in the remaining nine contests, which just ain’t gonna happen. Nonsense to think she can or will.

But she’s still in there swinging—often wildly. She’s morphed now from a gun-totin’, beer swillin’ blue collar babe to the mad bomber. She threatened one day to “obliterate” Iran, the next day to engage in “massive retaliation,” if that country were to nuke Israel.

Did she forget, when posed with this bulljive hypothetical, that Iran is still years away from a nuclear weapon? Any country that lobbed a nuke toward Israel would be instantly turned into a radioactive desert because Israel has enough nuclear warheads to blow the entire Middle East back to the Abrahamic age. Not even the loons who run Iran today are totally suicidal.

No, Senator Clinton—nice to pledge your loyalty to Israel, but neither Israel nor we need more nuclear saber-rattling, thank you.

““The one question that must still be asked is whether she is hell-bent on damaging Obama sufficiently so that he falls to McCain and she becomes the last-chance candidate in 2012. A very dangerous game, if only for its own transparency. People will not forget such treachery.

It was Bill Clinton, remember, who created “triangulation,” a mode of separating himself from both his own and the opposition party in order to serve his personal career.

Speaking of Bill, perhaps he is going through male menopause. He has deteriorated from being a very sly and wily prevaricator (“depends on what the meaning of is is”) to a plain old-fashioned bumbling liar.

Most recently he denied making a statement he had taped on a radio broadcast the day before.

Reminded me of an incident many years ago when a reporter played a statement on a tape recorder back to Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne.

She looked him straight in the eye and said, “I never said that!”
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Monsieur Don Rose, the sophisticated political analyst and chic restaurant critic formerly for the “Chicago Sun-Times” and other publications, is spending his springtime in Paris but he follows U.S. politics avidly.