How is Hillary like Jimmy?

The two major Democratic presidential candidates plus John Edwards debated in Nevada last night, and the San Francisco Chronicle's Joe Garofoli says they managed to lose "the Berkeley vote" (even though Berkeley technically is in California, not Nevada):

Interesting question: Would you enforce a law that requires colleges to have an ROTC program and allow military recruiters on campus? This is a BIG deal in the Bay Area--at least in the Berkeley/San Francisco/Oakland/Santa Cruz parts of it--where "counter-recruiting" efforts goes on campus and high school students and families regularly elect to NOT be contacted by recruiters.

Start painting the picket signs: All three of them said they will enforce the law. Edwards gets points for expanding the question to talk about homeless vets, and helping returning Iraqi service personnel. [Mrs.] Clinton joins in and talks about PTSD.

The Washington Times, meanwhile, goes a bit overboard in interpreting one of Mrs. Clinton's comments:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last night compared her rival, Sen. Barack Obama, to President Bush on executive abilities--just minutes after calling the current president "pathetic." . . .

Mrs. Clinton of New York shot back that setting vision and bringing people together is important, but "you have to be able to manage and run the bureaucracy."

"We've seen the results of a president who frankly failed at that," she said. "He went in to office saying he was going to have the kind of Harvard Business School CEO model, where he'd set the tone, he'd set the goals, and then everybody else would have to implement it. And we saw the failures."

But Mrs. Clinton didn't exactly call Bush pathetic. What she said was:

You know, President Bush is over in Gulf now begging the Saudis and others to drop the price of oil. How pathetic! We should have an energy policy right now putting people to work in green-collar jobs as a way to stave off the recession, moving us toward energy independence. All of that and more is waiting for our next president.

Then again, the picture Mrs. Clinton paints of what her presidency would look like isn't exactly thrilling: She wants to be a micromanager and an "energy independence" busybody. Isn't one Jimmy Carter enough?