HARD SELL: I don’t do a lot of political commentary these days; I figure there’s a lot of people who do that sort of thing better than I can, but every so often I feel the need to indulge so I hope you will bear with me.

The political news these days is that the presidential campaign of the junior Senator from New York is starting to look a little vulnerable around the edges. The junior senator is still the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, of course, but her constant invocation of her “experience” for the job is now causing some of her fellow candidates to point out that she has none. The junior Senator’s campaign staff makes much of her eight years in the White House as First Lady, but it seems to me that this means that the junior Senator’s husband has presidential experience and not the junior Senator; if I want to hire a plumber, I hire a plumber, and not the plumber’s spouse. But you won’t hear this from the junior Senator’s campaign staff, who hype the junior Senator and her nomination’s inevitability with all the verve, gusto, and hard sell of Madison Avenue pitch men who know they have a flawed product on their hands and are trying to sell as many units as possible before the public figures out that once you get past all the glitz, what’s left is a lemon.