Going After Hillary.(The Talk of the Town)(Hillary Clinton)

It took until the final minutes of last week's debate among the Democratic Presidential contenders for the flying saucers to make their appearance. Though the special effects were subtle, there was a surprise cameo by an important movie star. The magic moment came when Tim Russert, who, along with Brian Williams, was manning ground control for MSNBC, asked one of the contenders what he termed "a serious question."

Q: The godmother of your daughter, Shirley MacLaine, writes in her new book that you sighted a U.F.O. over her home in Washington state, that you found the encounter extremely moving, that it was a "triangular craft, silent and hovering," that you "felt a connection to your heart and heard directions in your mind." Now, did you see a U.F.O.?, A: I did. And the rest of the account--I didn't--it was an unidentified flying object, O.K.? It's, like--it's unidentified.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich--for it was he--is indeed the candidate whom it is easiest to imagine walking up the gangplank of the glowing mother ship in the final scene of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Many viewers may not have been aware of the identity of his daughter's godmother, or of the corollary of that fact: that Warren Beatty, a player in Democratic Party politics for forty years, is Kucinich's daughter's goduncle--and, therefore, Kucinich's godcousin, or something. There is more than one dynast in the Democratic field.

And more than one space cadet. The other, Mike Gravel, was missing this time, having been triaged out on the ground that his campaign has consisted almost entirely of showing up for TV debates, to which his passport, now expired, was his service as a senator, which ended a quarter century ago. Of the remaining seven, six--Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, plus Governor Bill Richardson and the two senatorial lions, Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd--are plausible Presidential figures. Kucinich, though implausible, at least represents something outside himself--the Pacifica Radio wing of the Party--and he does not always finish last in the polls.

The earth has already circled the sun once since this campaign began and will circle it again before it's over. But last week's debate kicked the proceedings into warp speed: with a mere two months until the Iowa caucus, we have reached the primary's equivalent of the general-election campaign's post-Labor Day, 2008, sprint.

By the time the lights came up in Philadelphia last week, the evening's theme had become settled wisdom among MSNBC's color commentators. "The target tonight: Hillary Clinton. Obama and Edwards are expected to come out swinging" (Tucker Carlson). Obama "has got to attack, and he has got to explain why Hillary Clinton cannot win the Presidency" (Howard Fineman). "Will Barack Obama hit the champ or hit the tank? Tonight's the night!" (Chris Matthews). Obama himself had helped write this script, giving a pre-debate interview to the Times, in which, according to the reporters' distillation of a nearly hour-long conversation, he promised to "start confronting" Clinton and "go on the offensive." But those were the reporters' words, not Obama's. His words, which could be found in an excerpted transcript on the Times Web site, were calmer. "I think she is an admirable person, I think she's a capable senator, I think there's overlap between some of her ideas and mine," he said. "The case I'm making is not that she's a terrible person or would be a terrible President. The case I'm making is that I would be better at those things that the country needs right now."

Not exactly a prescription for a "steel-cage match," for which, as David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist, correctly told the Washington Post, "there's a tremendous bloodlust out ...