No less than Republican operative Torie Clarke seems to be right on the money about Hillary Clinton. Here’s what the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs under Donald Rumsfeld said on ABC’s This Week concerning the “people are bitter” comment by Barack Obama.

I think he can recover from this and I think he will, pretty easily. I think Hillary Clinton can overplay her hand. To prove that she’s a real person of the people, she’s out there drinking fake boiler makers, and this, and that. It’s just laughable.

[Time Magazine’s] Mark Halperin: They were real boiler makers.

Clarke: Crown Royal? Sorry, in Western Pennsylvania you don’t drink your boiler makers with Crown Royal. It’s a little bit tougher than that. But I think they may not play this that well. They may overplay this hand.

Clarke was born in Pittsburgh, so we’ll take her word on the cocktails. She’s also correct so far on Hillary’s shameless exploitation of Obama’s quite astute observation. Here’s what Obama actually said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.”

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The Clinton team wasted no time in whipping up the voters, handing out, “I’m not bitter” stickers in North Carolina. She has also taken to defending hunting, to make it seem to the bitter, ignorant masses she is pandering to that Obama was attacking it.

But the woman’s complete lack of self-awareness is so far even more evident than Clarke’s predicted miscalculation.

After a weekend spent making direct appeals to gun owners and church goers, Hillary Clinton said Sunday a query about the last time she fired a gun or attended church services “is not a relevant question in this debate” over Barack Obama’s recent comments on small town Americans.

“We can answer that some other time,” Clinton said at a press conference held in a working class neighborhood [in Scranton]…

“We have been working very hard to make it clear that we have millions of Democrats who are church going and gun-owning,” [Clinton] said. “And we are tired of having Republicans, or frankly our own Democrats, give any ammunition to Republicans because what happens then is Republicans take advantage of the situation.”

REPUBLICANS TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION?

Somebody get me a glass of water.

But speaking of predictions, I’d like to go on record now as forecasting the true “dream ticket” in 2008. If McCain wants someone as willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill the dream of the White House as he is, he should pick Hillary Clinton as his running mate. They seem to agree on just about everything. Deciding which of the two of them is the bigger ambition whore is the hard part.