Who would have thought that the Wellesley grad, Yale Law School-trained Hillary Clinton would be a whiskey-chugging, pizza-chomping, duck-hunting, gun-lovin’ gal? What’s more, she doesn’t much like elites who “psychoanalyze or patronize” the good people of Pennsylvania. (No, she has not done a mind-meld with Laura Ingraham.)

Now conservatives might guffaw over her new-found appreciation for the Second Amendment, but there is something inarguably more down-to-earth ( and if not “normal” than at least “ordinary”) about Hillary Clinton than Obama. It has nothing to do with race or class (liberal bloggers want to remind us he was on scholarship to that tony Hawaii prep school) and everything to do with their life experiences. Clinton is a product of middle class, Midwestern parents and has spent a chunk of her adult life in Arkansas. She may not trust Americans to read a home loan document, but she knows them well enough to never let slip from her lips words of cultural condescension.

Obama seems to regard these Americans from afar as a case study in one of the sociology department’s offerings (“Fundamentalism in America 101”) at Harvard. One is left wondering if he knows any of the people he diagnoses.

So while some believe that only those mean Republicans could really go after Obama on his “radioactive personal associations, his liberal ideology, his exotic life story, his coolly academic and elitist style,” Clinton is coming awfully close to sounding those very same themes ( minus the “too liberal” part).

And if Obama was supposed to be the more attractive of the two candidates in the eyes of superdelegates from Red states, in part because he could broaden the party’s appeal beyond Blue enclaves, the RNC is doing its best to turn up the heat on those down-ticket Democrats. We will see if they are still so thrilled with the notion of Obama at the top of the ballot.