For The Record

Some of the heated rhetoric Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill used against Barack Obama in the closing days of the New Hampshire primary campaign drew controversy on several fronts.

The former President essentially called Senator Obama fool's gold, telling one audience a day before the primary that he was offering false hopes that he couldn't fulfill if elected.

Perhaps the most-provocative comment was Senator Clinton's in which she suggested that she was akin to President Johnson while Mr. Obama was like Martin Luther King Jr. For all the latter gentleman's rhetorical eloquence, she noted, "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ... It took a President to get it done."

What was most striking to us about the comparison was that most people who invoke Mr. Johnson in that context do so to point out that while it was President John Kennedy who was most closely identified with White House support for the civil rights movement led by Dr. King, it was his successor who had the political smarts that finally pushed the bill through Congress. Since Mr. Kennedy was also known for his speaking skills, it seemed odd that she wouldn't have made it a Kennedy/Johnson analogy. (It's possible that the Clintons have spent so much time trying to cloak themselves as the political heirs to John and Bobby Kennedy that they would have found it unthinkable to use any comparison that put one of them on the short end.)

A New York Times editorial writer also wondered why Senator Clinton would couch matters in a way that implied "that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change." But the editorial writer, who may have relied too much on the CliffsNotes of Mr. Johnson's career, also called it "baffling" that "Mrs. Clinton would compare herself to Mr. Johnson, who escalated the war in Vietnam into a generational disaster ..."

Frankly, we thought bringing Vietnam into the discussion was as baffling as the Johnson/King parallel. Its only relevance is that his blunder in expanding the war is the primary reason that LBJ is not remembered as one of our greatest Presidents, based on achievements from the civil rights laws to the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and his other efforts to combat poverty in America.

Interestingly, a couple of months before Senator Clinton brought Mr. Johnson into the conversation, one high-ranking city official of our acquaintance cited him in explaining why she supported Hillary for President. She might seem overly calculating in sometimes casting aside her better instincts - most notably on her vote authorizing President Bush to invade Iraq - when they clashed with her political ambitions, this official said, but Mr. Johnson was the same way, and it was a prime reason he was so good at bringing legislation to passage as both a Senator and President.

And so the challenge for Ms. Clinton if elected might be to emulate LBJ except when the subject was war.

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New York's other presidential hopeful (we don't include Rudy Giuliani in that category since America's Mayor has taken such a shine to running against the city and what it stands for) got a bit of a jolt last week when a poll showed only 16 percent of city voters want Mayor Bloomberg to make the run.

The survey by Quinnipiac University found that in contrast, nearly 50 percent of the 1,162 registered voters it polled would like him to run for Governor. Those numbers are particularly surprising given that Quinnipiac found that more than half of those who responded said they believed Mr. Bloomberg would make a good President.

The seeming contradictions in their responses may reflect satisfaction with the field of White House contenders as it already stands and a continuing discontent with the performance of Governor Spitzer, who spent too much of his first year in office steamrolling himself toward the political junkyard.

Mr. Bloomberg's approval rating, which peaked at 75 percent in a Quinnipiac survey early in his second term, is currently 73 percent, up two points from the polling institute's previous check of the electorate's pulse in November.