Shaking knees in Hillaryland?

Deborah Orin has a column today looking at several moves Hillary and her supporters have taken recently and concludes that the campaign is starting to get nervous about winning the nomination.

A batch of Hillaryland moves over the past few weeks suggests a nervous- Nellie president wannabe rather than a confident Democratic front-runner. She hired a lefty blogger and cozied up to anti-war activists by pledging to desert pal Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) if he loses a primary over Iraq and runs as an independent.

To boot, hubby Bill Clinton went out to court activists in the first-test states of Iowa and New Hampshire by vowing that his wife supports their favored positions.

The most bizarre move was having her pollster, Mark Penn, and longtime Clintonite James Carville write a defensive-sounding Washington Post weekend op-ed piece insisting “she can win” in 2008.

The minute Hillaryland feels a need to insist that she can win, her partisans have admitted it’s a debatable - and weak - point for the candidate, who’s supposed to have a lock on the nomination.

Apparently, she's nervous because of a recent poll that showed John Edwards ahead in Iowa.

If this nervousness continues, expect for her to make some more moves to the left. Of course, the one thing that is the biggest barrier to her getting leftist support is that she won't call for a pullout from Iraq. She'll have to either change her position or move further left on other issues and hope that that will balance it out among other voters. I doubt that it will. For those who feel passionately that we need to come out of the war as soon as possible, a moderated position trying to find some middle ground isn't going to hack it. The big question is whether there are enough of those voters to outweigh her name-recognition and popularity among Democratic primary voters. There are many, even in the Democratic party, who don't like her positions and her propensity for carefully choosing her positions according to what she thinks will help her. They're not all that impressed with her status as former First Lady who was cheated on by that lovable cad, Bill. And once you get past that, what does she have going for her among Democrats? If they don't like her stand on the war, does she have all that much more to attract Democratic voters? It used to be she had that air of inevitability, but they might look for more in their hopes to take back the White House.

With open nominations on each side, it's going to be a bumpy, but fun ride.