All campaigns spin. All candidates spin. But there is something about Clintonian spin that is...well, spinnier than conventional spin.

Here's an example. Last Thursday, following the mis-moderated Clinton-Obama debate of the previous evening, the Hillary Clinton campaign decided to follow up by blasting Barack Obama on two issues that had been tossed at him the previous evening: his past support of a handgun ban and his connection to William Ayers, a former Weather Underground radical who has become a distinguished professor and education expert. During a conference call that morning, Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer, two senior Clinton aides, hammered Obama for having held a fundraiser in 1995, during his first campaign for state senator, in Ayers' apartment. At the time, Ayers, who has admitted taking part in bombings during the 1970s (which never caused any loss of life) and who was never arrested for any of his radical actions, lived near Obama, and the two served on the board of a nonprofit that provided grants to groups working on poverty issues. Obama, Wolfson insisted, had "to be more forthcoming" about Ayers.

During that conference call, I asked Wolfson whether Senator Clinton supported the pardon Bill Clinton issued in 2001 to two Weather Underground radicals: Linda Evans, who was sentenced to prison for participating in a series of bombings in the 1980s, and Susan Rosenberg, who was charged with being part of a bank robbery that left a guard and two police officers dead. Whether or not the Ayers matter was a non-issue, if Hillary Clinton's aides were going to bash Obama for having once had a connection to a former radical who had never been arrested, it seemed fair to wonder if she had opposed her husband's pardons of two radicals who had served time for their crimes.

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In Slate, the indispensable Linda Hirshman tackles feminism's latest head scratcher: Young women rejecting 'embarrassing, old school feminism' just to annoy their moms. I oversimplify, but so do young women who inherited what we mothers fought for and now want us to disappear so our girls can go wild and pole dance without feeling all guilty. Caricatures work both ways, missy.

This schism has become glaringly apparent as Clinton and Obama vie for the nomination while young women say sexism's not much of an issue anymore. The trouble started when us OG feminists surprised young chicks by pointing out that, oh, they're insane to believe that. And that their skirts are too short. It went downhill from there. Young women, like several other groups of humans, don't react well to being told they have a false consciousness. Or that their skirts are too short. In the end, the moms drove the daughters ever farther from Hillary Clinton. Hirshman offers this example:

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MIFFLINTOWN, PA – Hillary Clinton spent a rainy Sunday afternoon in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the sort of small town that has recently been at the center of her race against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In a mirror of the Ohio primary, in which Obama took heat for the Goolsbee/NAFTA affair right before election day, Obama has spent the week before Tuesday's Pennsylvania vote explaining his comment that in "a lot of small towns in the Midwest," people are "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion." Clinton has sought to portray Obama as out-of-touch and to portray herself of the true champion of small town values. She entered Greater Johnstown Senior High School (home of the 2007 Laurel Highlands Section 2 softball champions) to the sounds of John Mellencamp's folk rock tune "This Is Our Country." And if that wasn't on-the-nose enough for the thousand or so attendees, she exited to Mellencamp's "Small Town."

But aside from some very subtle references (Clinton said she wanted to be the president of "every city, every town, every village"), the attack de jour was elsewhere.

Governor Ed Rendell, a stalwart Clinton supporter who spoke before the Senator, tipped off the crowd when he paraphrased this statement Senator Obama made earlier in the day:

"You have a real choice in this election. Either Democrat would be better than John McCain. And all three of us would be better than George Bush."

The critique was that Obama was willing to give an inch — the Democratic talking point of the campaign is that McCain is running for a third Bush term, and saying otherwise suggests that the speaker is either soft or naïve.

Clinton used the opportunity to hammer Obama and McCain both, saying:

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The national treasure that is Ernie Chambers is leaving the Nebraska unicameral state legislature after 38 years.

Capitol regulars cried in the halls and fellow state senators gushed with praise for Ernie Chambers' service as the self-proclaimed "defender of the downtrodden."

But the Omaha senator wasn't in any mood to reminisce on Thursday, his last day on the legislative floor he prowled for 38 years. He was a reluctant, mostly absent, observer of his own legislative funeral and mostly spent the day like he has thousands of others since first being elected in 1970 — working....

Chambers logged more years as a state senator than anyone in Nebraska history. And while term limits won't officially push the muscled 70-year-old and state's only black senator out of his cluttered Capitol office until the end of the year, he's done making, and mostly stopping, laws for the state.

"He has just been a stalwart in making sure people get justice and that justice is administered fairly," said Sen. DiAnna Schimek of Lincoln, one of the 14 other senators who won't return next year because of term limits.

"Nobody's paid in the lobby to speak out on behalf of people on death row, for black youth, for poor kids," said Sen. Steve Lathrop of Omaha. "Ultimately, the downtrodden will be defended by our conscience, and Ernie is a man of conscience, a man of determination."

A hellraiser in Mother Jones' own tradition, Chambers was able to inspire solemn reverence even in ever-snarky bloggers like this one. He'll be missed.

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