After a potentially damaging poll out of Iowa, showing Obama up by 4, and running evenly among female voters, Hillary Clinton has perhaps understandably hit the Bill Button again, reminding Iowans of her husband’s successes.

But whoever’s writing her ad-libs at this point needs to be pulled from the game, and a closer brought in.

In speaking of Bill’s success in leading the US out of debt and into an economic surplus, Hillary advanced this cute new meme: “As someone said the other day, there seems to be a pattern: it takes a Clinton to clean up after a Bush.”

Get it? Bush, then Clinton, Bush, then Clinton: they screw things up and we step in to fix them.

But as much as anything else, this little slogan serves to re-emphasize the dynastic nature of the race, as Hillary perceives it. Family on family, which is to say a Presidency that remains all in the families. Two families, to be exact.

Not exactly the sort of thing you want to stress in a race that will turn on the notion of change, we wouldn’t think.

But what do we know? We thought Dean was a lock.