According to syndicated columnist George Will, in his latest work, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did not display any overconfidence when it directed its recent attacks on Barack Obama.

Rather, her campaign’s rhetorical assault was a response to a prominent Barack Obama contributor saying rude things about her. But her overreaction was, nevertheless, one of several recent developments that have lent clarity to the Democratic contest in its early stages.

Former President Bill Clinton has said, regarding presidential candidates, that Republicans fall in line and Democrats fall in love. Which explains the Clinton campaign’s palpable panic:

Indeed, Democrats have fallen in love. Just not with her.

Bill Clinton was right in his assessment. Republicans tend to follow a very orderly pattern when choosing their nominee. They nominate the next person in line: Vice President Richard Nixon, not Nelson Rockefeller, to follow Dwight Eisenhower in 1960; Vice President George H.W. Bush, not Bob Dole, to follow Ronald Reagan in 1988; Dole in 1996; Even George W. Bush, whose dynastic lineage propelled him past Sen. John McCain in 2000.

Thus, there is a Republican tinge to Hillary Clinton’s campaign: She is next in line. That fact - combined with the Clintons’ fundraising prowess, combined with the Clintons’ earned reputation for ferocity - is supposed to impart to her an aura of inevitability.

But this may backfire on Hillary because this kind of aura annoys voters by telling them that they really have no choice. When voters get the feeling something is inevitable, they may wish to make something else happen, to defeat boredom or prove their own free will.

Democrats have (or had) many interesting candidates, too. Governors often are the most plausible candidates to be country’s chief executive, and only one remains in the Democratic race - New Mexico’s Bill Richardson.

Three former governors - Virginia’s Mark Warner, Indiana’s Evan Bayh, and Iowa’s Tom Vilsack - left the race before it even got rolling.

Vilsack said the demise of his candidacy was determined by “money and only money.” There were reasons, of course, both political and ideological, why he couldn’t find buyers for what he was selling. Nevertheless, his demise here in the dawn of the 2008 campaign has triggered the usual questions about the role of money in politics.

Candidates do have to spend too much time raising money, but only because the government, by banning large campaign contributions, has transformed a huge American surplus - money - into an artificial scarcity. The government began to do this for anti-competitive purposes.

The modern drive for campaign finance reform is usually said to have been initiated by Democrats in response to Watergate. Democrats did get this ball rolling, but before Watergate, in response to their traumas of 1968.

That same year, Sen. Gene McCarthy’s anti-Vietnam insurgency disturbed the Democratic Party equilibrium by mounting a challenge to the renomination of President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was able to do so because a few wealthy people gave him large contributions.

Democrats were also similarly alarmed by Alabama governor George Wallace’s success in 1968, and they mistakenly assumed that Wallace, too, was largely funded by a few very large contributions.

According to John Samples of the Cato Institute, congressional Democrats began the process that culminated in criminalizing large contributions - the kind that can give long-shot candidates, such as Vilsack, a chance to become competitive.

Yes, the initial aim of campaign “reforms” was less the proclaimed purpose of combating corruption or “the appearance” thereof than it was to impede the entry of inconvenient candidates into presidential campaigns.

In that sense, campaign reform is a government program that has actually worked, unfortunately.