It was a good try, but she failed because, as boxing great Joe Louis once said about an opponent, "He can run, but he can't hide."

Clinton can run from Obama, but can't hide from the unholy mess he — and she — made.

As his first secretary of state, she was part of the team that botched the wars in Iraq and Syria and helped birth the Islamic terrorism now rattling the world. The slaughter in Paris and fresh threats against America make it urgent that she erase her fingerprints from the calamity. That's impossible, so she settled for putting some daylight between herself and Obama.

"Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS, but to defeat and destroy ISIS," she said.

Daylight, but not too much daylight. For as a Democrat trying to succeed him, she needs Obama's support, and especially the black vote, to win the general election.

So she was careful to invoke his name only when she agreed with him, as when she joined him in knocking down the straw man that the solution requires a large deployment of combat troops.