So Hillary Rodham Clinton had a pretty good week. But so did the Republicans.

How can that be? Answer: As the junior senator from New York closes in on the Democratic nomination, Republican prospects for the general election are improving — because concern for national honor eclipses enthusiasm for national health insurance.

As Clinton demonstrated during her pentathlon of Sunday talk shows, she is an effective Q-and-A advocate for her new healthcare plan. And that probably guarantees her the Democratic nomination.

But Clinton is ahead of the Republican hopefuls, although not by much — just three points or so — against the leading Republican, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. And that's a surprisingly narrow margin, given the anti-Republican mood of the country; the best overall metrics of public opinion are President Bush's job-approval ratings and the "right track/wrong track" question — and both are 2-1 negative.

In such a situation, one might expect the Democrats to be on their way to another big victory in 2008.

But they don't seem to be so strong, at least not at the presidential level. How come? One answer is that while the voters were eager to punish the Republicans, they still don't entirely trust the Democrats.

Moreover, it would appear that many Democrats, including Clinton, have misread the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. In wartime, people tend to become morally conservative. They pray more, reflecting upon the sacrifice that others are making; they take patriotism and pride in the military more seriously.

Such sentiments were well expressed by David Lloyd George, the British prime minister during and after World War I: "The stern hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the everlasting things that matter for a nation — the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honour, Duty, Patriotism, and, clad in glittering white, the towering pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven."

Some might smirk during such a peroration, but more folks are likely to get a tear in their eye. And the gap between those who do and those who don't is a wide dividing line in politics.

That's why MoveOn.org's Sept. 10 advertisement attacking Gen. David Petraeus was so toxic — you just don't trash the military in wartime. Or put it this way: If you do, you're less likely to win an election. Don't take my word for it: Ask Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who, as an embittered young veteran, denounced the U.S. military on Capitol Hill back in 1971. The voters of red-state America never forgave him.

Last week, Clinton had a golden opportunity to undo some of the damage done to the Democrats by the MoveOn ad. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced a "sense of the Senate" resolution deploring attacks on Petraeus; yet Clinton still couldn't bring herself to vote for it, even as it passed the Senate 72-25, with nearly half of Senate Democrats voting "aye."

Clinton does not seem to understand that being commander-in-chief means sticking up for the troops first — and left-wing bloggers and billionaires second.

Yet the irony is that Clinton's health insurance plan is totally in keeping with the zeitgeist. In wartime, people want to salute the flag, but they also want to take better care of each other on the home front. The same Lloyd George was a leftist — a leftist patriot. For him, supporting the welfare state was equally a kind of patriotism. As he also said after the Great War, the task now was "to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in."

Of course, George also insisted on "Britain for the British" — more leftist communal patriotism. And that's yet another lesson of wartime politics that Clinton & Co. seem to be ignoring, as they shilly-shally around on the issues of immigration and border security.

James Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday. Reach him at pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.