Note to Hillary: The plastic sheeting and duct tape crowd is NOT going to vote for you

In the closing days before the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton, just like Rudy Giuliani, wants you to know that only she can keep you safe from the boogeyman:

Eldridge, Iowa - Barack Obama and John Edwards might want to change the world. But Hillary Clinton wants to protect you against it.

That's the unmistakable message that Senator Clinton is pounding out in this final phase of the campaign to capture the Iowa caucuses. In a world brimming with danger and uncertainty, she argues as she blitzes the Hawkeye State, there's no time to waste daydreaming about pie-in-the-sky promises of reform.

Instead, the American people must choose a leader ready to immediately start fixing the problems that already exist and one who is immediately ready to face the inevitable and "unpredictable" crises looming right over the horizon. And that would be Clinton.

"We know some of the challenges that await the next president," Clinton told a packed crowd at a junior high school Saturday morning. "But no matter how much we know, we can't possibly anticipate all the problems."

The razzamatazz cheerleading, sloganeering style that punctuated her earlier campaign events has now been replaced by a sedate, somber, even grave tone coming from the podium. Clinton never raised her voice, never elevated the mood, and at times sounded like a concerned, responsible parent telling the kids that something terrible was taking place outside the door but not to worry because Mom and Dad - or in this case Hill and Bill- would take care of it.

Becoming president, she said in a hushed tone, is "an awesome responsibility. And it was thrown into relief with the events last Thursday with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto."

This may come as a surprise to the conservatives who have spent the last six years in a state of pee-in-your-pants terror that Islamic terrorists are plotting to kill us every single day, but those of us who are going about our lives are not uncognizant of the very real dangers in the world today. And neither are John Edwards and Barack Obama. But because nothing else has seemed to work, Hillary Clinton is spending the final days leading up to Iowa trying to tap the reptilian brain in Iowa voters by taking a page from the Republican playbook and playing the fear card. And it's a distasteful sight.

Hillary'c campaign has played right into everything that those of us who will not vote for have found repulsive all along -- that every move she makes, every statement out of her mouth, comes not from a place of conviction but from whatever the focus groups, polls, and Washington pundits say will work on any given day. One minute she's being America's Mother. The next she's "the put upon girl being beaten up by the Big Mean Men. Then she's ripping off John Edwards' health care plan. Now she's decided to try to out-Giuliani Giuliani.

When Bill Clinton was president, I thought the obsession with Hillary's ever-changing hairstyles was petty, Mean Grrlz of the Press bullshit. But perhaps they were on to something, but that something had nothing to do with her hair. It has to do with the reason I can't vote for: because I don't know who the hell she is. I don't know what she stands for. I don't trust her to end the Iraq war. I don't trust her to not bomb Iran and follow a neocon foreign policy. I don't trust her to not negotiate away reproductive freedom. I don't get the sense that there are any values she feels strongly enough about to take the heat when the Republicans and the Washington press corps line up against her.

We've seen many Hillarys during this campaign. But who the hell is she?