How’s this for a surprising turn in the presidential race? The candidate who has been toughest on Saudi Arabia in the past week hasn’t been Mayor Giuliani, Senator McCain, or Governor Romney, but Senator Clinton, the Democrat of New York. It was Mrs. Clinton who spoke out about a punishment of 200 lashes that a Saudi Arabian court gave to a 19-year-old woman victim of a gang rape by seven men. Said Mrs. Clinton, “This is an outrage. The Bush administration has refused to condemn the sentence and said it will not protest an internal Saudi decision. I urge President Bush to call on King Abdullah to cancel the ruling and drop all charges against this woman. As president I will once again make human rights an American priority around the world.”

Hats off to Mrs. Clinton for talking tough to the Saudis. The statement is even more newsworthy because the House of Saud has long been a patron of the Clintons. As The New York Sun reported in 2004, the Saudi royal family and three Saudi businessmen, Abdullah Al-Dabbagh, Nasser Al-Rashid, and Walid Juffali, each donated $1 million or more to the Clinton presidential library in Little Rock, Ark. President Clinton also helped secure millions of dollars in Saudi funds for the University of Arkansas.

As for the Bush administration, we have given great deference to the maneuvering required of a wartime leader, as Churchill so memorably explained of his dealings with Stalin in pursuit of Hitler. But the State Department hasn’t been covered with glory; here’s how it went at the State Department on Tuesday:

QUESTION: Can we return to the case of the Saudi rape victim and her punishment?

STATE DEPARTMENT SPOKESMAN SEAN McCORMACK: Sure.

QUESTION: Are you going to exert any pressure on the Saudi Government that this constitutes some kind of human rights violation?

MR. McCORMACK: Well, it is within — it is within their ability to take a look at this sentence and to make changes in it. I’m sure that, however, rests entirely in their hands. We have expressed our astonishment at such a sentence. I think that when you look at the crime and the fact that now the victim is punished, I think that causes a fair degree of surprise and astonishment. But it is within the power of the Saudi Government to take a look at the verdict and change it.

QUESTION: Why won’t the United States go further and condemn this outright?

MR. McCORMACK: Look, we’ve said — we’ve talked about it yesterday, we talked about it today. As we said, it’s within their power to change the verdict …

QUESTION: When you say, Sean, we have expressed our astonishment, does that — is that just from you from the podium or has a representation been made to the Saudi Government that —

MR. McCORMACK: I am not aware of any direct contact with the Saudis on this issue.

Even that was an improvement over Mr. McCormack’s performance on Monday, when the interaction went this way:

MR. McCORMACK: I can’t get involved in specific court cases in Saudi Arabia dealing with its own citizens, but most — I think most people here would be quite surprised to learn of the circumstances and then the punishment meted out.

QUESTION: Does that mean that the State Department is astonished by it, too?

MR. McCORMACK: I’ll leave the answer where it —

QUESTION: Well, what does ‘most people’ mean? I mean, most of who?

MR. McCORMACK: I would just leave — I don’t have anything else to offer. …

QUESTION: I’d like to go back to the Saudi case, actually. Just to be clear, you’re in no way condemning the sentence at all?

MR. McCORMACK: I have said what I’m going to say about it.

As for the Saudis, the quasi-governmental English-language Arab News reports that on Saturday, the Ministry of Justice issued a statement in response to press scrutiny about the case. The statement said the woman was first sentenced to 90 lashes because she “confessed to doing what God forbids.” It went on to say that the sentence was increased to 200 lashes and six months in prison because “they are the main cause of what happened, the woman and her companion, as they exposed themselves to this horrible crime and violated the rule of Shariah.”

Suffice it to say that if one percent of the attention devoted to Judge Mukasey’s feelings about water-boarding terrorist detainees were devoted to Saudi lashings of innocent teenage rape victims, it would be a sign that America was starting to rediscover the right priorities in the war in Islamist extremism.

In the meantime, we learn from the Brandeis professor and Pulitzer-prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer, in his book “Paul Revere’s Ride,” that one of the things that inspired the ire of the people of Massachusetts against the British in the run-up to Lexington and Concord was the sight of the British officers in Boston disciplining a soldier with 500 lashes on his bare back. Not only was it evidently cruel, but it violated the injunction of Deuteronomy chapter 25 verse 3, “He may be given up to forty lashes, but not more, lest being flogged further, to excess, your brother be degraded before your eyes.”

The Saudis have many sins — refusing to recognize Israel, funding Hamas, teaching hatred of Jews in mosques and schools, producing 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001. But sometimes to crystallize public opinion it takes a case like a sentence of 200 lashes doled out to a 19-year-old woman who has already been raped by seven men. There is a long time between now and the election, and there are a lot of other issues. But if Mrs. Clinton feels this one in her gut, there may yet be hope for her to emerge as a president who understands the war America is in and who is able to broaden the support for the war on a bipartisan basis with the American public.