My Yankee friend on Hillary: (1) Carving up the Kerry vote & (2) Some commentators speculate she won't seek reelection to the U.S. Senate in '06.

Excerpts from:

Carving up the Kerry vote

By Joan Vennochi
The Boston Globe
March 25, 2005

Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to dissect John Kerry's political base like a frog in a biology class.

Slice. [At a recent event, when asked about '08, of] course, she told her guests she is focusing on her 2006 Senate race.

Slice. Last week, Ann Lewis, a longtime Democratic activist who is now director of communications for Hillary Clinton's political action committee, [said] the Kerry campaign had ''a different message every two or three weeks.'' Lewis also told the newspaper that the Kerry campaign ''kept trying to rationally convince, to put a presidency together, line by line, plan by plan'' and people ''don't vote for plans, they vote for presidents.''

As she slices up the traditional Democratic base, Clinton is also reaching out to the middle, seeking common ground on contentious issues from war to abortion. It is an early, but impressive show of political gamesmanship. And it is all happening while the rest of the Democratic pack of presidential possibilities train their arrows mainly at President Bush and Republicans in Congress.

Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, who is also contemplating a presidential run, is also taking shots at Kerry, most recently in a New Yorker article, where he used the ''w'' word -- ''weak'' -- in connection with Kerry.

[While she is a rock star]in Massachusetts and New York, Clinton has a tougher audience elsewhere in the country. She still must prove the leftover baggage from the Clinton White House years won't trip her up.

Clinton and Kerry are both catching criticism for ducking the matter of Terri Schiavo, although they are hardly alone in that. The Senate passed the bill to bring her case back to court on a voice vote, with only three members present. That, however, is general election not Democratic primary fodder.

Some conservative commentators are beginning to speculate that Clinton will not seek reelection to the U.S. Senate in 2006. The theory, advanced by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, suggests that Clinton would not want to take votes in the Senate that could be used against her as a presidential candidate, which happened to Kerry during his presidential quest.

But at the moment, Clinton is concentrating on the base that lifted Kerry up, while letting others talk about the obstacles that blocked his path to the White House. Slice.