With an eye on '08, Hillary is reinventing herself. Have you noticed how the press is so accomodating? Back off press; let us choose our candidate.

What’s Hillary Up To?
The former first lady is frustrating the right by proving different from the caricature they made of her

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
March 11, 2005

Hillary Clinton is keeping unusual company these days. She was in Iraq with John McCain. She cosponsors legislation with South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was one of the House managers pressing for her husband’s impeachment. And this week, she stood shoulder to shoulder with two of the Senate’s most right-wing members, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, to introduce a bill to examine the impact of the dreaded evil media on children, the kind of legislation that normally sends shivers down every liberal spine.

What’s Hillary up to? She’s laying the groundwork for a presidential run in ’08, and she’s paying attention to the voters. Postelection focus groups revealed that what concerns parents is not the Jerry Falwell agenda of opposing gay marriage but how to raise children in a sex-and-violence-soaked culture. Hillary is not a newcomer to the issue. As First Lady, she sponsored a children’s television summit at the White House, and she was a big proponent of the V-chip to screen out unwelcome programming. In her book, “It Takes a Village,” she has a chapter called, “Seeing Is Believing,” where she blames the deadening effect of television for contributing to the alienation of young people.

Republicans ridiculed her book, accusing her of wanting to replace families with government, but now that media have exploded onto the Internet and spun off games like Grand Theft Auto, they’re with Hillary looking for a heavier federal hand. Keeping company with Hillary is frustrating for the right because she’s proving to be something different from the caricature they made of her. “She’s having a rebirth,” says Marshall Wittmann, a former McCain staffer who’s now with the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference. More than any other Democrat eyeing the presidency, Hillary understands the cultural weakness of the party. Her recent comments on wanting to find common ground on abortion and her appearance at a press conference with such avatars of the right as Santorum and Brownback show she has absorbed the lesson of the ’04 election more systematically than anyone else.

At a recent informal dinner with members of Congress, a reporter declared Hillary “the nominee in waiting.” He compared her to Ronald Reagan circa 1978, when the Eastern elite of the political press said nobody would elect an aging B-movie actor with orange hair as president. Today’s cognoscenti think Hillary is too polarizing, that she could win the nomination but never the presidency. Still, a consensus is emerging that Hillary Clinton is the Democrats’ likely candidate and that Republicans are whistling Dixie if they think she’d be a pushover. Imagine Bill Clinton once again rattling around the White House “doing God knows what” in the words of one of the dinner attendees. But Clinton himself has become more of a beloved figure. His role in tsunami relief combined with his illness allows the American people to see him in a different light.

A presidential race eventually comes down to two people, and the Republicans don’t have an obvious candidate to beat Hillary in ’08. Senate Leader Bill Frist is the putative front runner, but his record as leader is weak, and he doesn’t generate much excitement or loyalty among party activists. “He’d make a very fine cabinet secretary,” observes a conservative Republican congressman from California. Frist doesn’t have what’s called “big room charisma.” He does OK in a small group. He’s earnest and accomplished and has a nice bedside manner, but put him in front of a large crowd, and he’s charismatically challenged.

It’s widely assumed that Bush is not grooming anybody to succeed him. But that judgment could be misplaced. Watching Condoleezza Rice on the world stage last month made people look at her in a different light. She glowed with confidence. Maybe Bush is grooming somebody right under our eyes, and it’s Condi. It’s premature to draw conclusions, but clearly she’s evolved from the staff position she held at the White House to a personage in her own right. Depending on the state of the world three years from now, she has the potential to be at the top of the ticket. The current take on Condi is that any Republican paired with her in the second spot would double the GOP’s share of the African-American vote from 10 percent to 20 percent and win the election. If the Republicans make further inroads in the African-American community, it will be impossible for a Democrat to win the White House.

The question for any woman seeking the presidency in the post-9/11 era is whether she can be a credible commander in chief. Rice has the resume, but can she stare down the North Koreans and the mullahs in Iran? Clinton gets rave reviews from Republicans for her work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She is confounding them on a daily basis by defying the caricature they created. The lamp-throwing, cursing, calculating Lady Macbeth is gone, if she ever really existed.