Something quite unusual is happening to Hillary Rodham Clinton. She’s becoming popular.

In New York state, where she is the junior senator, her approval ratings are in the stratosphere. When she became senator, many sceptical New Yorkers — they’re not pushovers — were partly persuaded by the Republican campaign against her.

She was a carpetbagger; she was using New York as a springboard to get back to the White House (this time in her own right); she was a hyper- liberal who campaigned in the more conservative sections of upstate New York purely for cynical purposes. Yes, Hillary won election, but the reservations were there. In late 2002 a third of New Yorkers had an unfavourable view of her.

Last week that number had fallen to a fifth in a New York Times poll. Other polls, by Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, have also recorded a sharp drop in disapproval ratings over the past year.

More tellingly, her approval number is now 69% — an 11-point jump since 2002. That makes her even more popular than New York’s other senator, Charles Schumer, who just won re-election with 71%.

Washington has also noticed. Talk to Democrats in the capital city and you’ll find an astonishing consensus that the Democratic nomination in 2008 is now Hillary’s to lose.

How on earth did this come about? The answer is, I think, that Senator Clinton has finally escaped one of the critical drags on her national reputation. What many people disliked about her was what they perceived as her unreconstructed liberal politics and her use of her marriage to gain and wield political power.

But in 2005 Senator Clinton has recast herself in the public mind as a centrist and she has won election in her own right. That changes everything. Or perhaps more accurately it changes a lot.

Take two recent Hillary gambits. The first was a remarkable speech to pro-choice activists in New York. Clinton is a strong supporter of the constitutional right to a legal abortion and has in the past used these occasions to rally a key constituency.

This time she drew gasps from the crowd. She insisted that opponents of abortion were sincere in their religious faith and deserved a more respectful hearing from pro-choicers. She also declared that abortion itself was always an unfortunate event — and that the Democrats needed to commit themselves more firmly to reducing its prevalence.

The gist: “We can all recognise that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women. The fact is that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.”

So she reclaims the rhetoric of values that Republicans have so cannily deployed these past few years; she strives to occupy a middle ground on a very polarised subject; and she calls the pro-life bluff on access to contraception.

The anti-abortion forces are dominated by evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics. The last thing they want to get into is a debate on how contraception can be a check against unnecessary abortions — because they will split into Catholic and Protestant camps. And that’s exactly what Hillary has pushed them gently into. Advantage Clinton.