Not many things unite conservatives and Republicans these days. The libertarians seethe openly at the Christian right. The fiscal conservatives scowl at the compassionate free spenders of the Bush years. The foreign policy realists despise the Woodrow Wilson-like idealists who dragged them into Iraq.

Even the Christian right is split. The younger evangelical leaders are increasingly interested in questions of social justice and the environment. The current establishment, represented by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family organisation, regard Rudy Giuliani as beyond the pale. The old guard, Pat Robertson, has just endorsed the cross-dressing former mayor of New York to defeat what he called Islamic “blood lust”. Still others want a third party.

The primary race is, for orderly Republicans, in an extremely volatile flux. Mitt Romney has poured vast amounts of his own money to secure polling leads in New Hampshire and Iowa, but is still only at around 10% nationally. Fred Thompson’s campaign keeps puttering a few hundred feet above the ground. John McCain is loathed by many in the base, but paradoxically remains the most authentic and viable pro-life candidate in the race. And between them they have raised only a fraction of the large sums now acquired by the Democratic candidates.

So what can possibly bring them together? I asked this of that old war horse Patrick Buchanan a while back. Despite massive differences in social policy, Buchanan and I found ourselves in somewhat uncomfortable agreement about the sorry state of the American right. But he had hope in his heart. “There is one candidate who can truly still unite the party,” he said, a little Hibernian twinkle in his eye. “The only trouble is she’s running for the other side.”

For good or ill, Buchanan has a point. One of the remarkable aspects of the current race has been the way in which many on the right have been absolutely certain that Hillary Clinton will be the next president. In fact I know of no Republicans in Washing-ton who even entertain the idea that she won’t at least be the Democratic nominee. And there’s a strange insistence on this – despite some rough recent weeks for Clinton on the campaign trail, despite a dead heat between Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama in Iowa in the polls, and despite the fact that a freshman senator, Obama, has managed in a few months to rival her both in organisation and funding.

Part of the Republicans’ certainty is related, I think, to the fact that most of them actively and not too discreetly want Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. This is not because they think they know how to beat her. Most of the time they seem to think they can’t. Their appraisal of her political skills seems occasionally absurd. In the current conservative bible, National Review, two young Republican scribes characterise her campaign as near “flawless”. Her former bête noire Matt Drudge called her “Queen of the quarter” after a recent fundraising drive.

Among the neoconservatives there is obviously sympathy for her against the most decisively antiwar candidates, Obama and Edwards. Many publicly prefer her to the insurgent antiwar candidate in their own ranks, Texas congressman Ron Paul. Privately some neocons see her as an important substantive successor to Bush, perpetuating and retroactively legitimising the Iraq occupation. She did vote for it, after all, they tell themselves. And her constant attempt to stay to the right of her opponents in the primaries has led to the bizarre spectacle of some well known Republicans showering her with thinly veiled support on Fox News.

At the same time, of course, some of this support is self-interested. Over the past few months, in a divisive and dispiriting campaign on the fractured right, Clinton has become essential to Republican fundraising. Republican party direct mail is so skewed towards scaring their base voters about the wicked witch of New York state that the party’s coffers could run suddenly dry if Obama were to steal the nomination away from her. National Review, while lauding her campaign as brilliant, ran ads for a week recently begging for donations to its website in order to “stop Hillary”.

Giuliani cannot wait to run a brutal campaign against her, and tries to deploy her name in every debate. Online, Facebook’s page devoted entirely to stopping her exceeds the popularity of many Republican candidates – and appeals to a much more diverse and younger crowd.

There is simply something about her – and the murky relationship she has with her husband and former president – that clearly strikes some kind of deep nerve, not just in the heartland, but also in blue-state America where many loyal Democrats simply do not trust her. Around 50% of Americans still say they wouldn’t vote for her under any circumstances. And this unease is one of the last ways in which an exhausted and bankrupt Republican party can actually persuade its members to give it money and votes.

The more cynical Republicans even believe that a third Clinton term – if you count the two in the 1990s – would be good for their party. They don’t believe Clinton would lead to a major shift from the status quo. She’s far too cautious, they think, to pull out of Iraq and stigmatise the Republican occupation as unnecessary and a mistake. She’s too conventional to do anything but tinker with climate change. They know some kind of expansion of the healthcare welfare state is inevitable – and with Clinton they can score more political capital off it if it leads to unintended consequences.

So she does not threaten to alter the political landscape against Republicans too dramatically. And her political skills are nowhere near her husband’s. Some Republicans think one term of Hillary could undo all the horrific memories of two terms of Bush with respect to party identity and loyalty.

And in opposition to Clinton and a Democratic Congress the Republicans could engage in some healthy bloodletting, debate and regrouping, all the while confident that a Clinton presidency would mean a torrent of money into the party machine, a boon to conservative publishing and media, and a handy, reliable target against whom to direct all their ire. They can barely wait. Traffic for Drudge would soar. Ratings for Fox News would go through the roof. And it would be over soon, they assume.

They could be wrong, of course. Bill Clinton benefited in the end from Republican rage at him. His wife is a resilient if charm-free figure. Between them they have studied how to enlarge the power and role of government while soothing the middle classes with plenty of communitarian micro-measures. And the first woman president may also serve to cement a new era of Democratic dominance.

This, it seems, is a risk many Republicans are prepared to take. In this surprising primary campaign the woman they love to hate has turned out to be not so anathema to them after all.

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