She’s running. You can tell that by the opposition. A newly formed political action committee to derail Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate campaign is already in full swing, and has the cheerfully misogynistic name of Stop Her Now.
You can also tell it from her supporters. The Nation, the hard-left magazine, just ran a long story persuading lefties to get over their qualms and learn to love the former first lady. You can tell it from her travels. What was she doing in Austin, Houston, and Dallas in Texas last March? Raising close to $500,000 for campaign work.
You can tell it from what she’s saying: supporting the Iraq war and touring military installations, reaching out to anti-abortion advocates, keeping a low profile on the filibuster kerfuffle, arguing that religious people should be able to “live out their faith in the public square”.
And you can tell it from what she’s not saying. Last week her advisers let The Washington Post know that if she is re-elected to the Senate next year, she will not pledge to serve a full term without running for president.
I can’t find a single Democrat of my acquaintance who doesn’t believe the Democratic nomination is hers to lose in 2008. A Gallup poll two weeks ago found that her support is at an all-time high nationally: 29% said they would be “very likely” to vote for her in 2008, 24% were “somewhat likely”. There’s a block of voters — 39% — who say they aren’t at all likely to vote for her. But that’s down from 44% two years ago. Perhaps more powerful a predictor, the online betting market Intrade.com, has her leading all her rivals for the Democratic nomination by 4-1.
A couple of things have broken in her favour. The first is that she has proved herself a capable senator. With close to 70% approval ratings in New York state, she has been particularly adept at reaching out to rural voters in the northern parts of her constituency.
Those voters are much more like Midwesterners than they are the residents of the Upper East Side of Manhattan — and are a test case of how Democratic candidates can appeal to the swing voters George Bush won in 2004. She speaks about practical issues — from healthcare to jobs and the needs of children. She does all this in decidedly non-ideological language. And she has formed a strange alliance with, of all people, Newt Gingrich, in formulating practical steps to tackle America ’s expensive, inequitable but high-quality health system.
She has even joined forces with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, part of the far right, in speaking about the difficulty of shielding children from degrading images on television or the internet.
The second piece of good fortune has been the behaviour of the Republican Congress. Its obsession with ideological issues — such as the Terri Schiavo case, stem cell research, or civil marriage for gay couples — has helped her own pragmatism to stand out.
It has also given her an opportunity to appear more credible in the political centre. Here’s her pitch to suburban voters in New York state: “What I see happening in Washington is a concerted effort by the administration and the leadership in Congress to really create absolute power. They want to control the judiciary so they can have all three branches of government. I really don’t care what party you are — that’s not in the American tradition . . . Right now young men and women are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for the America we revere.
“And that is a country where nobody has all the answers — and nobody should have all the power . . . We all need to stand up for what made America great — what created a wonderful set of values that we revere, that we exported and tried to really inculcate in people around the world.”
She appeals to Republicans and Democrats. She frames her vision in terms of restraining untrammelled power rather than wielding it (deflecting fears of her megalomania). And she does it all in deeply patriotic language, of a kind the Democrats have had a hard time adopting for quite a while.
Whether it is constant reporting of torture and abuse by the military, sex and violence on television, or the notion that the United States is no longer respected around the world — voters are open to hearing someone talk about restoring an older kind of America.
The social security debate has played into her hands. She has deftly painted President Bush’s reform plan as an attempt to undo the safety net established by FDR. So she seems a traditionalist and the president a radical.
None of this would work if she were regarded as soft on terror or weak on national security. But she has devoted herself to studying military policy as a member of the Senate armed services committee; and, critically, she voted for the war in Iraq and has been circumspect about criticising the conduct of the campaign. Americans, of course, are not used to the conflation of a woman with a war leader. But it’s a potent one, as Margaret Thatcher found out to her advantage.
There is, of course, the question of her husband. Divorce won’t happen. But a first husband who is also a former president could be a disaster. The Republican attack machine will try to remind voters of the scandals of the 1990s. But in the wake of 9/11, it may not work. For some the 1990s even seem worthy of some nostalgia. And Hillary’s doggedness through all of that slime has dulled the lethalness of this vulnerability.
That doesn’t mean it won’t still hurt her; or that she can’t still evoke almost pathological fury on the right. But that fury was most effective when it seemed to come from an excluded group, the beleaguered “angry white men” of the last decade. Now that Republicans control every branch of government, too brutal an assault on Hillary might backfire.
It’s too early, of course, to say anything with much conviction about the future. But you can confidently say that Hillary has prepared herself with a discipline and intelligence that has prompted some of her critics, including me, to take another look. She has the money, she has the beginnings of a centrist appeal, she’ll have a Democratic party desperate to win back the White House. Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton?
In the strange nepotism that has always bedevilled American politics weirder things have happened.
