MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL...

Don't Count Hillary Out (Richard Reeves, August 27 2003, Hartford Courant)

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 has changed totally in the past few weeks. At the beginning of the summer, Hillary could comfortably deny having national presidential ambitions because the comfortable conventional wisdom was that it didn't really matter who the Democratic candidate would be, because President Bush had a lock on re-election. (I'm sure that the thought has never crossed her mind that it would be better for her if Bush won in 2004, leaving her a clear field in 2008.)

But now! With Bush looking more vulnerable because there are not enough jobs at home and not enough peace abroad, Sen. Clinton has to check some numbers. If a Democrat, say Kerry, defeats Bush next November and then runs for re-election in 2008, then her next chance to run would probably be in 2012, when she will be 65 years old. And who knows what the world will look like then?

For the record, our new senator has said she was not interested in the presidency. So has former Vice President Al Gore, who might be rethinking his own future. Not for the record, though, Hillary and her advisers, including her husband the ex-president, her money men and pollsters, will meet shortly after Labor Day - Sept. 6, I hear - to discuss whether she should go for it. It is a decision that has to be made earlier rather than later because of November and December filing deadlines for the early primary elections that will almost certainly (and very quickly) identify the 2004 Democratic nominee.

We've been saying for two and a half years now that she's going to run in '04 and see nothing to make us change our minds. In politics if you want to run for president and the nomination is yours for the taking, you go for it. The interesting thing about the dynamics of the race is that the rest of the field has pursued the Party's Left so hard that, with a pliant media, she can probably get away with portraying herself as the Center-Right candidate of the lot. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2003 9:03 PM