By Lee Cullum, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – Over and over I hear it: the only one who can save the fortunes of the Democratic Party next year is Hillary Rodham Clinton. With recent polls showing support for George W. Bush slipping and the junior senator from New York running a close race against him and well ahead of declared Democrats, the former First Lady soon will be faced with a difficult decision - to go or not to go in 2004.
Everybody agrees that Senator Clinton is plotting her way back to the White House, this time as the elected half of the two-for-one ticket. Most have assumed that she prefers to wait until 2008, when there will be no incumbent to impede her. But if Bush is vulnerable, can she afford to risk a victory by Dick Gephardt, Howard Dean, Joe Lieberman or someone else who could block her path to the nomination for eight years? Or if that Democratic president should lose to a Republican, it could mean a wait for Hillary until 2016, when she would be 69.
Clinton's preparation has been meticulous. Not only has she published her memoir (carefully crafted to sell on the hustings), one observer noted that she also has coopted her Republican colleagues in the Senate at every opportunity. With a staff that works persistently combing through reams of proposed legislation, looking for bills the senator might support, Clinton seizes the ones that suit her style - help for the spouses of slain service people, for example - and calls the senator in question, often as not from the opposite side of the aisle, to ask if she might co-sponsor the measure.
Moreover, she has stayed away from the talk shows - except for her book promotion - avoiding public stands that might later be a liability, and worked quietly to consolidate her position in New York and the capitol.
There are those who argue that Hillary Clinton would be fatally divisive as a candidate for president, and no doubt she would attract considerable hostility. But anyone who saw her speak in Switzerland only a few days after the Monica Lewinsky story broke knows how superbly effective she can be under the severest of pressure. I saw her again in September after her husband's grand jury testimony that August. He made a speech on the economy in New York, but it was Hillary who made the impression, working the crowd in a fever of concentrated, extroverted effort.
Hillary Clinton evokes fear, but she also evokes nostalgia for an era when the worst problem facing the nation was Monica Lewinsky. Those were crazy days, but the economy was good, and the only war we faced was a short encounter in Kosovo. A lot of this was due to luck, of course, and it may be that one of the Clintons is about to be lucky again. If so, she would be the first president from New York to be elected since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the seventh in our history, pushing New York ahead of Ohio as the most presidential of all the states (unless you count Benjamin Harrison, who was born in Ohio but worked in Indiana).
And, of course, she would be the first woman to lead the nation. I have long since believed she would never get back to the White House; that she would be wiser not to risk a bloody battle for president but instead to become the number one liberal voice of the Senate, succeeding Ted Kennedy. Now I'm not so sure of that, at all. A successful campaign for the presidency now seems completely possible for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The big question is when.
Lee Cullum is a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News and to KERA.
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