A huge war chest and soaring ratings - Clinton looks beyond the Senate
With a win in New York certain, former first lady has rivals asking 'Can she be stopped in 2008?'
Ed Pilkington New York
Tuesday October 31, 2006
The Guardian One of the cliches that have grown, lichen-like, around Hillary Rodham Clinton over the past six years is that she is very hard working. Like many of the other Hillary cliches (she is ambitious, determined, ruthless) it sounds good but fails to do justice to the extraordinary political operator she has become. Take her schedule in the past five days: on Thursday night she celebrated her 59th birthday not with a candlelit dinner with Bill, but with a fundraiser for 1,100 guests that added $1m (£525,000) to her war chest; on Friday she was off to Syracuse in upstate New York where she campaigned for the Congressional Democrat candidate and spoke in support of biosciences; Saturday it was more campaigning for the candidate in Yonkers, outside New York City, and then back to Manhattan for a fundraiser for Bill's foundation; on Sunday she enjoyed a day of rest by giving a press conference on identity theft; and yesterday she was back on the stump in Rochester.
This nonstop whirlwind activity is the kind of background noise that has begun to give Republicans sleepless nights. Behind their immediate worry that they face a drubbing at the mid-term elections this time next week is an underlying deeper fear, that looks to 2008 and a Hillary presidential race.
"Hillary Clinton - the one that was so easy to dislike, even outright hate - won't be the one running for president," says the rightwing commentator John Podhoretz in his book dedicated entirely to the question: Can She Be Stopped? "She's older and wiser and cleverer - and therefore more dangerous. She's shown the most important quality a successful politician can have: she's learned how to adapt." And that's coming from her political enemy.
The short-term prospects for the junior senator from New York are straightforward enough: next Tuesday she will be handed a second six-year term with a whopping popular endorsement. She stands 65% to 30% in the polls against the hapless Republican, John Spencer.
But then what? With a resounding victory will Hillary stand for president? And if so, will she win?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/midterms2006/story/0,,1935594,00.html