Hillary in 2008? No Way!

By Joe Klein

I was having a fascinating conversation with a Middle East expert about the intricacies of Israel's disengagement from Gaza when I noticed the fellow growing impatient. "Enough of this," he said. "What about Hillary?" Welcome to my life. In airports, on checkout lines, at the doctor's office: "What about Hillary?" (Everywhere except in Washington, where everyone "knows" she's running.) I shrug, I try to avoid the question, I say it's too early--and it is. But you want to know too, right? So here it is. I like Senator Clinton. She has a wicked, ironic sense of humor (in private) and a great raucous belly laugh. She is smart and solid; she inspires tremendous loyalty among those who work for her. She is not quite as creative a policy thinker as her husband, but she easily masters difficult issues--her newfound grasp of military matters has impressed colleagues of both parties on the Armed Services Committee--and she is not even vaguely the left-wing harridan portrayed by the Precambrian right. I also think that a Clinton presidential candidacy in 2008 would be a disaster on many levels.

It would doubtless be a circus, a revisitation of the carnival ugliness that infested public life in the 1990s. Already there are blogs, websites and fund-raising campaigns dedicated to denigrating her. According to the New York Observer last week, these sites aren't getting much traffic--yet. But they will. I remember several conversations with Senator Clinton after her health-care plan was killed 10 years ago, and she was clearly pained--nonplussed by the quality of anger, the sheer hatred, directed against her. That experience would be a walk in the park compared to the vitriol if she ran for President. And while I'd love to see someone confront, and defeat, the free-range haters on the right, the last thing we need is a campaign that would polarize the nation even more. Indeed, we could use the exact opposite--a candidate who would inspire America's centrist majority to rise up against the extreme special interests in both parties.

Senator Clinton's supporters will say she is that candidate. And it is true that Clinton has far more leeway to run as a moderate than almost any other Democrat. Her repositioning on social issues has been overrated--she will have to do more than merely "respect" those who oppose abortion; she will have to propose creative compromises.

But Clinton is a judicious hawk on foreign policy and has learned her lessons on domestic-policy overreach. No less an expert than Newt Gingrich says, "Hillary has become one of the very few people who know what to do about health care." Still, she has some very real political limitations. She has a clenched, wary public presence, which won't work well in an electorate that prizes aw-shucks informality; she isn't a particularly warm or eloquent speaker, especially in front of large audiences. Any woman running for President will face a toughness conundrum: she will constantly have to prove her strength and be careful about showing her emotions. She won't have the luxury of, say, Bill Clinton's public sogginess. It will take a brilliant politician to create a credible feminine presidential style. So far, Senator Clinton hasn't shown the ease or creativity necessary to break the ultimate glass ceiling.

And then there is her husband, a one-man supermarket tabloid. A few weeks ago, the New York Post ran a photo of Bill Clinton leaving a local restaurant with an attractive woman, and the political-elite gossip hounds went berserk. Prominent Democrats--friends of the Clintons--were wringing their hands. "Do we really want to go through all that again?" one asked me. I don't know--should the sins of the husband be visited upon the wife? Absent any evidence, the former President should be considered guilty until proved really guilty. But there is another problem: What role would the big guy play in a Hillary Clinton Administration? Would he reform health care? Does anyone believe that a man with such a huge personality would have a less active role in her Administration than she had in his?

"You mean she can't run just because her husband was President?" a Hillary supporter yelled at me. "That is the most incredibly sexist thing I've ever heard." Yes and no. My guess is that Hillary Clinton would roll into Iowa with an incredible, Howard Dean-like head of steam in January 2008, and then the folks--yes, even the Democratic base--would give her a very close look and conclude that a Hillary presidency would be slightly dodgy. The Clinton line in 1992 was, Buy one, get one free. We've already had that co-presidency--for its full, constitutional eight years. What's more, I suspect there would be innate and appropriate populist resistance to this slouch toward monarchial democracy. There is something fundamentally un-American--and very European--about the Clintons and the Bushes trading the office every eight years, with stale, familiar corps of retainers, supporters and enemies. Bill Clinton was a good President. Hillary Clinton is a good Senator. But enough already. (And that goes for you too, Jeb.)