p President Hillary: can she do it?
Cover story
Andrew Stephen
Monday 29th August 2005


She's still insisting she won't run in 2008, but she will, writes Andrew Stephen. She is rapidly positioning herself to be the next Democratic presidential candidate. And, with a little help from her new friend Rupert Murdoch, she will win

Who is the latest darling of Rupert Murdoch? Who is now a committed supporter of the war in Iraq and even an advocate of the Patriot Act? Who is cosying up to right-wing Republicans such as Senators John McCain, Bill Frist and Lindsey Graham - and even to Newt Gingrich? Who, indeed, has just finished a "heartbreaking" working tour of Alaska with McCain to investigate the effects of global warming? And who has been seen jetting in to places such as Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket this summer, hand-in-hand with her husband but increasingly looking like the more commanding of the two?

Not so long ago, it would have seemed inconceivable that the answer to all these questions would be "Hillary Clinton". I have always insisted in these pages that she is brighter than her husband and that she would make a much better president, but I now feel confident to predict that - barring unforeseen circumstances - she will be the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008. That would make her at least odds-on favourite to become the 44th president of the United States, to say nothing of being the first woman to hold the most powerful office in the world.

Like every politician consumed with that very purpose in mind, Senator Clinton insists that she has made no decision to run, yet to say that she is spending this summer positioning herself to do just that is to put it mildly. She has a stroke of luck coming up, too. On 27 September, ABC Television will start screening Commander-in-Chief. The station plans to make the new series a prime-time hit at 9pm on Tuesday evenings; it will star Geena Davis as, yes, a wife and mother who becomes the US president. And that, I suspect, will start to get the nation accustomed to the idea of President Hillary moving into the White House, trailing alongside her First Gentleman Bill.

In the latest polls, Hillary is favoured by 39 per cent of Democrats as their 2008 candidate, compared with just 21 per cent for John Kerry, 15 for John Edwards and 5 for Senator Joe Biden, with the rest split among dark horses such as Evan Bayh, Mark Warner, Bill Richardson and even Al Gore. Although 49 per cent of the country as a whole say they are "not very likely" or "not at all likely" to vote for her to become president, 51 per cent responded that they would "likely" or "somewhat likely" cast their ballot for her - which would hand her a much clearer margin of victory than those for George W Bush in 2000 or last November.

This summer, too, she has been unfailingly in the news. It may be more than a thousand days to go to the 2008 election - and only ten months since the last - but the media are salivating at the prospect of an all-women contest between Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a not inconceivable but unlikely event. (In fact, my only prediction, and it is slightly light-hearted, is that the Republican candidate will be Dick Cheney - not least because he has always said flatly, over and over again, that he won't be.)

I will never forget the sight of Hillary and Bill sweeping in to midnight communion late at the Washington National Cathedral at Christmas in 2000, just before they left the White House. As though in anticipation of her newly emancipated role, Hillary assumed a magisterial swagger ahead of her lip-biting, sheepish husband - now shackled for ever, following Hillary's monumental public humiliation over Monica Lewinsky in 1998, to play the role of contrite and ever-supportive husband. He said a few days ago that he is not convinced Hillary will stand but that he will serve in her administration if she wishes - words which must have been music to the ears of his wife. Despite their forays together this summer, she spends most of the year at their house near the British embassy in Washington, DC, while he prefers their 19th-century farmhouse 265 miles north, in Chappaqua.

The first hurdle Hillary must overcome is to retake in the 2006 midterm elections the New York Senate seat that she won in 2000, though one of her confidantes tells me that she would be better off to concentrate on the presidential campaign. She has been helped, again, by the emergence of her most likely Republican opponent so far - Jeanine Pirro, a hyper-ambitious 54-year-old district attorney with an ex-con husband. Pirro made a comically inept start to her campaign this month when she lost her way in a speech announcing why she would be a better senator than Hillary, stumbling for an agonising 32 seconds in front of television cameras while she sought the page with the right words.



Yet, to me, perhaps the most telling bell-wether of the Hillary bandwagon is Rupert Murdoch, who snuggled up to Tony Blair (and vice versa, of course) when he realised in the mid-Nineties that the Tories were going down the chute and that Blair was going to become prime minister. Now, perhaps still seeing the future more cannily than most at 74, he is doing the same with Hillary. Not so long ago his New York Post depicted her as the most loathsome Beelzebub imaginable - not only a "liberal" demon, but female to boot. Last month, however, it switched course and hailed her as "the unlikely warrior" after she called for troop levels in Iraq to be stepped up.

Predictably, the right-wing propaganda machine - funded by the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife, a publisher who has devoted both his life and many of his millions to Clinton-hating - is already churning out tides of anti-Hillary books, in the expectation that they can destroy her character in the way that the so-called swiftboat veterans destroyed John Kerry's last year. The most vile so far claimed that their daughter, Chelsea, was conceived when Bill raped Hillary. You would expect the New York Post and ratings-dominant Fox News Channel to go to town on such filth and on another upcoming muckraking book by Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's former poll adviser, but Murdoch's media are suddenly being conspicuously quiet in their Hillary-bashing.

By the end of June, Senator Clinton had raised $12.6m for her New York campaign next year; a Quinnipiac University poll has her leading Pirro by 63 to 29 per cent - though, whoever Clinton's Republican opponent proves to be, that margin will dramatically narrow. Democrats claim that Pirro's main role is to bloody her up for '08, but the current mantra is that Hil-lary is merely using the voters of New York to further her longer-term campaign for the presidency. In terms of name recognition, Hillary Clinton has it all - having become, I reckon, second only to Lady Diana as the most media-scrutinised woman in history.

As Hillary's profile becomes even higher and Geena Davis's fictional female president seeps further into the consciousness of America's masses, we can expect to see even more desperate demonisation of her character: that she is not only a lesbian but also immoral and a philanderer (that she had an affair with Vince Foster, the Clinton aide who committed suicide in 1993); that she is a Wellesley-educated, man-hating feminist who prospered in the anti-America Sixties (she is 57) and who also promoted healthcare reform, aka, horror of horrors, "socialised medicine".

This is not forgetting wild claims that the Clintons engaged in drug trafficking, extortion, bribery, tax evasion, fraud and murder. Even some parts of the mainstream media have accused them of all these things, at one time or another. The "vast right-wing conspiracy" against them that Hillary famously blamed for pillorying her husband over the Lewinsky affair, before she discovered the truth, does in fact exist; and its adherents see anybody to the left of them as being, by definition, flawed in personal character.



That is why Hillary Clinton is busily cavorting with right-wing populists such as McCain, a Republican who hates George W Bush even more than she does and who will himself be a frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2008, when he will be 72. Clinton v McCain, indeed, is more likely than Clinton v Rice. Trying to counteract the image of her as a wildly bombastic lefty explains why Hillary is tacking frantically towards the centre right, not just on Iraq but also on social issues such as gay marriage (she is against); moreover, she is accen-tuating her (genuinely devout) Methodism and her (more doubtful) devotion to her husband.

The obstacles, however, are not all political. Some are personal, too. She can bring out the worst in both men and women, perhaps because so many - especially, it seems, those on the Republican side - fear a powerful and intelligent woman. In the words of Sally Quinn, the social chronicler of Washington and wife of Ben Bradlee, the former Washington Post editor, "there's just something about her that pisses people off". She can be relaxed and witty in private but is frosty in public, with little of the easy but superficial matiness so exemplified by her husband. The American media have adjudged her a polarising figure, and what the mainstream media ordain here so often proves self-fulfilling.

This summer, a record 57 per cent of the American public say they have a "favourable" image of Hillary. "Hillary Clinton for President 2008" badges are selling like hot cakes for $2.99, mouse mats for $16.99. In the first half of the 20th century Edith Wilson, wife of Woodrow Wilson, in effect took over as US president (unknown to the public) when Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919; Eleanor Roosevelt was already acting as the political ears and eyes of FDR when he started to initiate the New Deal 15 years later. However, both women had to assume presidential power by back-door subterfuge. Hillary Clinton is poised to rise not so much because of her husband, but in spite of him.

It has been widely reported in the press that the first woman to have stood in an American presidential election was Geraldine Ferraro, Walter Mondale's vice-presidential running mate in the election that produced the disastrous Reagan landslide of 1984. In fact, that distinction belongs to Victoria Claflin Woodhull, a flamboyant suffragette and early advocate of free love who ran for the presidency itself in 1872, but fled to exile in England five years later. Records of her candidacy have been lost in the mists of time. But Hillary, whose defining moment came when she suffered those gross personal and political abasements in the White House seven years ago, has been meti-culously planning her own triumphal return there ever since.

Besides, Woodhull never had the support of Rupert Murdoch, and a multibillion-dollar worldwide media empire that always ruthlessly pursues and usually wins whatever it perceives to be in its best interests. Now, however, it seems a woman called Hillary Rodham Clinton finally does.



Ten things you might not know about Hillary Clinton

- Her great-grandfather came from Pembroke

- Bill Clinton first proposed to her by Ennerdale Water in the Lake District in 1973, when she said no

- Her Yale Law School thesis was on the rights of children

- She was originally a Republican, changing her loyalties after the murder of Martin Luther King

- She sat on the board of Wal-Mart for six years, starting 1986

- She is a lifelong practising Methodist

- She won a Grammy for her recording of her book It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us

- She was paid a record $8m advance to write her memoirs

- Her high-school nickname was Sister Frigidaire

- In 1978-79 she made $100,000 trading in cattle futures
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.
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