The Once and Future President

...Making it all the sweeter is control of her namesake HILLPAC, a phenomenally successful political action committee engorged with funds often gathered at Whitehaven, the Embassy Row mansionette that has become the functional equivalent of the Lincoln bedroom—a place to rub elbows with Bill and Hillary for a few thousand dollars...

...It achieves publicly what she had already accomplished among her Senate colleagues—rebranding "Hillary" as a serious product in her own right...

...Hillary has internalized Dick Morris's triangulation strategy, but that comes with a price...

...The old Hillary was a political novice who endangered her husband's future by running the Democratic health-care agenda into the ground (and this after having made a mess of his education agenda in Little Rock...

...Nor is she likely to forget that 59 percent of New Yorkers polled want her to stay in the Senate and forego a 2004 presidential bid...

...But since her election to the Senate, there has been but a single public display of the old Hillary, in September 2001, when the cameras caught her sitting in the gallery listening to President Bush declare war on terrorism...

...But now look at what they've done...

...Hillary all but refers to the "buy one, get one free" administration, of which she was once famously considered to be a "co-president?' When she talks of "bringing America back?' she really means bringing back a Clinton presidency...

...Hillary, attuned to political danger like a swallow to a distant storm, appears often with Sharpton and is obviously out to keep him appeased...

...I see cameras— she must be here...

...Eliot Spitzer, the superambitious New York attorney general and Wall Street bete noir, could be another problem...

...It will make a strong skeletal organization for 2008...

...Now here he was in Lake Placid, at one of those regional events that serve as national touchstones for ambitious Democrats...

...Together, these elements reinforce each other, forming the most formidable power base in Washington after that of Bush & Co...

...She now occupies key committees, controls choke points between the outside world of donors and the inside world of Senate policy, and oversees minor soft money kingdoms in which she can nurture a small army of talented loyalists...

...The think tank will provide policy guidance, while the media effort echoes those ideas...

...Cross her and you might not get that coveted post on, say, Foreign Relations...

...But Hillary is anticipating the politics of 2008, when the first baby boomers approach retirement and the mounting pressure of entitlement spending begins wringing out every budget item save defense...

...The sarcasm fairly drips...

...she is the true believer...

...Well, we don't need that much of a surplus, so we can afford this extremely large tax cut, because we believe in supply-side economics, and when we slash our revenues we get more revenues.' We've heard this before...

...You can pick a good press secretary any time—all you need is the right chemistry...

...The book serves two purposes...

...She has one of the best on the Hill, right up there with Kennedy and Moynihan...

...says Bill Dal Col, the veteran Kemp and Forbes strategist who mounted a heroic effort to revive Rep...

...I don't think she sees herself as having spent enough time in the vineyard to make wine?' he says...

...Hillary is mostly seen in big media markets like Rochester and Syracuse, hometown to Terry McAuliffe, head of the Democratic National Committee...

...We were on the road to making our economy strong—far into the future?' Of course, there had to be adjustments—"that's part of the business cycle...

...In Georgia, you worry about the F-22 and C-130s...

...Indeed, as a result now of all the careful work, it almost seems indecorous to recall the furor over bartered pardons and stolen furniture...

...And HILLPAC invests effectively...

...Hillary is also part of the drive to establish an echo chamber in the Democratic media, radio, and other media networks, to counter Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the conservative talk-show phenomena...

...Howard Dean arrive in Lake Placid for a little presidential primary dustup, the conference has already been leached of energy and significance...

...The new Hillary does everything right...

...Visiting upstate New York's Fort Drum with President Bush to personally thank the 10th Mountain Division for its service in Afghanistan is hardly what one expects of someone schooled by Saul Alinsky and Marian Wright Edelman...

...Marine Corps...

...There is nothing minor about Hillary's position, which gives her a powerful lash in approving committee assignments...

...The appointment so rankled Schumer, her nominal senior, that Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle had to appease him with a special (read: minor) leadership post of "regional whip...

...Our second four years are going to have to be stronger than our first?' Dal Col says...

...She rolled eyes, talked with her colleagues and, in the words of columnist Michelle Malkin, "fidgeted like a five-year-old at an opera...

...From quiet, effective committee drudge, Hillary has emerged now as the Democratic Party's most effective critic of President Bush...

...She's going to wait for the Democrats' implosion?' Dal Col agrees...

...The rumor, of course, pertained to the old Hillary, the one who as First Lady failed to acknowledge her ghostwriter's contribution to It Takes A Village, reaping horrible advance publicity...

...She's too smart to contest anyone in a primary," Kawior predicts...

...From the formal beginning of her independent political career, through 2002, her total raised was more than $31 million...

...As a freshmen senator, she arrived on Capitol Hill full of solicitude, understanding that her peers would be more impressed by sweat than celebrity, and winning praise as an earnest student of the Senate's arcane rules and knotty issues...

...As First Lady cum health-care reformer, Hillary first raised suspicions by crafting an absurdly complex policy in secret meetings, then offended the mandarins of the Hill with her patronizing drop-bys...

...But Spitzer has every interest in facilitating her re-election...

...She is hectoring, pitch rising to the sarcastic when she imitates the despised Republicans: "What did they do...

...Even more goes to the care and feeding of staff, office, travel, direct mail, and political consultants, allowing her to capture and keep the best operators in the Democratic Party...

...But 2008 is a different matter...

...During the 2002 election cycle, she was the Senate's top donor, disbursing more than $1 million to other political action committees and candidates (including more than one hundred members of Congress...

...But it's a good combination—to be engaged in homeland security and national security...

...In person, it had all the subtlety of raked knuckles across the face of George W. Bush, formerly of the Texas Air National Guard...

...The Steering Committee gives her the ability to crack the whip on colleagues, while HILLPAC gives her softer tools of influence...

...New York and Armed Services—it's not a natural fit," says a prominent former Pentagon official who frequently deals with the committee...

...These are, after all, predominantly white, middle-class voters who feel that the game of life is rigged, that they have been cheated by downstate swindles and Washington shenanigans, and that the government owes them some payback...

...She knows "what it takes to keeping a great country great," and so she is astonished that this "administration is turning its back on the future...

...Hillary's more genuine...

...George Pataki taking her on...

...Consider the differences...

...While Republicans tend to see the American people as suburban North Dallas, Hillary has dug deeper, discovering rich veins of resentment in discarded parts of Middle America...

...Seen from this perspective, Living History was just the icing on a very substantial cake...

...These are Hillary's people...

...Not since Lyndon Baines Johnson has a freshman senator managed to find and manipulate so many levers of power...

...Another obvious danger would be overheating on publicity and jumping into the presidential race too soon...

...This is no ordinary political speech—it is the early stump speech of a former president seeking to return to office...

...In Virginia, you worry about Norfolk and sea power...

...Her voice rose in modulated degrees toward outrage...

...None of the presidential candidates can come close...

...Though those numbers have tightened considerably, Bush has already proven that he's now a contender for New York state...

...You have to wonder: what is really happening here...

...One achievement above all others reveals the depth of her ambition to be president: She is the first New Yorker to be appointed to Armed Services since the committee was formed in 1947...

...From the once and future president, it will sound almost Churchillian...

...A Quinnipiac poll earlier this year showed her blowing away the entire slate of would-be Democratic candidates, with four-to-one margins over titular frontrunners Kerry and Dean...

...She's here, she's here...

...She is not likely to forget that this same Quinnipiac poll showed that President Bush would beat her 52 percent to 41 percent in a hypothetical matchup...

...These are the downsized, the RIF-fed, the fed-up...

...If they keep it up, soon we will all be living history...

...The former president's statement was generally seen as an idle musing, not as a serious proposal...

...The point is the likelihood that well before 2008, something terrible will once again happen in America—and then Hillary Clinton will then be able to say, I told you so, now let me get things back on track From an ordinary politician, this may sound like a petty message...

...Hillary understands that the elementary school teacher or dairy farmer will not like the sound of that...

...She didn't like that, but she had to expect it...

...But Hillary Clinton creates advantage by turning the rules upside down...

...Like Ronald Reagan, Hillary enjoys a comfort level with her party's base that is secure enough to let her explore the center...

...As usual, he nailed the truth to the wall, but the new Hillary is a fresh phenomenon...

...Hillary is flatly incompetent?' Kelly was widely and fairly regarded as the most perceptive journalist of the Clinton years...

...Rudy Giuliani...

...She can't finish the book," one agent told me...

...Schumer seems genuinely grateful to Upstate for his election and is a regular visitor to the most remote places...

...Moreover, her version of budget politics may be intellectually disingenuous, but it's politically smart...

...The Clintons are on a roll...

...promoting her in Washington is his surest way of keeping her out of his way in Albany...

...New York Republicans talk about Gov...

...Certain offices have strong reputations for quality staff," says one high-ranking Senate Democratic aide...

...The only other New York Democrat with the star power and fund-raising potential to rival hers, he is already holding "Spitzer 2006" events in a transparent bid for Pataki's governor's seat...

...He's becoming the number-one black man in America," Stone says...

...How's this for perfect Clintonian equipoise: "[Al unilateral attack, while it cannot be ruled out, on the present facts is not a good option...

...Are there any reasons to believe she will not go all the way...

...Another part of the empire is a liberal think tank, the American Majority Institute, a counterpart to the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation...

...John Podesta, her husband's former chief of staff, is spearheading the softmoney drive to establish a place where the best policy minds in the Democratic Party can plan the embryonic stages of her presidential race and the policies of the next Clinton administration...

...But it served its purpose...

...If he decides to run as an independent for the Senate, she's sunk...

...In just two years, she has become the single most influential Democrat in the United States Senate...

...The son of a Brooklyn exterminator, Schumer became a high school valedictorian, shined on the TV quiz show "It's Academic," earned two degrees from Harvard, became—at twenty-three years old—one of the youngest members of the New York State Assembly since Theodore Roosevelt, was elected to Congress by twenty-nine, and in his late forties finally rose to become the senior senator from the Empire State...

...A year later he added this obituary: "And while Clinton is brilliant at performance politics, Gore is barely competent...

...There is always the chance that the woman Michael Kelly called the "Contessa de Greed" with her "money-grubbing, power-abusing, cheese-ridden acts" will revert to form...

...Which is why so many shrewd observers of Washington are saying that after Bush 43, she is destined to become Clinton 44...

...she made a ham-fisted mess of her one formal attempt to craft national policy, the 1993 healthcare reform...

...Still, many veteran Hillary-watchers don't believe she'll jump...

...Upstate New York Democrats are not shy about comparing Chuck "the Brooklyn farmer" Schumer with Hillary...

...The rebranded Hillary has not one but several acknowledged ghostwriters, who got her book out just in time to beat Harry Potter to the bookstores...

...Second, it neatly tucks away all those inconvenient moments from the naughty past...

...Even in such venues, Hillary is the epicenter for the same relentless, unblinking coverage given to a United States president at a high-stakes Middle East peace conference...

...she asks again, then adds darkly: "There is another agenda at work...

...Her home state Senate colleague presents a more subtle problem for her—an unflattering contrast...

...She'll play with it, run with it, dance with it—but Hillary is far too smart to get sucked into the vortex?' Dal Col says...

...she appears to regard power, in her case, as something approaching a divine right...

...One obvious hurdle is re-election to the Senate in 2006...

...But under the previous administration, she says, "we had the resources in hand to deal with the problems everyone knew were on the horizon...

...Then the capper: "We fear for our country's future?' The applause is sustained and deafening...

...One young Republican operative worries that if voter support for each of the current Democratic candidates remains below 20 percent, Hillary has the possibility of being an instant frontrunner—of going "from zero to sixty in one month...

...Each of these parts is impressive...

...What about the Left...

...Steering allows her to coordinate Senate policy with the whole collection of special-interest groups that make up today's Democratic Party, while HILLPAC allows her to drive those policies with candidates fueled by hard-money donations...

...She's the best since Bobby Kennedy to capture the rhetorical essence of the Democratic Party...

...She arrived early for the fivehour event, preceded as always by a palpable buzz, like the crest before a mighty ship...

...Hillary Clinton is positioning herself as the once and future president, outraged at what her successor has done to her beautiful legacy...

...Bill Clinton doesn't address the issues in the same tone," says Philip J. Kawior, a long-time Republican opposition research guru...

...she epitomizes the scorched-earth politics that already have crippled the ability of Congress and the White House to make law...

...Her opening remarks were pedestrian...

...She's soaked up all this high-level talent, keeping this army fed and under her banner...

...We were paying down our debt...

...How can people say with a straight face, 'Cut cut cut, and you will have more because supply-side economics will defy the laws of arithmetic?'" "What's going on here...

...T he orgy of publicity surrounding Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir at the start of this summer masked the far more telling story of what she has quietly achieved behind the scenes...

...McGovern, she said, "was a TRUE military hero, and understood what the challenges of COMBAT actually WERE...

...Before she could comfortably return to attacking the depredations of the vast right-wing conspiracy, she had to co-sponsor legislation with Tom DeLay and Don Nickles...

...Yes, there are problems ahead for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid...

...A far more serious home-state obstacle is Al Sharpton, the Harlem huckster turned presidential candidate...

...Hillary Clinton's homeland defense stance is equally disingenuous—and just as clever...

...And so she's free to make nice with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and its leader, Al From, as her husband did in his long, pre-presidential phase...

...Hillary Clinton is a handsome woman, wellcoiffed, neatly dressed, with bright eyes...

...Moynihan was right—starving the government is what Republicans want (indeed, they'll tell you as much...

...Now Hillary's blood was up...

...Don't they know about her lack of discipline...

...Before she could safely seek global bestsellerdom, she had to generate headlines like "Smart Schools Save Energy" in The Syracuse Post-Standard, and "Small Farms Can't Be Forgotten" in The Daily Star of Oneonta...

...She rankled the antiwar Left with her nuanced support of President Bush's war against Iraq...

...This is just one of a thousand signs that a pattern has been broken...

...It's less incongruous when you remember that as a young woman who had just moved to Arkansas to begin her partnership with Bill—fresh from her radical days at Yale Law and work as a House impeachment attorney against President Richard M. Nixon—Hillary had tried to enlist in the U.S...

...Gamely Schumer had been hoping for the extra lift of a late arrival, pumping up the crowd and heightening the drama...

...Hillary Rodham Clinton, his junior New York colleague, has been doing that to him for years now—just byshowing up...

...She gathers in all the acolytes...

...It's an argument centered on deficits, though the political graveyards are full of generations of Republicans—and more recently, of Democrats—who tried to get the American voter to care about deficits...

...Is she here yet...

...When she recognizes someone she likes, her face breaks into an expression of controlled glee—wide-eyed, open-mouthed delight...

...That night, just before the unveiling in June of her Living History blockbuster, the freshman senator was in Lake Placid to make small talk with Democratic county chairmen...

...Instead, the headlines are dominated by a statement from Bill Clinton that it might not be such a bad thing to strip presidential term limits from the Constitution so that young presidents can have another crack at it...

...Clinton quotes her predecessor, the late and sainted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to the effect that the Republicans are out to "starve the federal government, to prevent it from being able to do anything other than national defense:' And so the Bush tax cut "is being funded by kicking 500,000 children out of after-school programs?' She talks, too, about cuts in local funding for police, fire, and other local first providers in homeland defense...

...She would divert 70 percent of homeland security funding directly to 1,000 cities and counties across the United States...

...But at HILLPAC you see the hard-to-find staff—for instance, people who can manage travel at a presidential level...

...We had a surplus...

...Writing in the summer of 1999, here's how the late Michael Kelly assessed Hillary's bid for the United States Senate: "She is the carpetbagger nonpareil...

...Hillary-as-moderate is yet another exercise in rebranding, moving forward with all the spontaneity of a North Korean placard-card pageant...

...There's a big car outside—she's coming, I think she's coming...

...Before she could schmooze on television with Barbara and Katie, she first had to win the Golden Gavel award for presiding over the Senate for more than one hundred hours in one year...

...It is hardly remembered now, but for weeks before publication, a rumor had circulated like a virus through New York publishing circles...

...There have been no scandals from Hillary's Senate office...

...When President Bush came to office, she says, it was to undo the works of the previous administration...

...For the moment, however, Pataki is mired in a fiscal swamp...

...The tandem team of Bill and Hillary sucked up so much "oxygen" that, by the time Kerry and Dean showed up, Lake Placid might as well have been Mount Everest...

...By the following day, when Sen...

...We've got to end George Bush's second term with high, single-digit growth, and security at home, or she is going to be tough...

...She became the candidate of anger...

...The implication is that the Bush administration is leaving America defenseless by refusing to send more grants to places like Buffalo and Utica...

...she has never held elected office...

...Hillary raises almost half of her funds out of state, with trial lawyers and law firms as her top categories...

...mini-boomlet...

...Schumer, no slouch, raises more than two-thirds of his money from within New York state, with Wall Street and real estate interests leading the way...

...Simon and Schuster paid her an $8 million advance for nothing?' said a New York Republican...

...She upset her old friends from the Children's Defense Fund by supporting proposals to stiffen the work requirement for welfare recipients...

...Two years ago we had a balanced budget," she says...

...The Bush tax cut won't force constraints in Social Security and Medicare—demographics tell us that those constraints are coming whether we cut taxes, raise taxes, or replace the dollar with the euro...

...If none of the current candidates catch fire by this fall, expect a "Draft Hillary...

...A Republican insider continues this thought...

...As usual, Hillary and her husband are their own best political consultants...

...And she has steered clear of the classic, liberal agenda on defense—arms control test bans and opposition to missile defense...

...Then again, any estrangement from the Left is unlikely to be permanent—not for the chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, the point person for protest campaigns against Bush judicial nominees...

...Still, it is difficult to imagine her allowing rural New York to slip away...

...Sharpton's quixotic bid for the presidency, says long-time Republican strategist Roger Stone, is about "running for Jesse"—enhancing his Rolodex and winning respect...

...From now forward, whenever the pardons, the purloined furniture or l'affaire Lewinsky are raised, Hillary's spokesmen will simply intone: "She's answered that/It's old news/Let's move on...

...It's a dark message, though political consultants will tell you that the American voter prefers optimism...

...More impressive still is her freshman appointment to the Senate Democratic leadership, as chairman of the Steering and Coordination Committee...

...She didn't start hitting her stride until she pointed out George McGovern's exploits in the Second World War, as described in the late Stephen Ambrose's book The Wild Blue...

...No one noticed him arrive...

...Fund-raising is another key to her national stature...

...Certainly, some future Robert Caro will have plenty to write about in her freshman rise to the front ranks of the Senate minority leadership...

...And indeed, when she did walk in, it was inside a cocoon of TV news cameras, klieg lights and ear-plugged security...

...Take those together and she's got a good basis for some of the claims she wants to make as a national candidate...

...Above all, the Steering Committee is the Senate sweet spot, the place where external interest groups like People for the American Way and internal policy development come together...

...Rick Lazio's moribund Senate campaign against her in 2000...

...He got a strong but brief dose of applause...

...I...

...He would be the strongest candidate, but there is a lot of doubt about whether he would risk his national hero status on what could easily be a losing bid...

...It's a conspiratorial message, though political consultants will tell you that Americans don't warm to conspiracy theories...

...The frontrunners for the Democratic nomination for the presidency make virtually no news...

...Never mind how unlikely it is that any amount of funding for the firefighters of Genesee County could prevent a major terror attack...

...They came in and they said, 'We have a balanced budget, we have a surplus, in fact we have a projected surplus of $5.6 trillion...

...Like a brilliant chessmaster, Hillary has moved her pawns and knights in a bold opening gambit...

...Schumer, no fool, could not have been surprised at being upstaged...

...Don't expect her to take the bait...

...For now, at least, it seems that the only person who can stop Hillary is Hillary...

...That agenda, of course, is that of the vast right-wing conspiracy...

...John Kerry and Gov...

...On paper, even with the capital letters, this might read like merely a faint reproach to some unnamed non-veteran...

...When Schumer later stood at the podium, he denounced the shameless Republicans and their "crazy tax bill" with a passion that matched the fire and spittle of the tirade of Michael Douglas's character in The American President...