Is she a 2008 Presidential candidate ?

Rise of Hillary Clinton.

By Richard Reeves Fri Jun 17, 2005

NEW YORK -- Flying across the country the other day, I sat next to a retired Air Force colonel, and we had a pleasant conversation about love of flying, travel and grandchildren -- and, for him, of retirement itself. "Yeah," he said, "there's only one thing that would make me give this up."

"What's that?"

"If Hillary or Jane Fonda runs for president, I'm going to work full time to beat her."

I told him I knew Hillary -- she doesn't even need a last name now -- and she's no Jane Fonda. He was not persuaded. I told him she had voted for the war in Iraq. "Exactly," he said; that proved what a phony she was.

"Well," I concluded before we began talking about planes and kids again, "I think you're going to get your chance. I think she's going to run."

I once wrote, with total sincerity, that I thought Hillary Rodham Clinton -- the Rodham seems to have disappeared -- had the political instincts of a stone. I also wrote that I thought she had marginalized her husband's chances of being an important president. Bill Clinton's historic destiny -- barring war or an event like 9/11 -- was to complete the work of Franklin D. Roosevelt by creating a fair and generous system of national health care. When he held up a sample plastic health-care card during his State of the Union message all those years ago, Clinton looked like history happening.

He blew that by naming his wife to head the task force to work out a national plan, and she decided to work in secret with battalions of "experts" who came up with a plan four times as long as the European constitution now in the process of alienating another whole continent.

Then, after taking her lumps for that and for some of her husband's dumber endeavors, she decided to run, as a Democrat, for the U.S. Senate from New York, a state she had always thought was a nice place to visit. A carpetbagger she was -- as were Robert F. Kennedy and James Buckley before her -- but New Yorkers do not mind that. We assume everyone wants to be one of us; nothing wrong with that.

Another assumption in the year 2000 was that she would run from the inside out, from Manhattan to the world. But she ran from the outside in, spending weeks in western New York, which has always been part of the Midwest. She learned about life there; she is a grind, and came to the city as an "Upstate" candidate. It was a smart move. She won big, and she will win re-election bigger. With her state approval rate above 70 percent, Republican heavyweights Gov. George Pataki and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani have already decided she is now too tough to run against.

She is now far and away the Democratic front-runner for president in 2008. (New Yorkers also are not serious about pledges to serve a full term; we expect our guys to go for the big one.) Her national numbers are getting better, inch by inch, day by day. Now, a slight majority -- 52 percent in a couple of polls -- say they are likely or very likely to vote for Hillary for president. True, 47 percent, including my friend the colonel, still say "Never." But her national approval-disapproval rate is now about 55-to-39, compared with 46-to-48 for President Bush.

The odds are still against her. So are most of the oddsmakers, beginning with Joe Klein of Time magazine, chronicler of the Clintons in fact and fiction. He believes a Hillary candidacy will polarize the country the way the reign of the Clintons polarized us in the 1990s. He is also annoyed by the prospect that the presidency might become the entitlement of two families, the Bushs and the Clintons.

He may be right, but as one who has been wrong about Hillary in the past, I am not about to underestimate her again