Hillary takes a big gamble

Various pundits have been suggesting for months that Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) was working out a new, moderate personna that would make her hard to defeat in the 2008 Presidential election- despite the fact that fully forty percent of the electorate repeatedly states in the polls that they would never, under any circumstances, vote for her.

I have never seen Hillary as the threat that other Republicans do. Sorry, Dick Morris! Nobody with her negative numbers has any more chance of getting elected in 2008 than I do. And Hillary Rodham Clinton is simply not a moderate. She is an extremist- and probably, other than President Bush (who did not achieve this status until after he was elected), the single most polarizing figure in American politics.

Hillary represents a remarkable opportunity for the Republican Party. Even after all the polarization the country has undergone on Dubyah's watch, Sen. Clinton's nomination by the Democrats would guarantee that she, and not he, would be the issue in 2008. I firmly expect that a John McCain or a George Allen or any of a half dozen other potential Republican nominees would clean the floor with her. Perhaps a more obscure candidate like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee would be an even smarter choice; the more the spotlight can be kept on Hillary, the better.

What inspires this prognostication? Simply that Hillary is showing her true colors. This may well go down in history as the moment in which the Republicans were guaranteed a third consecutive term in the White House.

Hillary is joining the band of Democratic Senate radicals planning to filibuster against the inevitable confirmation of Justice- Designate Sam Alito.

There is one way- and only one way- that this decision will not blow up in her face: if there are enough Democratic votes for cloture that the filibuster never gets off the ground. She may have counted noses and concluded that such will be the case. If so, she will have scored points with her base- the Far Left in the Democratic party- and done herself no harm with the public at large which time will not largely heal. It would even be a smart move- if the filibuster never gets off the ground. But it's an exceedingly risky one, sure to blow up in her face if she's counted wrong.

A filibuster against a nominee on purely ideological grounds would be a violation of the agreement forced by the "Gang of Fourteen" months ago, which ended a Democratic fillibuster against lesser Bush judicial appointees and avoided a Republican resort to "the nuclear option:" amending Senate rules to abolish the filibuster entirely.

That Senate liberals have been quite rightly calling for the abolition of that undemocratic abomination- most famous for its use as a tool by Southern racists to obstruct civil rights legislation during the 'Fifties and 'Sixties- literally for generations will make the irony of subsequent events all the more delicious: if a viable filibuster is initiated, the Republican majority will use "the nuclear option" to abolish the filibuster, Judge Alito will be confirmed- and the Democrats will be blamed by the electorate not only for their obstructionism, but for forcing the Republicans' hand by breaking their word not to filibuster except in "exceptional circumstances" which simply do not obtain in the case of Alito.

And a certain senator from New York- the highest profiled of those involved in that filibuster, and her party's likely nominee for President in 2008- will come to be its symbol. Hillary Clinton will find it impossible to credibly run for President as anything but the radical she is.