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August 27, 2003
Hillary For President
BY RICHARD REEVES | Universal Press Syndicate
richardreeves.com
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- Senator John Kerry spent the weekend in the Hamptons but never got to the beach. There is no time for sand and sea when you are gathering money for a presidential campaign.
The man from Massachusetts had a pretty good couple of days. Several dozen New Yorkers (mostly) paid $500 each to hear him at a brunch in Southampton, where he was introduced as the candidate with: "The war record of John Kennedy; the brains of Bill Clinton; the toughness of Lyndon Johnson, and the hair of Ronald Reagan."
A good time was had by all, even if you heard the occasional grumble of, "What the hell is she doing out here? What is she raising money for?"
"She" is Hillary. The Senator from New York was down the road in Easthampton, getting ready to do her own gathering at a $250-a-head cocktail party. Pretty good for a freshman senator. But Kerry, who has served 19 years in that august company, is not concerned about Hillary the senator. He is worried about Hillary for President -- and well he should be.
The race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 has changed totally in the past few weeks. At the beginning of the summer, Hillary could comfortably deny having national presidential ambitions, because the comfortable conventional wisdom was that it didn’t really matter who the Democratic candidate would be, because President Bush had a lock on re-election. (I’m sure that the thought has never crossed her mind that it would be better for her if Bush won in 2004, leaving her a clear field in 2008)
But now!...with Bush looking more vulnerable because there are not enough jobs at home and not enough peace abroad, Senator Clinton has to check some numbers. If a Democrat, say Kerry, defeats Bush next November and then runs for re-election in 2008, then her next chance to run would probably be in 2012, when she will be 65 years old. And who knows what the world will look like then?
For the record, our new senator has said she was not interested in the Presidency. So has former Vice President Al Gore, who might be re-thinking his own future. Not for the record, though, Hillary and her advisers, including her husband the ex-president, her money-men and pollsters, will meet shortly after Labor Day -- September 6, I hear -- to discuss whether or not she should go for it. It is a decision that has to be made earlier rather than later because of November and December filing deadlines for the early primary elections that will almost certainly (and very quickly) identify the 2004 Democratic nominee.
The contest, again almost certainly, will be over by by March 2, at the latest, and possibly as early as the end of January. California, New York, Texas, Ohio, and eight smaller states will hold primary elections on Super-Super Tuesday that second day of March. There is even a chance that if the same candidate, say Kerry, could win the Iowa Caucuses on January 19 and the New Hampshire primary on January 27, he could win early enough to cut off the financial and journalistic oxygen of other Democratic runners. If Hillary decides to do it -- you only get to be president by running for it -- she will have to meet filing deadlines by announcing her candidacy before the end of this year.
Hillary and her advisers will meet shortly after Labor Day, I hear, to discuss whether or not she should go for it.
Senator Clinton is in the same high-stakes dilemma as one of her predecessors was 35 years ago. In 1968, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was the most celebrated Democrat in the country after President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run -- after almost being defeated in New Hampshire by a critic of the war in Vietnam, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Kennedy threw caution and old non-candidate promises to the wind and entered the contest against McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey.
There are great similarities between then and now, and between New York’s carpetbagger senators -- Bobby from Massachusetts, Hillary from Arkansas -- beginning with their name recognition, their armies of admirers and enemies and their dominating position in polls.
And polling could drive Hillary’s decision, beginning with Bush’s popularity ratings. On her own side, Democratic polls right now show Kerry, Senator Joseph Lieberman, House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and former Vermont Governor Howard Dean as the Democratic leaders, each of them with 15 or 20-percent of the Democratic vote nationally. Throw Hillary’s name into those polls and she gets between 37-percent of the vote (ABC News poll) and 48-percent (Quinnipac Institute).
Kerry and the rest drop to single digits. Unfair? Of course. If Bush is in trouble, Kerry and Dean could be the Gene McCarthys of their generation if Hillary decides to be Bobby.
RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com. |
