Anne Quindlen editorial on Hillary...hadn't seen this before...

[SaveElmer]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15362334/site/newsweek/

History shows that she is able to woo agnostics and even naysayers. That is how she wound up with a Senate seat in a state to which she had only recently moved. (In the carpetbagger department she was inoculated by Robert F. Kennedy, who didn't even have a home in New York when he was elected its junior senator.) She bested her opponent by 12 points because she won over some Republicans and independents and upstate residents. And she carried the women's vote by 60 percent, even though pundits loved to parrot anecdotal evidence suggesting women were put off by her decision to stand by her unfaithful husband.

But because liberals are idealists, they are unwilling to do the same. They don't even compare their most promising leaders with the opposition. Instead they compare them with the ideal, the perfect candidate, the standard-bearer without flaw. Right now that means a candidate who did not vote for the Iraq war (although, curiously, if the memory of dinner-party arguments circa 2003 serves, a significant number of liberals supported the original invasion). It also means someone who has never moderated a position for the sake of legislative consensus or personal gain: neither LBJ nor FDR need apply. The chatter about presidential possibilities for superstar newbie Barack Obama offers liberals a classic opportunity: this time around they could argue the black man versus the white woman and then watch, wounded, as another white guy takes all.

Can it truly be that the people who once brought us Social Security and civil rights, often through frantic horse-trading, are now so frozen in the amber of high-mindedness that they have become the official party of the Pyrrhic victory?

Let's see: brilliant, well informed, high profile, enormous war chest, works hard, speaks eloquently, campaigns well. No wonder the party leaders are worried. Will she run? I hope so. Can she win? She has to take only the states that John Kerry took, and then one more. (Or the states that Al Gore took, and the Supreme Court.) And the Democratic Party has to decide only that it wants to get behind its front runner, to win and therefore actually get things done instead of having the satisfaction of whining "we told you so" all the way to oblivion.