Hillary Clinton is entering the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. This comes as good news to a band of folks out there who've made an awful lot of money demonizing her, preying on the view of a small band of citizens who think she's Satan in a pants suit. There's one activist group that's very bad with facts, very good at getting past my Spam trappers. At least twice a month, I get an e-mail that says, in effect, "Everything you value in the world will cease to exist if this woman is not destroyed. Send us lots of cash and we'll stop her." Those people must be turning cartwheels right now and starting the mass mailings.
This is just a gut feeling on my part but I don't think their efforts will be necessary. I don't think she'll get that near the nomination. She's not a very dynamic speaker and I suspect a lot of folks who otherwise might be inclined to vote for her would prefer someone who didn't come with so much baggage. It's kind of the way a lot of the loyalest Republicans now view George W. Bush.
Of course, I also don't think Obama, Biden, Kucinich and the rest of the announced or presumed contenders have that much more appeal than Ms. Clinton. The shallowness of the Talent Pool is evident when the Democrat who looks the most like presidential material is Al Gore. And some of that will just be a matter of voters wanting to turn back the clock, wipe out the previous eight years and vote for the guy they now think they really wanted in the first place. Gore was right on the Iraq War and it's now becoming near-fact (sadly) that he's right about Global Warming. In politics, if you're right about two important things, you're way ahead of the average. Like, by about two things.