Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has already spent far more time in the White House than the rest of the presidential field combined.
Since Mrs. Clinton began her independent political career in 2000 by running for the seat in the New York Senate being vacated by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the assumption in political circles was that her ultimate goal is a return to Pennsylvania Avenue, this time as the spouse in charge. And for almost as long, the expectation has been that Mrs. Clinton would begin the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination as the front-runner -- as she has.
But what few people expected was that Mrs. Clinton would be running as the most moderate of the leaders in the Democratic field, or that her most fervent detractors, at least in the primary season, would be to her left.
During the two White House terms of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, Mrs. Clinton was for the most part lionized by the party's liberal wing, and so despised by many conservative "Hillary Haters" that Republicans were almost as active as Democrats in promoting the idea that someday she might run for president.
To get to where she is now, Mrs. Clinton has overturned many assumptions. First there were questions of whether New Yorkers would accept a so-called carpetbagger and whether she would be able to carry a state whose northern reaches were traditionally conservative. After winning by 55 percent to 43 percent of the vote in 2000, with a surprisingly strong showing upstate, Mrs. Clinton waltzed to a virtual coronation in 2006, with 67 percent of the vote.
In the Senate, she surprised many of her new colleagues by working regularly across the aisle and collaborating with many formerly bitter opponents, like Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, who acted as chief prosecutor in Mr. Clinton's impeachment trial. Her watchword on policy has been to push for incremental, achievable change, a sharp contrast to her sweeping proposal for remaking the nation's health care system that was defeated in 1994.
Though the health care debate was crucial in forming her political image in the White House, Iraq has been the focus of the Democratic debate over her presidential candidacy.
In 2002, Mrs. Clinton voted for the resolution that authorized President Bush to use force in Iraq, along with several other of the current crop of Democratic candidates. Unlike former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, however, she has not said that the vote was a mistake, instead emphasizing that it had been based on faulty intelligence given to Congress by the Bush administration.
That formulation has not won over those antiwar Democrats who feel Mrs. Clinton was too supportive of Mr. Bush's Iraq policies for too long. And while Mrs. Clinton earlier this year proposedthat a withdrawal of troops begin by mid-spring, her plan avoids the fixed deadlines or goals for total withdrawal included in those of Mr. Edwards or Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who became Mrs. Clinton's chief rival this winter.
Just as she has taken a more centrist approach to legislation, Mrs. Clinton has appeared determined since joining the Senate to prove that the author of the child-rearing book "It Takes a Village" has what it takes to be tough when it comes national security. Her most prominent committee post, for instance, has been her seat on the Armed Services panel.
Mrs. Clinton has also been talking tough on the campaign, declaring that she is "in it to win it," and that "when you are attacked, you have to deck your opponent."
That kind of language prompted the first quarrel between the campaigns of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, when the entertainment mogul David Geffen said he would be supporting Mr. Obama because Mrs. Clinton and her husband were too "ruthless." Mrs. Clinton's campaign lost no time in demanding that Mr. Obama repudiate Mr. Geffen.
While Mr. Clinton has stayed mostly on the sidelines, that dispute is not the first time that memories of his presidential tenure and Mrs. Clinton's role in it have surfaced in the campaign. Republican strategists talk about "Clinton fatigue" and still seem eager to relive the many controversies of the Clinton years, including the Whitewater and Travelgate investigations, neither of which led to charges against Mrs. Clinton, and the Lewinsky affair that prompted Mr. Clinton's impeachment.
On the other hand, Mrs. Clinton has been talking more about her husband's presidency, offering it as a contrast to Mr. Bush's six years in office. As one Clinton campaign memorandum to supporters put it, "A lot of Americans will gladly take the eight great years of economic prosperity and peace that the Clinton administration delivered."
In her standard speech, which takes listeners from a girlhood in a Republican household in Illinois to foreign policy crises in the White House to the Senate, she seeks to convey that she not only carries the authority of her husband's experiences, but has also learned lessons in Congress that will allow her to avoid his mistakes.
Portraying herself as the most seasoned candidate, Mrs. Clinton does not gush over the novelty of a woman as a presidential front-runner. In typically organized fashion, however, she is working to turn the idea's appeal to good use, forming a "Women for Hillary 2008" network, with weekly "Hillgrams" and talking points.
Despite the sudden challenge of "Obamamania," her campaign gives off a steady confidence, perhaps summed up in what appears to be Mrs. Clinton's informal slogan: "In it to win it."
Mrs. Clinton recently said of Republicans, "I'm the only person they're most afraid of, because Bill and I know how to beat them, and we have consistently."
But for the moment, her challenge is her fellow Democrats.
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