From my hometown paper, Peter A. Brown has it right: Hillary is being set up (free registration required, but here are the important portions):
Some Washington pundits are rethinking their conventional wisdom. The result is an emerging belief inside the Beltway that she has successfully moderated her political image.
In their view, Clinton has convinced bumpkins in The Great Beyond that she’s no longer a loony liberal, but has remade herself into a centrist Democrat.
…
Centrist Democrats, who can count electoral votes and don’t believe she can convince Americans she isn’t the liberal they had always thought, are crossing their fingers Hillary does the same.
They understand how difficult it would be for her to win any states that Kerry could not, and they realize that, without some states in 2008 that they lost in 2004, the Electoral College will continue to deny any Democrat seeking admission.
Republicans want her to run because they think the centrist Democrats are right.
If Hillary were to put her party’s future ahead of her ego, she would listen to her enemies rather than to her friends.
I have the utmost respect for Senator Clinton, but, being one of those Centrist Democrats, I am convinced that she is incapable of capturing the White House come ’08. Indeed, when she runs she will, more than likely, take the Democratic nomination — the fringe voters come out in the primaries, a group that worships her, and a number of the moderates will be convinced that her artful manipulation of her image will compensate for the oncoming Radical Liberal slurs from the right. However, voters do have long memories, and for those who do not the Republicans will be more than happy to remind them of the Hillary-as-a-frothing-liberal image.
When it comes to Hillary supporters, the argument utilized is that a true leader is needed for the Democratic party, of which I completely agree. However, I am not convinced that Hillary, at this time, can be that leader — she’s simply too polarizing. And to that, there are many who would claim that a move to the left is required, that it’s impossible to garner the votes of gun nuts and abortion clinic bombers (which it is, and Democrats shouldn’t want those votes, regardless.) Indeed, a move to the left is needed, but the sort of perceived shift Hillary would signify to a majority of Americans would be much too far.
However, a number of Democrats would be fine with that. They fall into the “Nader Zone”, the one where, supposedly, the majority of Americans live on the far left side of the political spectrum and simply do not vote because candidates shun their uberprogressiveness — a false world, as any political data set pumping out an ideological bell curve easily debunks. The Republican party has subscribed itself to the same idea, but in the opposite direction — it has worked, obviously, but there is now a sense that the party has moved much too far to the right. The Democrats now have the ability to offer a moderate alternative, primarily because the Republicans have become rightest extremists while, simultaneously, exuding the most negative aspects of supposed leftist policy, namely Big Government Spending and, with the Schiavo matter, the deconstruction of federalism.
So, Hillary simply won’t do. Democrats need to focus on making gains beyond that of 2000 and 2004, which should be an obvious fact. Take serious looks at Evan Bayh, Wes Clark, Bill Richardson — those who at least have a chance once the race begins of surviving the initial negative onslaught. Centrism, after all, is the New Left when compared to Bush et all; that should provide some comfort.