Given the way politics works, it sounds like New York Senator Hillary Clinton is off and running, according to the New York Times:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has begun a calculated series of meetings with top New York Democratic officials to signal that she is likely to run for the presidency in 2008 and to ask for their support if she does, according to one state Democratic official who spoke with her and two others who have been briefed on her plans.
It’s good news and bad news for Democrats who are now pondering:
To Hillary, or not to Hillary: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous demonization,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing try to neutralize them? To battle conservative talk show hosts: to counter negative TV ads and conservative bloggers;
No more; and by choosing someone else like Obama we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That her health care proposal was heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To find someone safer, to choose Hillary;
To possibly lose the White House in 2008: perchance to dream that people will accept her recent centrist Senate record and popularity with New York constituents: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that problem of imagery is what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off the spin from the media, her camp’s hype and her foes’ grudges,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of political baggage;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Rush Limbaugh,
The Hannity’s wrong, the proud liberal Democrats’ agenda,
The pangs of Bill’s love, the blasts from Tom DeLay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When some safer candidate might his quietus make
With less hassle? who would baggage bear,
To grunt and sweat under negative impressions,
But that the dread of something after national nomination,
The undiscover’d scandal or Swiftboating from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus political expediency does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and losses of political coattails,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. – Soft you now!
The fair Obama! Ms. Clinton, in thy orisons
Be all thy sins remember’d, recounted, exaggerated and feared…
For some less poetic but perhaps as dramatic political analysis be sure to read:
—Ed Morrissey (who looks at electability problems)
—Arianna Huffington (who thinks the Times wrote a condescending story about a self-evident development)
—James Joyner (who puts the Hillary story within the context of the Barack Obama Presidential boomlet story)
—Iowa Voice (who predicts the unelectible line will be dumped by the press once she’s more officially in the race)
—Poliblog (who looks at it from a cool political scientist’s point of view)
Additional News Stories About Hillary Possibly Gearing Up
New York Daily News
CBS News/AP
New York Post
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.