A presidential odds couple

Washington

It’s the ultimate inside-the-Beltway fantasy, a political tease too titillating to surrender, because it ends with the prospect of two women running against one another for president of the United States in 2008.

Or, in some scripts, it ends with the clash of two dynasties, a titanic grudge match that will determine the most powerful family in the most powerful nation on the planet.

Plot too tired, movie been done?

Well maybe in Hollywood, but in Washington, fantasy politics is all the buzz. Now that the midterm elections are history (except in Louisiana, where campaign-o-holics have managed to drag out their elections into the Christmas shopping season), politicos are only too happy to salivate over the contests to come. Like rotisserie baseball, presidential scenario-spinning requires a few leaps of faith and the usual creative mind. After that, it’s all delicious speculation.

Scenario One: Democrats rally around Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) as their presidential candidate in 2008, after she is reelected in a roar from New York in 2006.

President Bush attempts to preempt Hillary’s expected star-power run with a trump card of his own, naming national security advisor Condoleezza Rice as his vice presidential running mate in 2004.

Bush-Rice triumphs at the polls, making Rice the first woman and the first African American to be vice president. Then in 2008, it’s Hillary vs. Condi.

Never mind that Rice, a Soviet scholar from Stanford University who is Bush’s top advisor on foreign policy, has never held elective office, has little policy portfolio on domestic issues and claims not to be interested in the position. Or that the job she says she really hungers for after life in the White House is commissioner of the National Football League. Or that she is believed to be pro-choice on abortion in a party where that is a hurdle to high office. Already, a new Web site is urging her to run (seattlewebservices.com/rice), and chat rooms regularly dissect the prospect. Scenario Two: Jeb Bush leaves office triumphant after his second term as governor of Florida in 2006 and decides to carry the family mantle into the 2008 presidential race, this time against Hillary Clinton.

“The Shakespearean scenario,” said Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster in California. “A former first lady running against the first brother with two former presidents in the wings, neither particularly old or disheveled. And then there’d be Barbara Bush off in the corner somewhere with a voodoo doll.”

Groan if you must, but political junkies love this stuff. They have already handicapped the odds, and, depending on who is talking, Hillary’s run is a sure bet and Condi’s is a longshot.

President Bush seemed to dash hopes for the first scenario. “Should I decide to run,” he intoned recently during a press conference, “Vice President Cheney will be my running mate.”

But this being Washington no one believed him. Cheney’s health problems (he has had four heart attacks starting at age 37, a quadruple heart bypass operation and now wears an implant), only fuel the speculation.

And Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of the conservative Washington Times, is convinced that Republican Party elders will force Cheney off the ticket.

“Cheney will want to stay on and Bush will want him to stay,” he explained. “But national Republicans will implore Bush to put on the ticket somebody who can be the standard bearer in 2008. To give up that advantage would be painful.”

Blankley admits that Bush will resist the pressure. And Cheney himself is perhaps the first vice president in history who actually likes his job, which John Nance Garner, FDR’s first veep, once likened to a bucket of warm spit (actually he said something a bit more graphic).

Still, the scenario beckons.

“I’m betting on a Bush-Rice ticket in 2004,” said William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, who has been pushing the idea since March. “Bush is a bit of a gambler politically.”

To Kristol and other Republican cheerleaders, a Rice candidacy is enticing because it offers promise of crossover appeal to black voters who would otherwise vote Democratic. No one is really sure if this will work -- it did not seem to help Democrats win more Jewish votes than usual when Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) was Al Gore’s vice presidential candidate in 2000 -- but pundits who play the fantasy game love to toss this one around.

“It depends on the issue mix,” said Kristol.

“Generally black conservatives in the past have not been able to attract black Democratic votes. It suggests that ideology really is more important than race identity.”

Maybe, but some Democrats worry that Hillary Clinton’s high negatives and a Condi Rice candidacy bathed in the aura of historic destiny could combine to give Republicans the edge.

“I don’t like that matchup,” said Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, a Democratic pollster. “We lose.”

Pollster John Zogby thinks the Condi-Hillary matchup is “a stroke of genius” because it removes any voter unease about voting for a woman as commander in chief.

Hillary Clinton’s negatives, he calculates, are irrelevant, since she has mastered the art of winning even though one-third of voters “hate her guts.” And Rice could pull in enough blacks, Zogby thinks, to embarrass the Democrats.

“She doesn’t have to bring too many,” he said. “Now Republicans have about 10%. She could probably build that into 18% to 20%, just enough to embarrass the Democrats. The Democrats can’t win without 90% of the black vote.”

Geraldine Ferraro, a former Democratic congresswoman from New York, was the first woman tapped to be a vice presidential candidate. Actually, so far she’s the only woman nominated on a major party ticket.

She likes all the talk of an all-female contest. But she thinks a more likely Republican opponent for Hillary Clinton is Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson.

“If Kay Bailey Hutchinson weren’t from Texas [where Bush already had an electoral lock], she would have been the vice presidential nominee in 2000,” said Ferraro, who heads a New York-based management consulting firm. “I don’t agree with her on the issues, but she’s done a credible job as senator, representing her party, precisely the type of person who should run.”

Others mention newly elected Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) who ran for president in 2000 and whose husband ran, in 1996, against Bill Clinton. Another grudge match?

If you poll the U.S. Senate on any given day, you will find 99 senators, give or take one, who thinks he or she is presidential timber.

But in the last 100 years, far more presidents have come from governor’s offices than the U.S. Senate. Voters may be more likely to look to a governor for executive leadership and managerial muscle.

But those who like to war-game presidential races think a woman commander in chief can balance any voter unease by having a male vice president.

Asked what qualities Rice or Clinton should look for in a running mate, Maslin, who polls for Gov. Gray Davis, said, “A man.”

Women’s advocates are somewhat cheered by a new crop of female governors now in the pipeline toward the presidency whose performance could blunt voter resistance to women in high office. Several pointed out there are now more female governors -- six (not counting Puerto Rico’s) -- than chief executives of Fortune 500 firms.

Ann Lewis, a friend and supporter of Hillary Clinton’s, likes the chatter.

“Anytime we start discussing scenarios, we’re helping women,” said Lewis, who chairs the Democratic National Committee’s elect-women-to-office campaign. “Making it imaginable is a big step to making it real.”