White House Via Arkansas?

Last week’s dedication of the Clinton Library may be remembered as the moment when Bill Clinton launched his ultimate gambit to be the comeback kid -- this time via his wife. He huddled under an umbrella, frailer and thinner, clasping Hillary’s hand and swallowing back tears. I thought of the title of Clinton’s first book, “Between Hope and History,” as Bill Clinton, officially and literally, became the latter -- his presidency boxed inside a massive edifice of glass and steel -- and Hillary became the hope of the Democratic Party.

Hillary held center stage. She introduced the former president. She looked regal among the world leaders and ex-presidents who generally gather in such numbers only for state funerals. When she rose from her seat to get a better view of Bono, she gestured to President Bush to follow suit, and he did. And when Bill Clinton was asked about his wife’s potential presidential candidacy, he for the first time didn’t bat away the questions but made a quarter turn toward the possibility. “If she did, I would do whatever she asked me to do.... I think she would be really good.”

During the election, the Clintons insisted they were working hard for John Kerry, although a Kerry win would have doomed Hillary. Women in politics, like women in Hollywood, age in dog years, and in 2012, the 57-year-old Clinton would have been 435, too old to run.

Kerry’s loss clears the way for ‘08, but will a party that just lost by fielding a senator tagged as a liberal from a Northeastern state filled with elitists without moral values immediately consider another? That’s where the library can help Hillary (D-Blue State). Unlike Kerry, she’s proficient at dropping her “g’s” below the Mason-Dixon Line, but now she can also restore her red-state roots by decamping frequently to the Clintons’ luxurious pied a terre built into a wing of the library in Little Rock. Goodbye, Martha’s Vineyard. Hello, Ozarks.

I could go into all the reasons why a skirt and a skirt-chaser are not coming in or coming back in ’08. But I was completely wrong in 2000 when I insisted Hillary would not abdicate the White House to run for office from a state she’d only previously visited as a tourist. The nerve, the gall, the anti-feminist derivativeness of it, when actually it was genius of a post-post-feminist kind, taking immediate advantage of standing by a man cheating on you. She listened, she learned milk-price supports, she drew a weak opponent, and she moved back to Washington as a senator at the very moment her husband was moving out. How could I have missed that one?

Once elected, she became an improbably good senator, doing the requisite grunt work, showing deference to her elders and trudging to so many senior citizen centers in upstate New York that it’s a wonder her hair hasn’t turned blue. Having landed a spot on the Armed Services Committee, she’s a frequent visitor at military bases and griever at military funerals. She’s overcome the resentment of senators like Trent Lott, who suggested loudly that she might be hit by lightning before she could take her seat. She’ll work with anybody; it’s no longer odd to see her whispering in the ear of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) -- a leader of the posse formed to run her husband out of town -- about legislation they’ve cosponsored.

Hillary Clinton has two things going for her that Kerry did not: enthusiasm and history. The party went for Kerry not because they agreed with him, found him inspiring or particularly liked him, but because when he poured a large bottle of ketchup money over Iowa, he proved that he could stop the outsider, Howard Dean. He could also credibly say “reporting for duty” in an election that looked like it would turn on national security.

With Hillary, it’s the opposite. Every poll, except those of a certain Chappaqua household, show her losing to a Republican while winning the primaries big time. But, oh, the passion. Democrats have fallen in love and they can’t get up. They love her over issues and out of nostalgia for Fleetwood Mac. A big slice of the party hasn’t stopped thinking about tomorrow.

And she has the Bush precedent.

Think about it. Desperate to be led out of the wilderness after eight years of Clinton, Republicans settled on the candidate with the right name who could immediately attract the big-money men and former White House advisors. Hillary has all that, plus the single-name name recognition, like Madonna and Cher, of the worldwide celebrity she’s become.

I could predict that Hillary would lose upward of 35 states in ‘08, but I don’t want to make a career of underestimating her. It’s just possible, if Bush is precedent, that Bill could be holding the Bible for his wife in 2008. A Clinton succeeding a Bush who succeeded a Clinton who succeeded a Bush? That’s some kind of history.