One you couldn't nail down if your life depended on it.

And against the background of the WOT and Bush's exploitation of fear, people did tend to see it in exactly those life-or-death terms. The issues were too serious to screw around, yet Kerry and the Democrats didn't really seem to take things very seriously. They just phoned it in.

I don't know how to interpret your remarks about The Hillary, given the way that the Right paints every Democrat as a wild-eyed Commie Fifth Columnust dedicated to destroying America from within, and lord knows the Right's unloaded everything they had against her over the years. Hillary insufficiently Liberal? Hard to buy that. Looking back at "their" Presidency, Hillary and Bill advanced some pretty mainstream-Liberal ideas, like national health care, where they failed; and succeeded only when they apparently made a calculated decision to drag a conservative issue like welfare reform into the center. In the fat, dumb, and happy 90s that was what worked, but I think that the much more polarized 2000s reward tough pursuit of ideological goals.

Being a polarizing figure has worked for Bush in this environment, albeit at the expense of serious harm to society, and there's every reason to expect that Hillary as a polarizer will be equally effective. The Right will go ballistic and the overheated rhetoric will be a turnoff to many voters, while others will admire her forthrightness (if she unleashes it, as she has from time to time over the years; she's capable of it), and still others will simply be charmed at the thought of finally having a female President.

Even that thing about dropping "Clinton" might work, if it reminds people of Bill's infidelities and garners some sympathy for her. How many betrayed and divorced women would vote for her simply out of sympathy with a "sister"?

One of the things I'm seeing in DemocratLand is that the rank-and-file is pretty disgusted with the party machine. They seem far less inclined these days to just passively accept whatever candidate the machine selects, and whatever insipid platform they craft with an eye on the polls. This means, I hope, that the well-known stars like Hillary (aka The Usual Suspects) are going to be forced out of their comfortable rut of triangulation and appeasement, into taking more left-leaning and strong stands to satisfy the Liberal constituency.

All along when I've talked about this, I haven't been talking about some new strategy crafted by bloodless political hacks in DC. I've been talking about the popular forces that will drag the Democrats in that direction whether they like it or not. Satisfying the base is what wins elections. Just ask Karl Rove.