Catfighting!

Political analysts predict the 2008 US presidential election could be a lady's contest. Robin Toner looks at the contenders

A long time ago, it became clear that something about Hillary Rodham Clinton had driven many political pundits around the bend.

For nearly 15 years, she has been denounced, at various times, as a deeply subversive rogue feminist who equated marriage with slavery; an overreaching social engineer bent on nationalizing the American health care system; and a disturbingly acquiescent wife too willing to stick with a straying husband. Now, in the latest incarnation offered up by her critics, she is the scheming, probably unstoppable front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, currently presenting herself as a moderate – via another insidious "makeover" – but hellbent on returning to her left-wing agenda once in power. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, in Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race, can barely contain their alarm. "Do not underestimate this woman!" they warn. In fact, the authors argue (over and over again), Hillary Clinton may be so powerful, so stealthy and so determined that only an extraordinary candidacy by Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, can stop her. As millions of right-thinking Americans realize the dangers of a Hillary presidency, the authors suggest, a draft-Condi movement will spring up at the grass roots, producing a kind of Manichaean catfight in the general election. That, at least, is the conceit of this book, its particular niche in the crowded marketplace of Hillary lit.

Very quickly, this argument begins to feel more obsessive than provocative.

Morris and McGann (they are husband and wife) labor mightily to set up a contrast between Hillary the bad and Condi the good, a sort of Fox News fairy tale. Clinton's candidacy "is driven by enduring ambition," Rice's by "her own lasting achievements and experience in government service." Clinton has risen by free-riding on her husband's success (although it hardly seems like much of a free ride), while Rice is a triumph of "individual upward mobility" and the meritocratic ideal. Clinton is surrounded by hard-case political operatives who will do almost anything to win, including the "thuglike" Harold Ickes, while Rice has succeeded and will continue to succeed almost spontaneously, when mentors and potential voters see her remarkable talents and push her up to the next rung. Get it?

The authors' basic political rationale for a Rice candidacy to block Clinton seems reasonable enough: Rice could hold the Republican base and take away Democratic votes among women, blacks and Hispanics, they argue. "Only Condoleezza Rice offers the Republican Party a chance to close the gender gap," they say, "or, at the very least, to prevent it from widening further." But the authors fail to make a convincing argument for why Republican activists - not always the most pragmatic bunch - would make such a calculated decision, based so heavily on politics over ideology. Rice, for one thing, is a supporter of abortion rights; Republicans have not nominated someone who was not solidly anti-abortion since the days of Gerald Ford. It's a different party now.

Moreover, Rice's skills as a campaigner are essentially unknown, and a presidential election is an unforgiving place to learn them; ask Wesley Clark. She has never held elective office and has no real record on many domestic issues. And while the authors appear dazzled by her diplomatic feats, even they acknowledge that "if the war becomes manifestly unpopular, Rice may find herself sucked down along with it." Aside from all that, she's perfect.

Condi vs. Hillary, though, seems at times less a serious exercise in political analysis than a chance for Morris to vent about the wife of his former boss. (For those not steeped in Clintonology, Morris, a longtime adviser to Bill Clinton who helped him shift to the center after the 1994 Republican landslide, left his employ in 1996, in the midst of a furor over Morris's reported relationship with a call girl.)

Morris clearly has some unresolved issues with Hillary Clinton. He warns that in private, she "is often bitter and sarcastic, a partisan who is always looking for - and finding - enemies, plots and conspiracies." She is filled with "rage" at the Republicans and their policies; "at her core . . . Believes in income redistribution"; and is on a secret mission to bring liberalism back to the White House. Finally, the authors warn solemnly at the end, after listing a long catalog of her failings and sins, there is this: she cries.

"Surprisingly, this tough, combative, sharp-tongued woman often broke down in tears during her time as first lady," they write. "Quite often, her tears were mixed with anger, as they were at various points with me, George Stephanopoulos and Rahm Emanuel." In short, angry mommy must be stopped.

Such excess, of course, provokes a reaction - the political culture and the market (not to mention ReganBooks) demand it. And so we have "The Case for Hillary Clinton," by Susan Estrich, in which the former Democratic operative and current law professor and commentator tries to buck up any wobbly Democrats about the desirability - and electability - of Hillary Clinton.

Estrich has a rather touching belief that, if elected, Clinton would profoundly change not just the government but the culture, reinvigorating the feminist movement around the world. (Reading Estrich after Dick Morris produces a kind of ideological whiplash.) But she correctly identifies a core belief among many Democrats - that Clinton may have a lock on the nomination, but cannot win the general election because (not to put too fine a point on it) too many people hate her.

That thinking inevitably leads to the case for nominating a "safe white male," which Estrich dismisses as just another Democratic delusion. "You'll never find anyone who's as safe as you hope, who can do as much as you need," she writes. "For instance, which of your safe white men are going to excite the base the way Hillary does, so they can spend all their time in the middle? I'll answer: None."

Estrich's book reads, at times, like a long dinner-party rant at friends who - she believes - ought to know better. For God's sake, stop obsessing about why she stayed with her husband! ("If imperfect marriages were grounds for disqualification from high office, would there be anyone left to run?" she writes.) Stop worrying about her ability to move beyond the Democratic base and look at her formidable approval ratings in upstate New York! And stop worrying about what the Republicans might throw at her in the general election; there's nothing left to throw!

"There will always be a market for the Hillary trash, just as there is for hard-core porn," Estrich writes. But, she adds, "however many books they write, however many trees they pulp, the simple fact is that the Haters have run out of material."

Maybe. But the case against - and for - Hillary Clinton long ago transcended mere facts.

© The New York Times