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Hillary Already Focused on 2008

October 24, 2005

Even though Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) has more than a year left in her re-election campaign, she is “already focused” on 2008 and a campaign to become the first female president of the United States, political analysts say.

Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, told Cybercast News Service that “there’s no way in the world she couldn’t be thinking about” running for the White House “because everybody else is thinking about her doing it.”

Referring to a survey conducted by the Institute in early October, Carroll said Clinton can look beyond 2006 since she currently holds a 2-to-1 advantage over her likely GOP opponent, Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, in next year’s election.

According to that poll, 64 percent of New York State voters said Clinton deserves to be re-elected, including 32 percent of Republicans.

Carroll also noted that “a lot of people in New York and nationwide think she ought to run and probably will run for president.”

However, the survey did contain some unwelcome news for the senator. While 51 percent of the New Yorkers polled said they “definitely” or “probably” would vote for her in a presidential contest, 59 percent indicated that if she runs for re-election in 2006, Clinton should serve out the full six-year term.

Carroll downplayed the poll’s results on that issue because he believes the respondents “haven’t thought it out. If she served the full term, she couldn’t run for the White House. People say, ‘Yeah, you ought to serve the full term,’ but I don’t think any American has ever resented anybody for running for president.”

Clinton also easily wins polls asking people their choice of Democratic presidential candidates, which Carroll noted is not a new phenomenon.

“In the last presidential election, when the Democratic primaries were on before Sen. John Kerry’s eventual nomination, Quinnipiac kept polling all the people who were running,” he said. “And then we’d throw Mrs. Clinton into the mix, and she’d wipe them all out.”

Nevertheless, Carroll said he didn’t expect Clinton’s White House aspirations to be obvious in 2006.

“I expect her to go out, raise money for other candidates and resolutely say that all she’s interested in is her Senate campaign, that she wants to be re-elected,” he said. “That’s the politically prudent thing to do: focus on 2006, but do all the things you have to do for 2008, like raise money and make friends.”

Clinton is apparently already being “politically prudent,” since news reports indicate that she raised about $5.3 million during the third quarter of 2005. And as for “making friends,” the senator just spent $4 million in a direct-mail campaign to find new contributors.

Meanwhile, Carroll said that the senator has an even more important resource to help her win the White House.

“I think that she’s married to probably the smartest politician in America, and I expect she’ll get a lot of very good advice from former President Bill Clinton,” he said.

Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, told Cybercast News Service that he believes Sen. Clinton will need all the advice she can get, even though he agrees she’ll win re-election in 2006 “by a landslide.”

With victory in next year’s campaign almost a certainty, Clinton will “look to 2008 almost exclusively,” he said. “She’ll be in New York a lot, but she’ll also be all over the country raising money at a rapid clip because the legislative burden is generally less in election years.”

Still, Sabato sees “a lot of things” that could get in the way of a Clinton victory in 2008, even the Democratic presidential nomination. “For example, the Democrats might consider whether or not they want to win” in the general election that November.

Clinton, though having lived in Arkansas for many years while her husband was governor, is the “least likely Democrat to win in the South,” Sabato said. That’s “because of her ideology, her campaign baggage — which includes her hubby — and because of her own problems left over from the White House years and her voting record in the Senate.

“New York senators are not likely to carry the South,” Sabato said.

He also urged caution in declaring Clinton the presumptive nominee. “It’s a long way to ‘08, and a lot of things could change,” Sabato said. “Everyone thinks she’s a shoo-in for the nomination, but funny things happen to shoo-ins on the way to the convention.”

Referring to the Democratic frontrunner who led every poll for the party’s 1988 presidential nomination until a scandal caused him to unexpectedly drop out of the campaign, Sabato asked: “Anybody remember Gary Hart?”

Source: CNSNews.com

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