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November 07, 2006

Hillary Can Bore a Grateful Nation

By Richard Cohen

In both theory and great expectations, Tuesday is the beginning of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. By nightfall, she will have won a lopsided re-election to the U.S. Senate, with plenty of money left over to start a presidential effort. She enjoys the sort of name recognition a president might envy and has the unalloyed good wishes of Democratic activists who have been waiting all these dark and awful years for a Clinton Restoration. After all, if the Bushes could do it -- one mediocre, the other incompetent -- then why not the brilliant and dazzling Clintons? The answer might be Hillary herself. She can bore a grateful nation.

Such, anyway, was the effect of her recent appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The anticipation was great. The crowd was huge and the fact that Clinton had agreed to speak to this august body meant -- it had to mean -- that she was at last going to say something thumping about Iraq. Instead, she delivered a no-news address lacking controversy, fresh approaches or even a single soaring sentence. She proved herself fit for the Senate but, not on that afternoon anyway, a presidential candidate.

If one sparrow does not make a spring, then one speech is not a campaign -- nor, maybe, was it typical of what's to come. But those of us who have heard Clinton before, who covered portions of her 2000 Senate campaign, were reminded that she can be industrially dull, so cautious that nothing comes out of her mouth except bromides. In his book about Hillary and her 2000 campaign ("Hillary's Turn''), Michael Tomasky dubbed her "The Laundry Lady'' for the numbing numbers of little programs she would somehow implement if elected. Had she run against Rudy Giuliani, such a methodically boring campaign might not have sufficed. But Giuliani dropped out and Clinton won.

Caution has served Clinton well in the Senate. There, she has listened to the wisdom of Robert Byrd, the longest serving member, who gave her his standard nose-to-the-grindstone tutorial and beamed with avuncular pride as she took it to heart and grandstanded not. On the other hand, she has led not, either. If she is a party leader, it is on the basis of who she is and not what she has done. She has risked little.

Clinton supposedly comes to the presidential race -- if she wants it -- with two built-in constituencies: women and minorities. The former I'm not so sure about, for wherever I go and her name comes up it is the ladies who make faces usually associated with bad wine. As for minorities, Hillary is Bill and Bill is Hillary and their record, if not his rhetoric, is unmatched. She has earned her following.

But that leaves the rest of us who might seek something more in a presidential candidate than lists and caution and itsy-bitsy steps toward universal health care. We want, yes, vision, leadership -- a little music, please, maestro! We want rhetoric that soars, poetry that compels and, every once in a while a phrase that pumps the heart and -- jackpot! -- draws a tear. We rarely hear that sort of thing from Hillary Clinton. Instead, she has played Mrs. Cool to her husband's Mr. Hot. The essential theatricality of politics is not in here -- not yet, anyway.

The Council on Foreign Relations is not, I grant you, a stadium full of partisans. It calls for a certain understated style. Even so, Clinton managed to bore the likes of stock brokers, money managers, corporate lawyers and others who you might think are already inured to boredom. Here and there I even saw people fighting sleep and I noticed one chap who had succumbed and was surely dreaming of IPOs or whatever fantasies occur to the very rich. Suffice it to say, though, that this was her audience -- predisposed to like her, already respecting her. She gave them nothing.

Clinton, in a way, personifies the Democratic Party. Many of the most prominent mentionables (Dodd, Kerry, Biden, Edwards) have pretzeled themselves over Iraq, voting for, arguing against and now expressing dismay at George W. Bush and his cockamamie policies. But on their own, they offer not much that lifts the heart. It is a field of the familiar. Oddly, Hillary Clinton is the fresh face, undefeated and on the cusp of history itself. Given who she is and, importantly, what she is -- smart, disciplined and, when she wants, charming -- there are those who say that this campaign is hers to lose. Last week, she took a first step toward that goal.

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