Hillary: Love Her, Hate Her

By KAREN TUMULTY

If you ask anyone around Hillary Clinton the question that everyone is asking, the answer comes back in a shot: The freshman Senator from New York is far too busy concentrating on her re-election in November to be giving even a passing thought to 2008. Thank you very much. But politics is ultimately a game of logistics, and the junior Senator is putting the machinery in place for a campaign that looks far grander than a re-election cakewalk in New York. All it will need is for someone to throw the switch. Against virtually nonexistent opposition for her Senate seat, she is raising money as though she were in the fight of her life, bringing in more than $33 million. What's left over--which might easily be $10 million or more--could be the seed money for a presidential campaign. And as her husband did the year before launching his 1992 bid for the presidency, she has been putting together the intellectual pieces of a campaign agenda in a series of centrist, high-fiber speeches around energy policy, the economy, privacy and even rural issues. Her political operation has grown to an army of 32 full-time employees, plus 10 from her Senate office who draw part of their salary there and 13 consultants who are building, among other things, a national direct-mail operation. She recently added an Internet guru to their ranks. And offering his services for free is the best Democratic political strategist on the planet: Bill Clinton is "thinking about [her presidential prospects] all the time," says one of Hillary's advisers. "He's thinking about it and talking to a lot of people, promoting Hillary. This is something he is very focused on."

Should Hillary run? Could Hillary win? Is this a dynasty in the making? Is a Clinton candidacy good for the republic? Normally, those would be questions that only political consultants would be asking at this stage, but given the outsize status of both Clintons, ordinary voters are already wondering the same thing. Hillary would step into the race as the instant front runner, but the risks would be enormous. It is hard to imagine a greater vindication than seeing the second President ever impeached hold the Bible as his wife takes the oath of office. But if Hillary ran and lost, both Clintons would come out tarnished--no small consideration when a promising Senate career and a presidential legacy are in the balance. So sensitive is the question of Hillary's future that both Clintons refused to let TIME interview them about it, and they discouraged those around them from talking, which explains why nearly all the people who did talk did so on the condition that their name not be used.

What they say is that 2008 is closer than it looks on your calendar. Whereas her husband could wait until just four months before the first caucus to make his announcement, a front-loaded presidential primary-and-caucus schedule and a growing field of contenders don't give Hillary that luxury. Her strategists tell TIME they are urging her to make her intentions clear by next spring--by forming an exploratory committee, for instance--to lock up fund-raising and political talent. Those close enough to know say that she is genuinely undecided but that Bill is not disguising his eagerness to see her make a bid for his old job. "He thinks that she should run, and he's going to do everything possible to help her," says Texas insurance mogul and philanthropist Bernard Rapoport, a longtime Clinton friend and backer.

LOVE HER, HATE HER

THE PROSPECT OF A HILLARY-FOR-PRESIDENT campaign has put much of the Democratic establishment in a bind. The early line is that Hillary would be unstoppable in a Democratic primary but unelectable in a general election. That bet would help explain the curious political subspecies I came across frequently in reporting this story: moneymen who are lining her campaign account even as they say privately they hope she won't run.

Her strategists point out that all she would have to do in November 2008 is win every state John Kerry did, plus one. They consider Ohio and Florida her best opportunities. And there is plenty of encouraging news for her in the latest TIME poll. More than half of those surveyed--53%--said they had a favorable impression of her; she registered higher than the other most familiar names in the potential Democratic field, Al Gore (49%), John Edwards (46%) and John Kerry (45%). Her negative ratings (44%) were lower than either Kerry's or Gore's. Edwards generated fewer negative reviews (31%), but 23% of those polled said they didn't know enough about him to have an opinion one way or the other. In hypothetical matchups with the preseason G.O.P. favorite, John McCain, Hillary is the only big-name Democrat to make a real race of it, with McCain edging her by just 2 points among registered voters. By comparison, McCain would trounce Kerry by 10 points and Gore by 9.

But what those overall figures do not show is how differently Hillary is viewed in red and blue America and how familiar she already is to voters. Other candidates may have a chance to persuade voters of their merits, but people have pretty much made up their mind about Hillary. Only 3% of those surveyed in the TIME poll said they had no opinion of her, positive or negative. She is the inkblot test of a polarized electorate. In the TIME poll, Democrats overwhelmingly describe her as a strong leader (77%) who has strong moral values (69%). Republicans by and large see an opportunist who would say or do anything to further her political ambitions (68%) and puts her political interests ahead of her beliefs (60%). As for independents, more than half (53%) of those surveyed said they would not support her, with 34% putting themselves in the "definitely not" category.

Polls aside, what the Clintons know from experience is this: if Hillary runs, the race will be long and brutal and expensive. There are few names that so ignite the Democratic political base. About a year ago, when party pollster Mark Mellman, who does not work for Senator Clinton, asked a focus group of 10 African-American women to name their all-time political hero, eight picked Hillary, he says. But the Clinton opposition is at least as ardent. Hillary has already figured as Lady Macbeth in enough volumes to fill a bookmobile, and in the next year the publishing industry will be adding to the collection with such titles as Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and Whitewash: How the News Media Are Paving Hillary Clinton's Path to the Presidency. One of her hapless opponents for the Senate seat ran an ad against her last week that featured pictures of Hillary and Osama bin Laden on the same screen. As a presidential candidate, Hillary could count on every attack from the right that Bill gotmaybe worse, because he never had to contend with the blogosphere or the newer kind of independent operation that turned swift boat into a verb in the 2004 presidential election.

And she is not as insulated as she once was on the left, which is far angrier than it used to be. Some liberals say they will not forgive her support for the Iraq invasion or, even worse, her refusal to recant that vote. When Hillary addressed the liberal group Campaign for America's Future in June, she was booed. And everyone there knew whom Kerry meant when he said, at the same conference, "It's not enough to argue with the logistics or to argue about the details. It is essential to acknowledge that the war itself was a mistake."

Hillary of late has made a point of stepping up her criticism of the Bush Administration, to the point of calling for the ouster of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And in a neat bit of Clintonian triangulation, she distanced herself from pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman even as her husband campaigned for him. But the hard truth is, she doesn't have much wiggle room. National security is the toughest test for a Democrat, particularly for a woman and especially for a woman so associated with feminine causes like child care and education. Her chief strategist has a grim assessment of what Hillary is up against on that front. The country may be ready for a woman President, Bill has privately told friends, but the first one to make it is more likely to be a Republican in the Margaret Thatcher mold.

THE TROUBLE WITH BILL

FOR MORE THAN 30 YEARS, THE Clintons have been the most fascinating tango act in politics. Sometimes they moved perfectly in synch. Other times, they had to make up the steps as they went. But always each has known what to do when the other stumbled. She became a Clinton not when she married Bill but after he lost his first bid for re-election as Arkansas Governor and she realized the state's voters weren't ready for a first lady who kept her last name.

Now the choreography is reversed, and it is Hillary's time to take the lead. The Biotechnology Industry Organization learned that the hard way when it paid Bill's customary six-figure speaking fee to book him as the star attraction at its annual convention for 20,000 attendees. A week or so before the April 11 speech in Chicago, his people made a sudden demand: he wanted it closed to all media except the trade press. Hillary, as it happened, had dibs on the spotlight that day, with a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago. The couple's handlers wanted to make sure that she, not he, got the headlines, which is how it turned out. Before Bill's aides make a major commitment for him, says an ally, "there's a lot of checking" with Team Hillary.

Yet ceding center stage does not come naturally to Bill. He can be simultaneously Hillary's best asset and a subtle saboteur. When they appeared together at a $1,000-a-ticket fund raiser for Hillary last summer on Nantucket in Massachusetts, his introductory remarks were longer than her speech, recalls a prominent Democrat who was there. As the guest of honor's turn to speak finally came, much of the crowd migrated to the other side of the pool to gather where her husband continued to talk.

Then there was the scene in Buffalo, N.Y., in May when she formally accepted her party's nomination for re-election at the state Democratic convention. Hillary's handlers had the good sense to plant Bill in the audience and not onstage until after she had finished the speech in which she hailed him as "an inspiration and a mentor and a friend and a partner." But for at least 15 minutes after she and every other politician had left, he lingered at the microphones, answering reporters' questions, oblivious to aides trying to scoot him out.

With the talent he has and the baggage he brings and the sensation he creates, Bill Clinton is the best possible political spouse and the worst. "I don't know what he does. Does he campaign for her? Doesn't he campaign for her?" asks an adviser to Hillary. "I don't think anybody within the inner circle of the Clintons understands how this will work." Her 2000 Senate race was something of a test run. As a sitting President, he could beg off anything more than the occasional campaign appearance. Safely behind the scenes, however, Bill went over her speeches line by line, hassled her staff when they overscheduled her, oversaw her debate prep, second-guessed her ad buys.

Hillary has improved her game considerably since becoming a politician in her own right. When scripted, she can still come off as a scold, but she has learned to attack a rope line with gusto and at her best can be engaging, warm and funny, especially in small settings. Still, "he overpowers her with his gifts," says a senior Democratic strategist. When they appear together, he adds, "it also makes it harder to see the gifts that she has that he doesn't, like a better sense of self and much less insecurity."

Being at Bill's side can seem like standing next to a nuclear blast. Hillary appeared to vanish as he set the audience on fire at Coretta Scott King's funeral in February. When Hillary's moment came, aides noticed something familiar about her ponderous tribute: she was lifting the best line of her husband's 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. She memorialized Martin Luther King Jr.'s widow as having risen from her grief after his assassination to tell the civil rights movement, "Send me." It was a leaden version of the "send me" riff with which Bill had electrified the crowd in Boston two years ago, describing John Kerry's Vietnam service. "She doesn't have his touch," says one of their oldest friends. "My recommendation would be that they not campaign together."

But that would create a different problem. People would start wondering, once again, what the deal is with that marriage. More than eight years after the country lived through the trauma of seeing a marital crisis turn into a constitutional one, the state of the Clintons' union continues to fascinate people. A comedian can rarely mention either of them without a dig at their private life. A tally of how much they see each other (14 days a month on average since the beginning of 2005) merited front-page treatment by the New York Times. Even the unveiling in April of their official portraits at the Smithsonian--hers, a luminous profile, evoking the Italian Renaissance; his, a sporty pose you might have expected to see over the fireplace at Southfork--had the sharp-eyed tabloids noting that no wedding ring was visible in his.

As with everything else about the Clintons, how you view their marriage tends to be a good indicator of your politics, and vice versa. Whereas a majority of Democrats in the TIME poll said they believe Hillary stayed with Bill after the Monica Lewinsky scandal because of Hillary's commitment to the marriage, 72% of Republicans said she did it to advance her political career. Nothing makes her strategists more nervous than the occasional scandal-sheet report that Bill had been spotted out on the town. The possibility of another scandal is "the subject nobody wants to touch," says one. "It could be nothing, or it could be the biggest issue. People gave her a break on Monica, but if there's a subsequent relationship, that presents a real problem."

If Bill is a distraction when Hillary shares the stage with him--and more of one when she doesn't--that leaves Hillary with another option: sending him out on the campaign trail alone. What political pros call the surrogate is the most traditional role for the spouse and often the most valuable. But when Bill is subbing for Hillary, you start wondering which one is the candidate. In late July, for instance, people paying $75 a ticket began lining up more than an hour early at Capitale in New York City, where Bill was headlining a fund raiser for Hillary's political-action committee. He opened by saying he wanted to make three points: first, that his absent wife, who was attending to the people's business down in Washington, has been "a really good Senator"; second, that he was "particularly proud" of her for bucking a partisan atmosphere to offer constructive solutions on energy, the environment, health care and education; and third ... well, his third point turned out to be about the "epic struggle" of his presidency. For the rest of Bill's 20-minute speech, his wife merited an individual mention only here and there. Everything else was framed in the first-person-plural we. Not that the crowd seemed to mind, judging from the deafening applause.

Americans, it turns out, have good memories of the Clinton presidency. In the TIME poll, two-thirds said they have a favorable view of that time, and Bill's job-approval rating was 70%, nearly twice George W. Bush's. But do they want him wandering the White House with no real job and no accountability? Only 18% said they would like to see him play a major role in a Hillary Clinton White House. Frets a Hillary confidant: "There's always going to be that question, Is she running on her own, or is she running as his surrogate? If she's going to do this, she's got to do this on her own."

THE HARDWORKING SENATOR

FROM THE BEGINNING, HILLARY HAS MADE sure that her political operation has had her own stamp. There are a few people around from her husband's campaigns, chiefly strategist Mark Penn. But by and large, she has formed a team whose loyalties are to Hillary alone. It is an extraordinarily disciplined operation, one in which she does not allow the turf wars and leaking that always kept his in turmoil. But veterans of Bill's campaigns say privately that Hillary's operation is too inflexible and insular for prime time.

In the Senate, Hillary was initially denied the spot she sought on one of the so-called super-A committees--Appropriations, Armed Services, Finance and Foreign Relations. So she went with her expertise, taking a seat on the Health and Education Committee, among others. But she persisted in lobbying for better assignments. In 2003 she ditched the Budget Committee, which sounds more important than it is, to take a spot that had opened on Armed Services. She was one of the first in Congress to point out that U.S. forces in Iraq lack the armor they need. After 9/11, she became one of the Senate's loudest voices on homeland security, pointing to lapses in port inspections and voicing early criticism of border protection. She counts as her biggest accomplishment her role in securing $20 billion in aid for her state in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. More recently, she has taken a lead role in the fight to increase the minimum wage, proposing to tie wage hikes to congressional pay raises.

This year the Republicans couldn't even find a credible candidate to take her on, in no small part because of the inroads she has made in more conservative upstate New York. There are other unlikely places where she has won friends and admirers. When Hillary was first elected, General John Keane, then Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, sought an audience, hoping to acquaint the new Senator with some of the Army's priorities in her state, including West Point and the perpetually deployed 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum. It didn't entirely surprise him that it took three months to get on her schedule or that, once he did, her staff called his twice to remind him that she couldn't spare more than 15 minutes.

When he finally got in to see her, however, the meeting did not go as he had expected. For starters, it lasted 45 minutes. "She committed immediately to West Point and the 10th Mountain Division, with follow-up on-site visits," he says. "But it was her enormous depth of knowledge about the military and her sincerity about our people which surprised and disarmed me." As First Lady, Hillary told Keane, she had traveled the globe and had often been able to see parts of the world that security prevented her husband from visiting but where the U.S. Army was always present. "She had an extraordinary grasp of our military culture, our soldiers, our families and what it was like for them," Keane marvels.

Hillary has succeeded in the Senate by recognizing what everyone expected of her and then proving them wrong. Much has been said of the low profile she keeps to avoid having her celebrity bruise any of the tender egos of her more senior colleagues. She shows up early for committee hearings even though her junior status means she is usually the last one to speak. Even more striking is the way she has reached across party lines--sponsoring foster-care legislation with Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, and pushing health-care proposals with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the Clintons' nemesis in their 1994 effort to reform health care. One of her closest friends in the chamber is South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who came to national attention as one of the House managers of the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton.

So solid is her standing that some who are close to Hillary tell TIME they believe she will in the end forgo a presidential race and set her sights on rising within the Senate leadership, toward the possibility of becoming the first woman majority leader someday. She has worked to tamp down talk of her national ambition by proving there is no New York concern too parochial to merit her attention. When an Appropriations subcommittee passed a bill that was loaded with goodies for New York recently, Hillary's staff bombarded reporters' e-mail with seven press releases in just over an hour, making sure she got credit for communications equipment for Onondaga and Rockland counties, economic-development assistance for Staten Island, a program for at-risk kids on Long Island, a crime lab for Monroe County and much more.

As Hillary has worked to take the partisan edge off her image, she has also underscored the biggest question voters have about her: What does she really believe in? A First Lady can pick and choose her issues, but as a Senator, Hillary has been forced to take stands in areas that go far beyond the health-care and family issues that Americans have long associated with her. Her voting pattern has tilted liberal, but in National Journal's ratings of the five Democratic Senators most often mentioned as presidential contenders, Hillary's record (more liberal than 80.5% of her Senate colleagues', in a computer analysis of key votes) comes down in the middle--less liberal than Kerry (85.7%) but more so than Delaware's Joe Biden (76.8%) and Indiana's Evan Bayh (63.2%).

Some of her positions have been surprising--although not as inconsistent as her critics say. After she called abortion a "sad, even tragic choice" in a January 2005 speech, pundits said she was remaking herself for a presidential race, and liberal groups raised cries of alarm. But in fact, Hillary had made similar comments often in the past. Aides from the 1992 campaign say she helped come up with Bill's signature line that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."

Whatever she does is held up not only to her own record but also to Bill's. Given the battles he fought to bring his party around to the benefits of globalization, it seemed a repudiation for her to oppose the Bush Administration-- approved deal to turn over operations of some U.S. ports to a Dubai-owned company. Never mind that virtually every other Democrat and Republican on Capitol Hill was right where she was in demagoguing as a national-security threat a deal that would have very little impact, if any, on how the ports would be run. And it didn't help her credibility when the Financial Times revealed that the emirate--where Bill had been paid $450,000 in speaking fees in 2002--was getting advice from her husband on how to go forward with the deal even as she was trying to derail it. His aides said that he was not paid for the advice and that he merely told the company it should submit to additional government review. The deal was later scuttled.

Even when Bill doesn't get in her way, Hillary has trouble pulling off what came so naturally to him. "I wish she hadn't come out against flag burning," says her supporter and funder Rapoport. "The worst mistake she can make is to move to the right. She's going to lose a lot of the enthusiasm of the people who can get her elected." But others point out that by supporting a statute banning flag burning, she helped defeat a more drastic constitutional amendment that would have done the same thing--very much like what her husband did in 1995 when he produced a balanced budget, horrifying the left with 25% cuts in domestic spending. That helped take the political momentum out of a balanced-budget constitutional amendment. "Do you pretend [an issue] doesn't exist, or do you find a way to beat it?" asks former Clinton White House domestic-policy director Bruce Reed. "The Clintons have always found a way to beat it."

Can they win again? In her memoir, Hillary closed by writing of her final moments in the White House Grand Foyer. The longtime butler there "received my last goodbye embrace and turned it into a joyous dance. We skipped and twirled across the marble floor," she writes. "My husband cut in, taking me in his arms as we waltzed together down the long hall." A farewell, perhaps. Or maybe the Clintons will yet want to have another dance.

To read about the Clintons in Chappaqua, go to time.com/time/chappaqua

With reporting by Kate Stinchfield/ New York