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While Clinton and McCain seem to have reached the same conclusion about where politics is leading them, their strategies for getting there will be very different, given the different obstacles they face within their parties and with the electorate at large. Here's an inside look at how the game plan is shaping up for each:
CLINTON'S PROVING GROUND
Although polls at this stage are largely a measure of name identification, the ones that have come out lately show the former First Lady winning every conceivable Democratic primary matchup, even over 2004 nominee John Kerry. But how does so polarizing a figure possibly make it all the way to the White House? Ask Hillary Clinton's advisers, and they will point you to New York.
One recent day found her in its conservative western corner, where radio tends toward Christian and country stations, doing what every Senator loves: doling out money. In Olean, she announced $229,000 in software grants from Microsoft to bring technology to rural areas. For St. Bonaventure University, she presented a ceremonial-size $1.5 million check for hiking and biking trails, which comes from the pork-laden highway bill signed recently. At the Cummins Inc. engine plant in Jamestown, she pointed to amendments she pushed that would free more federal money for the clean diesel technology that Cummins uses. And at nearly every stop, Clinton closed by thanking the voters who "took a big chance on me back in 2000." In Olean, Ellen Winger, 17, asked her to sign the back of her T shirt. The front said, SOMEDAY A WOMAN WILL BE PRESIDENT.
In New York State and Washington, the only First Lady ever elected to the Senate has earned high marks for her hard work, her sensitivity to the other egos in the Senate and her overtures across the aisle. Clinton has taken pains to burnish her foreign-policy credentials, traveling twice to Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Last February, she gave a speech on the future of the United Nations at the prestigious Munich Conference on Security. She voted for the Iraq invasion and then was one of the first Senators to complain that U.S. forces there had inadequate armor, winning her points as a defender of the troops. Even the conservative editorial page of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post has praised her as "the unlikely warrior."
Clinton is considered all but unbeatable in her re-election bid next year, especially now that her chief rival, Westchester County prosecutor Jeanine Pirro, has proved so gaffe prone in recent weeks. That's why Clinton's real test, two of her strategists say, is proving she has become more acceptable to swing voters. Although she won with a surprisingly comfortable 55% in 2000, she lost narrowly in New York's more conservative upstate areas and suburbs. "Hillary's biggest challenge is to exceed what she did in 2000, and it is a really high bar," says a close adviser. "If she doesn't do as well this time, people are going to question whether she is viable" as a presidential candidate.