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--The nasty New York press is said to be ready to eat Hillary alive. Nonsense. The New York press is a scarecrow. Its famous brutality is mostly saloon bragging by tabloid drunks on their 10th beer. Whitewater, Filegate, the commodity trades--old business, forget it. After all, Ted Kennedy ran off a bridge a long time ago, and a woman drowned, and he's had 30 happy years in the Senate since then.
--Gender will play heavily in Hillary's favor. A lot of upstate Republican women are confessing to friends that while they would not normally think of voting for the Democrat, the feministic appeal overrides their traditional loyalty. Hillary Clinton recapitulates, in her life, the origin myth of liberated white American woman--the journey from the Friedanish frustrations of domesticity, from the shadow of the husband to the promised land of independence, power, autonomy as a woman.
Yet Hillary's victory will result mainly from this: she has Celebrity. In the politics of turn-of-the-millennium America, Celebrity trumps all else, even when it may be disreputable. In this case most voters judge it is the lady's husband who is disreputable; she gains shine from the contrast and, at deeper levels of our psychology, accrues a fascinating power (the power of hardened martyrdom) from her stolid--not to say classy and somewhat mysterious--endurance of the lout's squalors.
Admittedly, a certain Clinton-in-Kosovo logic is at work. Outsider Hillary, like NATO, violates state borders (New York's) in the interests of morally imperative do-gooding--a form of moral colonization, what the French used to call une mission civilisatrice. The transgression will offend some. But, as in Kosovo, it will succeed.
I think I see a sort of Celtic mist forming around Hillary as a new archetype (somewhere between Eleanor and Evita, transcending both) at a moment when the civilization pivots, at last, decisively--perhaps for the first time since the advent of Christian patriarchy two millenniums ago--toward Woman.
It may all be hallucination, of course (in which case I will bolt my kitchen table to the floor). But Hillary Clinton amounts to something more than herself, and anyone who underestimates that something is a fool.