Conservatives For Hillary

I used to think that Hillary Clinton had the proverbial snowball's chance of ever living in the White House again. Now, I'm not so sure. What changed? People on the right, seeing the dismal selection candidates the GOP is offering for 2008, are starting to make their peace with the idea of President Clinton. Andrew Sullivan explains why:

The conservative Washington Establishment is swooning for Hillary for a reason. The reason is an accommodation with what they see as the next source of power (surprise!); and the desire to see George W. Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq legitimated and extended by a Democratic president (genuine surprise). Hillary is Bush's ticket to posterity. On Iraq, she will be his legacy. They are not that dissimilar after all: both come from royal families, who have divvied up the White House for the past couple of decades. They may oppose one another; but they respect each other as equals in the neo-monarchy that is the current presidency.

Keep in mind, Hillary doesn't need every single conservative in order to win the general election. All she has to do is peel off enough of them to make a couple of closely-divided states like New Mexico and Ohio swing back into the Democratic column. It's not impossible. (I'm assuming, of course, that she will get the Democratic nomination, but that is looking more inevitable all the time.)

I think back to the odd pairing of former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in relief efforts following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Katrina in 2005. They seemed to get along very well and the two are now close friends, by all accounts. So I think there is something to the "royalty" theme Sullivan mentions. If Hillary is elected in 2008, we will have 24 and possibly 28 years of continuous Oval Office occupation by people named Bush and Clinton. Mark Shea thinks partisans on both sides will get what they deserve:

It will be an exquisitely just comeuppance for all the consequentialists on both sides of the aisle if Hillary is elected (as Bush seems to be telegraphing) and she winds up embracing Mr. Bush's War. All the whores on both sides of the aisle who have loathed one of them and praised the other (while making every excuse in the book for their prostitution of basic principles of natural law in the name of their respective ideologies) will get the last full measure of betrayal from each of them as they walk off, hand in hand, having given us a state fully committed to salvation through leviathan by any means necessary *and* to the sacrament of abortion. Hillary will be the perfect Bush legacy. A classic example of the system doing what we designed it to do, not what we want it to do.