VDH Sez It'll Be President Hillary

Well, not in so many words. But he sure seems to echo what I've been saying:

[T]riangulation for a chameleon Senator Clinton relies on an emotional base that will still cry, "Hillary, right or wrong!"

Like her husband, Hillary Clinton generates just that diehard loyalty. Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill for which George W. Bush would have been demonized. Without a cry from Barbara Boxer or Al Franken, he pre-empted and bombed in the Balkans despite neither U.N. approval nor a vote of the U.S. Senate.

Senator Clinton also grasps another great truth about America. Populism is never passe. What the old blue-collar middle-class electorate revolted against in the 1960s was not only the Democratic liberal social agenda, but also the hypocrisy of their erstwhile spokesmen in the universities, foundations, media and Hollywood who lived a very different life from what they advocated for less well-off others....

So Hillary Clinton is now voicing the old Democratic fair deal, without giving too much rope to her fringe zealots, who could hang her in places like Topeka or Memphis with gay marriage, open borders, partial-birth abortion or skedaddling from Iraq.

Inasmuch as Senator Clinton's transformation for now seems cosmetic and is as yet unmatched by a written agenda that spells out reduced entitlements, low taxes and strong national defense, can Hillary pull it off without seeming entirely cynical?

Perhaps....All her dirty linen has long ago been aired....Mostly forgotten are her old putdown of stay-at-home moms and the socialist healthcare plan fiasco of 1993.

Finally, she is being advised by one of the most astute political triangulators in American history — her husband.

Mr. Hanson doesn't get it all right - he credits Mr. Bill with having "navigated an entire agenda through a hostile Republican Congress," which never actually happened (it was his initial agenda that led to the election of a "hostile Republican Congress," and that Republican Congress was far more timid than hostile), and suggests that the GOP base may become so terrified of Hillary that it might precipitate the even bigger disaster of nominating an extremist RINO like Rudy Giuliani, the chances of which are slightly less than Chuck Schumer quitting the Senate to become the newest Teletubby (named "Cranky").

But he does capture the general sense of Pachyderm foreboding:

Republicans are even more fidgety that she is not just moving laterally in the views she expresses, but up in the polls as well. Like frozen observers watching a train wreck in progress, conservatives are sweating that a winking Hillary might just get elected and then unveil her true liberal agenda.

Not "might," ladies and gentlemen; "will."

When the Clintons are involved, there are no rules. And they always win.

Dubya better get as much done as he can between now and January 20, 2009, because a long political winter is already on the horizon.

Victor Davis Hanson says so.

Sort of.