On January 20, 2009, at precisely noon, the world will witness the inauguration of the forty-fourth president of the United States. As the chief justice administers the oath of office on the flag-draped podium in front of the U.S. Capitol, the first woman president, Hillary Rodham Clinton, will be sworn into office. By her side, smiling broadly and holding the family Bible, will be her chief strategist, husband, and copresident, William Jefferson Clinton.
If the thought of another Clinton presidency excites you, then the future indeed looks bright. Because, as of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 presidential election. She has no serious opposition in her party. More important, a majority of all American votersâ52 percentânow supports her candidacy.1
The order of presidential succession from 1992 through 2008, in other words, may well become Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton.
But if the very thought of fourâor perhaps even eightâmore years of the Clintons and their predictable liberal policies alarms you; if you see through the new Hillary brandâthat easygoing, smiling moderate; if you remember what a partisan, ethically challenged, left-wing ideologue she has always been, is now, and will always be, then you can see what the future holds.
Thatâs exactly the kind of president Hillary Clinton would be.
But her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza âCondiâ Rice. Among all of the possible Republican candidates for president, Condi alone could win the nomination, defeat Hillary, and derail a third Clinton administration.
Condoleezza Rice, in fact, poses a mortal threat to Hillaryâs success. With her broad-based appeal to voters outside the traditional Republican base, Condi has the potential to cause enough major defections from the Democratic Party to create serious erosion among Hillaryâs core voters. She attracts the same female, African American, and Hispanic voters who embrace Hillary, while still maintaining the support of conventional Republicans.
This is a race Condi can win.
And Hillary cannot offset these losses of reliable Democratic constituencies with other voting blocs. White men donât like her. That wonât change. And there is nowhere else for her to pick up support. Itâs simple: With Condi in the race, Hillary canât win.
The stakes are high. In 2008, no ordinary white male Republican candidate will do. Forget Bill Frist, George Allen, and George Pataki. Hillary would easily beat any of them. Rudy Giuliani and John McCain? Either of them could probably win, but neither will ever be nominated by the Republican Party. These two are too liberal, too maverick, to win the partyâs support; their positions are too threatening to attract the Republican base. Jeb Bush? Too many Bushes in a row make a hedge. Heâs not going anywhere. And Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger canât run. In the next election, none of the usual suspects can stop Hillary. Without Condi as her opponent, Hillary Clinton will effortlessly lead the Democratic Party back into the White House in 2008.
There is, perhaps, an inevitability to the clash: Two highly accomplished women, partisans of opposite parties, media superstars, and quintessentially twenty-first-century female leaders, have risen to the top of American politics. Each is an icon to her supporters and admirers. Two groundbreakers, two pioneers. Indeed, two of the most powerful women on the planet: Forbes magazine recently ranked Condi as number one and Hillary as number twenty-six in its 2005 list of the most powerful women in the world.
As Hillary and Condi emerge as their partyâs charismatic heroines, they seem fated to meet on the grand stage of presidential politics. These two forces, two vectors, two women, and two careers may be destined to collide on the ultimate field of political battle. Two firsts in history. But only one will become president.
The year 2008 could, at last, be the year of the womanâindeed, the year of two women. Suddenly, the timing is right. Eighty-five years after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, the planets seem suddenly aligned to challenge history. American voters are surprisingly ready for a woman in the White House. Public opinion is rapidly settling into a consensus that a woman could actually be elected president in the next election. For the first time in our history, a majority of voters say they would support a woman for president. In a May 2005 USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll, an amazing 70 percent of the respondents indicated that they âwould be likely to vote2 for an unspecified woman for president in 2008.â3
What a revolutionary shift in thinking! No major American political party has ever nominated a woman for president. And only one woman has run for vice presidentâDemocratic Party nominee Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. But now there are two star-crossed, qualified, and visible women who may be presidential contenders in2008. And the voters like them both:4 53 percent of those questioned in the May 2005 survey had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, while 42 percent rated her negatively. Condoleezza Rice fared much better: 59 percent liked her and only 27 percent didnât.
Hillary Clinton has always wanted to be the first woman president of the United States. Shortly after her husbandâs election in 1992, the coupleâs closest advisers openly discussed plans for her eventual succession after Billâs second term. Of course, things didnât turn out quite that way; Hillary has had to wait a bit. But her election to the Senate in 2000 gave her the national platform she needed to launch her new imageâthe âHillary Brand,â5 as we called it in Rewriting Historyâand begin her long march back to the White House.
One thing is certain: Hillary Clinton does not want any other woman to take what she regards as her just place in history as Americaâs first woman president.
Yet, ironically, it is Hillaryâs own candidacy that makes Condiâs necessary and therefore likely. The first woman nominated by the Democrats can only be defeated by the first woman nominated by the Republicans. Two firsts of their kind, locked in electoral combat, with the futureâtheirs and oursâon the line.
Their potential battle recalls a moment in the Civil War when the South was suffocating beneath the blanketing blockade the Union had draped over its ports.6 Anxious to redress the balance, Confederate shipbuilders fitted the captured wooden-hulled Union warship Merrimack with a coating of iron skin and renamed it the Virginia. On March 8, 1862, a new kind of vesselâthe worldâs first ironclad shipâsailed out to sea. There, in a single day, it demonstrated graphically its manifest superiority over every other ship in history. The Virginia rammed and sank the huge Union ship Cumberland and shelled the frigate Congress until she surrendered.
Once there was a Merrimack, however, there also had to be a Monitor, the Unionâs answer to this strange new creature of the sea. And so the Northern counterpart materialized, looking like a tin can set on a raft. The two ships met in mortal combatâtwo firsts of their kind, each made necessary by the otherâs potential to master the high seas.
The battle between the worldâs first ironclads ended in a stalemate. A race between Hillary Clinton and Condi Rice will have a more decisive ending. But the parallel is clear: If there is a Hillary, there must be a Condi. One will spawn the other.
Hillaryâs nomination as the first woman candidate for president by a major political party would generate extraordinary excitement and give the Democrats an undeniable advantage in the general election. The Republicans would have no choice but to respond by nominating a similarly compelling and popular candidateâone who would counteract the certain shift of women voters to Hillary. And who else could that be but Condi?
Consider this: If Hillary is nominated as the first woman ever to run for president, she is very, very likely to win. By maximizing her support among the 54 percent of the vote that is cast by womenâand tapping into the enthusiasm that her husband elicits among African Americans and Hispanicsâshe is likely to sweep into office, easily defeating any conventional white male candidate the Republicans might send against her.
And there is only one viable Republican answer to Hillaryâs candidacy: Condoleezza Rice.
Were Condi and Hillary to face one another, it would be the next great American presidential race and one of the classic bouts in history. Hector vs. Achilles. Wellington vs. Bonaparte. Lee vs. Grant. Mary, Queen of Scots vs. Elizabeth. Ali vs. Frasier. And now, Condi vs. Hillary.
But these potential combatants are as different as, well, black and white. In many ways, they are mirror images of each other: not only white/black but north/south; Democrat/Republican; married/single; suburban/urban; and, in their policy interests, domestic/foreign.
Their backgrounds are not in the least similar. While Hillary grew up in the middle-class security of white, Protestant Park Ridge, Illinois, Condi came of age on the wrong side of the racial divide in preâcivil rights Birmingham, Alabama. But growing up as an African American in the segregated South did not mean that Condi came from an impoverished background. It was Rice who came from an educated, professional family; Hillaryâs was far more blue-collar. Hillaryâs mother, the child of a teen pregnancy who was abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandmother, was a high school graduate; her father, a physical education major and football player at Penn State, made and sold commercial draperies. Condiâs parents and grandparents, on the other hand, were college graduates. Her father was a minister, teacher, and guidance counselor. Her mother was also a professional, a music teacher in the same school where her husband taught.
It is not only their family backgrounds and geography that were distinctive. Their careers also took very different paths. For more than thirty years, Hillaryâs success has always been coupled with her relationship with one powerful man: Bill Clinton. Wherever he went, Hillary followed, supporting him, advising him, rescuing him, and, at the same time, reaping enormous rewards from his advancement. Her own talents were often obscured, her ambitions put aside, as the two worked jointly to advance his career above all else.
It was Bill who introduced her to his colleagues at the University of Arkansas Law School when she was suddenly unemployed after her work as a legal researcher on the Watergate Committee came to an end in 1973. Though a bright and talented graduate of Yale Law School, Hillary had failed the D.C. bar exam and would undoubtedly have had a hard time landing a top position in Washington. Women lawyers were not yet in strong demand, and a bar failure would have been a major strike against her, as well as a humiliating admission to make in job interviews for a supremely self-confident person like Hillary. An easy alternative was Arkansas, where she had passed the bar the previous year and had since been admitted to practice law. Her decision to move to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and accept a teaching position in a clinic handling criminal lawâa subject in which she had never before shown any interestâchanged her destiny and paired her future with Bill Clintonâs. From then on, as Bill moved up in Arkansas politics, Hillary simultaneously progressed in her legal career. When he was elected attorney general, she was offered a job at the Rose Law Firm, the most prestigious in Arkansas. When he was elected governor, she was named the firmâs first woman partner. And when he was elected president, she ultimately evolved into a Senate candidate from New York.
Unlike Hillary, Condi has never married, and her success has never been a matter of hitching her wagon to the political fortunes of any powerful man. Instead, she advanced strictly on her own merits. She began her career by excelling as an academic and specializing in foreign affairs. Eventually, she brought that expertise to a family of presidents. But it was always Condiâs own record of accomplishment that made her a prominent national figure. When she was still in her twenties, she was elevated to the Stanford University faculty because she amazed her colleagues with her abilities. She came to Washington during the administration of President George H. W. Bush because she had impressed National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, who met her at Stanford. She was only thirty-four when she became the administrationâs chief expert on the Soviet Union. After her White House experience, she so impressed the incoming president of Stanford that he asked her to be his provost, even though the job usually went to a dean or a department chair. Through Ronald Reaganâs secretary of state, George Schultz, she met then-governor George W. Bush, and prepared him for the foreign policy issues he would face in the 2000 campaign. The younger Bush was so awed by Condiâs abilities that he appointed her national security advisor and then secretary of state.
Condi Rice, in short, reached her position of power on the strength of her own achievements.
The two women also came to the White House in characteristically different ways. Hillary arrived as a wife, with no experience in government, no portfolio, no administrative experience. Though her husband immediately granted her sweeping authority over health care, she was still the presidentâs wife, the first lady, who had no expertise in the very health care issues that she completely controlled. Her power was always derivative. She was not an elected official. She was not a cabinet member. She had no designated role or powers. The public policy issues she chose to address were centered on traditional womenâs issues: health care, advocacy for women and children, and protection of national treasures.
Rice entered the White House in a completely different way. She came in as a high-level expert, charged with guiding America through the delicate process of German reunification, the dismantling of the Sovietsâ satellite empire in Eastern Europe, and the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union itself. A rare woman in a field long dominated by men, she held her own.
The work these two women did once in the White House likewise reflected their dramatically opposite characters. Condi quietly advanced and enhanced her reputation in the field of national security and Soviet relations with a keen understanding of how to make the system work. She was a success.
Hillary, on the other hand, created a chaotic bureaucracy just to draft her health care bill, which ran to more than one thousand pages. She alienated members of Congressâeven in her own partyâas well as health professionals and the press. The collapse of her reform plan was a colossal personal and professional failure on her first national public stage. Her reputation was salvaged only by her grace during the Lewinsky scandal and her enthusiastic willingness to campaign and raise funds for Democratic candidates all over the country. And, once she had rehabilitated herself, it was still her alignment with Bill Clinton that led her to the next rung in her career: a Senate seat from the state of New York.
Condiâs and Hillaryâs respective reputations in politics, too, were diametrically opposed. Condoleezza Rice has never been involved in personal or professional wrongdoing; Hillary has been embroiled in scandal after scandal, ever since she entered public life. She has always teetered on the ethical edge. Her unexplainable windfall in her commodities futures speculation; the circumstances of her Whitewater investment; the disappearance of her law firmâs billing records; her role in the decapitation of the White House Travel Office employees; her solicitation and acceptance of personal gifts of expensive furniture, silver, and china during her last days in the White House while she was still first lady (but not yet a senator bound by rules about gifts); her acceptance of contributions and gifts from persons seeking presidential pardons; and the hiring of her brothers by drug dealers and others seeking pardonsâall of these have led to the continuous cloud of doubt that has surrounded her personal and professional integrity.
Perhaps the most shocking example of her tin ear on ethical issues was her acceptance of furnitureâand $70,000 in campaign contributions7âfrom Denise Rich, who was basically trying to buy a pardon for her fugitive ex-husband, Marc Rich. After a federal indictment charged Marc Rich with fifty-one counts of tax evasion and illegal trading with the enemyâIranâduring the hostage crisis of the l...