Pete King—raconteur, sometime fiction writer, and one of two House Republicans with the nerve to vote against the impeachment of Bill Clinton—has a great story about the former First Couple. Last April, he got beeped by President Clinton’s office: Bill urgently needed to talk. It turned out the former president was starting the impeachment chapter of My Life, and he needed King to help reconstruct some of the details. Which was fine, of course, but King couldn’t help but be puzzled: “I’m reading in the papers that the galleys of his book are already in,” he says. “And here he is, talking to me—I can hear him going through papers, rustling through things, telling me, ‘Hold on, hold on,’ because he’s gotta go upstairs, he wants to find some note. I imagined him like some crazy professor, racing around his Chappaqua house.”

The conversation went perfectly well. Then, six weeks before the book came out, King got another phone call from the Clinton household—this time at six in the morning. “I’m sound asleep,” says King. “My wife answers. And she hears a voice: ‘This is the Capitol Hill operator. Are you ready to talk to Senator Clinton?’ I take the phone, and Hillary says, ‘I’m so sorry to wake you up, Pete, but Bill really had to speak to you.’ ” The next thing the congressman knew, the president was again on the line. “And he says, ‘Hey, Pete! How ya doing?’ ” says King. “No mention that it’s six in the morning. Nothing. And he’s like, ‘Hey, let me read you what I wrote about you, because if it’ll cause you problems, I’ll take it out.’ But of course it wasn’t going to cause me problems. It was basically about how I couldn’t be bought. And he’s like, ‘Isn’t it good? Isn’t it good?’ He was like a kid showing off a new Cadillac. Then, like a day or two later, Hillary called me at 8:30 in the morning. But that was prearranged. Official. Normal. Whatever.” These, perhaps, are the Clintons’ characterological differences in a nutshell: Bill, the bounding cocker spaniel, panting for praise and attention no matter what the hour; Hillary, the groomed Cheshire cat, shrewdly observing boundaries. Dogs often become presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton come to mind as recent examples—in part because their desperation to please, their sensitivity to human moods, makes them ravenously hungry for public approval. (And, as we unfortunately know, also a bit prone to acting like dogs.) But can a cat become a president?

“One thing I’ll say about being successful in politics: People have to like you before they consider voting for you.”

This is Breaux speaking again. Sly and good-natured, he retired from the Senate this January. He’s now sitting in his office at Patton Boggs, an upscale law and lobbying firm in Washington. “If they like you,” he continues, “they’ll excuse you for positions that they don’t agree with. Bill Clinton’s a classic example of that.”

And Hillary?

“I don’t have the slightest clue who Hillary is. All I see is a gal who knew she was as good as anyone else, and she saw this guy she could make something of, and went to Arkansas. That’s a hell of a move to make for a redneck.”
—Charlie Rangel, Congressman (D)

“Well, Hillary. I mean, she can charm a person very well. So she’ll have to use those skills to talk to housewives and farmers and small- businessmen and -women around the country and say, I’m the one who can represent your values and interests.”

The problem, he hastens to add, isn’t that Hillary isn’t likable. Quite the contrary. During the Democrats’ Tuesday caucus lunches, he says Hillary used to stun colleagues by popping up for coffee and asking if anyone else wanted a cup—not exactly the reflex they were expecting from a woman who’d just had a giant White House staff at her disposal. But it’s not like the rest of the world knows this.

“The problem is, when you’re running for the first time for an office, you can help create your image,” he says. “You can tell people who you are. But people already think they know who she is. So for a vast segment of the population, she’d have to change their opinion of her. And that’s really . . . ” he trails off. “She can keep the base, but that’s all she has. And that’s a real challenge. That’s tough.”

“Hillary’s a bit of an anomaly,” agrees Jay Timmons, former head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “She’s an attractive candidate for both Democrats and Republicans. She’s raised more money as the subject of both committees than anyone else.”

In smaller settings, Hillary has proved she’s capable of charming the most uncharmable sorts. But 99 percent of presidential politics is mediated through the television set, and Hillary’s TV addresses are pure chloroform—they’re positively narcotizing. And senators make lousy candidates. Their speech is larded with facts, figures, mysterious verbs that’d be better off as nouns; because they cast hundreds of votes, they’re an opposition researcher’s dream—nearly all of their votes can be reinterpreted in some unbecoming fashion.

Nor does the argument that Hillary has seduced the red parts of New York seem particularly convincing. Chuck Schumer has seduced red New York, too, and no one’s suggesting for even five seconds that he run for president, or that his appeal will translate in Muncie, Indiana. Nor is it clear whether the American electorate will feel comfortable choosing a woman to run a country during a time of war, assuming the world feels as perilous in 2008 as it does now.