Never count a Clinton out

As guessing games go, this one didn’t last long. The bookies didn’t even have time to set the lines on whether Hillary Clinton would or wouldn’t when she suddenly fired the shot heard ‘round the campaign.

Hillary is running. And I don’t mean just for the Senate.

Clinton’s appeal last week for “common ground” on abortion was a perfect two-fer. On one level, it was about Roe v. Wade. At heart, it was about her. Come together over abortion, she seemed to say, and while you’re at it, look at me. I’m not so bad, I’m really a moderate. Really.

Testing. Testing. It’s the new-and-improved Hillary, trying out some fresh material for 2008. And why not? Somebody has to be president.

Her speech to an abortion-rights group in Albany, N.Y., came on the 32nd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling that legalized abortion. She clearly saw it as the ideal moment not only to signal her intentions but also her strategy.

So she repeated her strong support for abortion rights while also praising the “influence of religious and moral values” in keeping teenage girls celibate.

Calling abortion “a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women,” Clinton said, “The best way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in the first place.”

Although Clinton has said similar things before, combining them in that setting was a classic play for the middle, or at least the appearance of the middle. Coming when Democrats are sifting through the ashes of John Kerry’s defeat and trying to figure out who they want to be when they grow up, Clinton showed she’s already got her own answers.

Let others get dirty in the fight over whether Howard Dean should be party boss or whether Condoleezza Rice should be secretary of state. Clinton knows what she wants and she’s going for it.

That she’s working under the tutelage of a master craftsman, the man who might someday be called the first President Clinton, should not be overlooked. The only Democrat since FDR to win two terms, Bill Clinton knows a thing or two about making friends and disarming enemies.

And that’s what I think Hillary is up to with her abortion speech. She’s not trying to win conservative votes, especially from pro-life Americans. She knows she can talk for four years about moral values and religion without winning a single vote on the religious right. To those people, she’s the Lefty From Another Planet. Now and forever.

But anything that has a hint of the middle of the road could make her less threatening to swing voters in red states. Being a moderate, as she tried to seem Monday by separating herself from the party line on abortion, might do the trick.

Will it work? One savvy Dem has his doubts, saying she could be too clever by half.

“There’s no question she has the presidency in mind,” he said. “You don’t make that speech on abortion if you have a primary in New York” for the 2006 Senate re-election.

“But her problem has always been credibility, and I don’t see how this kind of thing helps her,” he continued. “I think these days, credibility problems are the kiss of death.”

Agreed, but I would never count a Clinton out. Her teacher had major credibility problems, but he found a way around them through a strategy called triangulation. By combing elements of both liberals and conservatives, and by ticking off both sides at different times, he often ended up somewhere between the two. That made him look like just enough of a moderate to escape the liberal tag.

Here’s the catch for Hillary. Bill Clinton could be so Southern-fried charming that many Americans believed he was truly conservative in some ways. That’s a skill his wife is still working to acquire.