Hillary for '08?

Excerpt from Jonathan Chait "Dean, Clinton and Kerry: No, No, No for 2008" in the L.A. Times (site requires free registration):

Dean, Clinton and Kerry: No, No, No for 2008: "A secular Yankee like Dean is about the worst possible candidate.

Unless, of course, the alternative is Hillary Clinton. OK, maybe she wouldn't be worse than Dean. But she surely would go down in flames if she won the nomination in 2008. President Bush owed his victory in large part to cultural division. If there's anybody who incites cultural divisions, it's Hillary Clinton.

Her advisors point out that she's religious and speaks the language of Scripture. That's nice, but nobody seemed to notice it during her eight years in the national spotlight. She's painfully uncharismatic. Her only political accomplishment is that she won a Senate seat in an extremely Democratic state, where she ran six percentage points behind Al Gore. Clinton's supporters like to note that she's not as liberal as people think. That's exactly the problem. I can see the logic behind nominating a liberal whom voters see as moderate. Nominating a moderate whom voters see as liberal is kind of backward, isn't it?

Probably the only worse option than Dean or Clinton, short of nominating Paris Hilton, would be to renominate John Kerry, who, reports have suggested, inexplicably harbors ambitions of running again in 2008. In a previous column I compared Kerry's contribution to his own campaign to an anchor's contribution to a boat race. In retrospect, I seem to have given him far too much credit."