Opinion: In 1998, as a combination of wily Democrat obstructionists and jelly-spined Republican squishes turned President Clinton's impeachment trial into a farce of a travesty of a farrago, I had a brief conversation with California Senator Barbara Boxer.
"My duty is to the Constitution," said the petite brunette liberal extremist, very gravely. "My duty is to preserve our two-party democratic system. It's up to the Democrats to save the Republican Party from itself." I sprayed my coffee all down my shirt front, but Senator Boxer ploughed on, warming to her theme and noting the latest Republican poll numbers - down somewhere between Robert Mugabe and the Ebola virus. "That's not good for our democracy," she explained. "This is a tragedy for the Republicans. The GOP has become the Get Our President party. That's not the Republican Party the people want. We have to reach out to them."
"Oh, come off it," I said. Okay, I didn't. Instead, I nodded thoughtfully in a respectfully non-partisan sort of way and silently marvelled at the senator's ability to reel off this sort of stuff with a straight face.
Eventually, sensing a massive uncontainable guffaw rising in her gullet, Ms Boxer wrapped it up, stepped into the Senate elevator and, as the doors slid closed, muffled howls of laughter began to shake the Capitol, glass rattled in the windows, plaster fell from the ceiling, etc.
Politics affords few greater pleasures than offering one's opponents some ostensibly friendly but hopefully lethal piece of advice.
We're in one of those phases now - hence, the vogue for columns in the US press on the "Conservative Crack-Up", a fearsome beast that, like the Loch Ness Monster, more and more folks claim to have spotted looming in the distance. In reality, the unrelieved gloom is on the Democrat side of the ledger: the Republicans are all but certain to increase their majority in Congress in 2006. Whereas, if you want the state of the Democratic Party in a single image, cut out the photograph from The New York Times the other day: a pumped Senator Robert C Byrd, the octogenarian former Ku Klux Klansman of West Virginia, giving a clenched-fist salute at a rally for moveon.org, the leftie internet agitators who've raised gazillions of dollars and have little to show for it other than their own celebrity.
That's the Rainbow Coalition 2005 model: a dwindling band of ancient vindictive legislators yoked to a cash-flush unrepresentative fringe. It would actually be to the Democrats' advantage if the Byrd-MoveOn union were to crack up, but instead their union seems merely cracked, like a miscast double-act thrown together by a desperate burlesque agent.
There is, however, one exception to the Dems' dance of death: president-presumptive Rodham Clinton. The chances of a Rodham restoration in the White House are better than even. For one thing, the salient feature of the Clintons' Democratic Party is that it was grand for the Clintons, disastrous for the party: throughout the 1990s, the Dems lost everything - the House, Senate, state legislatures, governorships - but somehow Bill and Hill were always the lone exceptions that proved the rule. In 2000, Clinton couldn't even bequeath the White House to his vice-president in a time of "peace and prosperity", yet the first lady won an unprecedented victory in a state she'd never lived in. There is no reason to believe the Clintons' historical immunity to their party's remorseless decay will not continue.
Second, the fact of a female candidate will send the media into orgies of diversity celebration. Right now, it's the Republicans with the star blacks (Condi Rice), star Hispanics (neophyte Senator Mel Martinez) and star immigrants (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger), while the Dems are a sad collection of angry white males (Ted Kennedy and Robert C Byrd). Were Condi to run against, say, Democrat Joe Biden in 2008, the press would play it strictly on the issues. But, if it's Republican Bill Frist against Hillary, get set for a non-stop cavalcade of stories with little inset photos of Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Gandhi, Mrs Bandaranaike, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Helen Clark in New Zealand, and headlines like "Is America Ready?" that manage to imply ever so subtly that not voting for Hill is the 2008 equivalent of declaring Negroes are three-fifths of a human being.
Yes, yes, I know - her failed healthcare plan, all the scandals, the lost billing records, the Travelgate firings. That'll be 16 years old on election day and nobody - or not enough - will care.
Third, the senator is a quick learner. Her initial campaign stops in the 2000 race were embarrassing: stiff, evasive, that robotic I-Speak-Your-Weight voice. By the end, she was almost charming - not lightly-worn Fred-Astaire-romancing-Audrey-Hepburn charm; you could see she had to work at it. But nevertheless she did, and she succeeded.
Smart folks adapt: for Republicans to assume they'll be running against the Hillary of 1992 is a big mistake.
And when you look at her feints to the right in the post-9/11 era - tough on terror, equivocal on abortion - what matters is not whether she believes them but that she's the only Democrat with sufficient star quality to be able to ignore the deranged needs of unabletomoveon.org.
No male Democrat could get away with Hillary's tentative moves away from Dem orthodoxy on abortion: John Kerry was reduced to claiming that, while he personally believed life began at conception, he would never let his deep personal beliefs interfere with his legislative programme; Howard Dean was practically offering to perform partial birth abortions on volunteers from the crowd. But, if Hillary runs as kinda-sorta-pro-life-ish, I'll bet the Democrats' feminist enforcers decline to protest.
Can Hillary be stopped? Obviously she can. But one lesson of the last 15 years is that the Democratic Party is basically a dead husk - it's as effective as whoever's wearing it. In the 1990s, the Clintons swiped it. For the 2004 St Vitus' dance, Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand and MoveOn.org seized it and couldn't make it work. But, if Hill takes it back...
Don't get me wrong. Biennial incremental gains by the Republicans are set to continue for a while yet. But don't be surprised if November 2008 is the usual day of disaster for Democrats in the Senate, House and state legislatures, with the exception of Hillary's election as president - oh, and Chelsea's stunning surprise victory in the North Dakota governor's race.