When it was first reported that Hillary Rodham Clinton was considering running for the Senate seat for New York being vacated by Senator Daniel Moynihan in 2000, few took it seriously. Now, three months later, just about everyone is taking it seriously while still waiting for her decision.
With her awesome dedication to detail, Mrs Clinton has had herself briefed on the minutiae of Manhattan ward politics and the economic statistics of the huge state of New York, which is nearly twice the size of Ireland and has over 18 million people.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting of the Monica Lewinsky saga, is keeping a sharp eye on HRC, as she is known to her staff, and is convinced she has her sights fixed on New York. Having watched Mrs Clinton at the latest of the numerous political functions she is attending in New York, Ms Dowd wrote: "Yup. The lady definitely wants to be a senator. It was pretty evident when she studied up on all New York's agricultural crops and started referring to herself and the state as `we'."
If Mrs Clinton does enter the race, it will be a bruising, dirty campaign as her likely opponent will be Mayor Rudi Giuliani of zero tolerance fame, who can look like a shark as well as behaving like one.
And Hillary Clinton as senatorial candidate will be exposed to the flesh-eating New York media digging into every aspect of her past life. It will be light years away from the tightly controlled schedule of a first lady in her White House fortress who keeps the Washington press corps as far off as possible.
Now comes probably the most detailed and researched biography of the potential candidate of all those written so far called The First Partner. It is by Joyce Milton, who has built her reputation on authoritative biographies of Charlie Chaplin and the Lindberghs. Oddly enough, she has already written a children's book on Mrs Clinton called A New Kind of First Lady for use in elementary schools. It was written in 1993 when Ms Milton was still enthusiastic about the arrival of the Clintons in the White House.
"Like many women my age, I felt I could identify with Hillary Rodham Clinton." She and Hillary had similar Methodist and family backgrounds but "Most important, Hillary Clinton was a product of the first wave of post-war feminism."
Now, for Ms Milton after her years of research, that first enthusiasm has faded. While admiring the First Lady's capacity for hard work and her protective upbringing of daughter Chelsea, the biographer finds a flawed figure who has "also been a victim of that great delusion of the 1960s, namely, that it's possible to continually reinvent oneself, rewriting the rules to suit whatever role one happens to be playing at the moment."
Ms Milton has analysed Hillary Clinton's ideas on child welfare, health reform and education at length and finds them lacking. "A self-confessed policy wonk and proud of it, Hillary wanted to be judged by her ideas. That's fair enough. But the more one looked at Hillary Clinton's ideas, the more one saw that despite her reputation as a very smart woman, she is not a clear thinker, perhaps she trusts her intellectual rationalisations a lot more than she trusts her emotions."
The Monica Lewinsky saga is rushed over by Ms Milton as she came up against her deadline, but she examines at some length how Hillary Clinton dealt with the earlier "bimbo eruptions" during the Arkansas years. Her way was to take the "defence lawyer posture".
"Though she might know, in a general sense, that Bill Clinton fooled around, she had decided to take his word for it that he was innocent of specific allegations. To think otherwise would put her in an untenable position."
How much ammunition Mrs Clinton's role in the failed Whitewater property scheme and other financial transactions could give to her political opponents in a Senate race, remains to be seen. Even the dogged Ken Starr could not produce evidence to warrant an indictment after five years of investigation.
Ms Milton sees more potential damage in the alienation of women who are disillusioned at the ardent feminist who now likes to pose for Vogue in Oscar de la Renta dresses. And who has passed from defending Anita Hill as a victim of sexual harassment to fierce loyalty to a man accused of such actions and, in the case of Juanita Broaddrick, of sexual assault.
"The one-time campus activist, who scorned appearances in favour of intellectual substance, had come a long way to reinvent herself as a Vogue cover girl," comments Ms Milton.
The 435-page book ends on an unsubstantiated claim that "She and Bill were once again discussing divorce, and as their political interests diverged, it became more difficult to imagine how they could find a common ground to repair their battered partnership."
Ms Dowd is finding that as Mrs Clinton moves nearer to making a political future for herself, "she sounded more Bill than Hillary."
Back in 1992, "She was all spine, where he was all flexibility. She was an ideologue, where he was a shape-shifter . . . Now it's her turn to try to be all things to all people. To slide to the centre. To bend that famous spine."
Galway will be a welcome respite from all this.
The First Partner - Hillary Rodham Clinton by Joyce Milton is published by William Morrow, New York, and costs $27.