Please, Hillary, don't do it

Even before the fall elections, we're getting a new round of stories on whether she will or won't run for president in 2008. The Hillary Rodham Clinton saga continues.

Even before the fall elections, we're getting a new round of stories on whether she will or won't run for president in 2008. The Hillary Rodham Clinton saga continues.

Here is one observer who hopes that she won't and that she remains a hardworking and popular senator from New York. Perhaps she just might be the first female majority or minority leader in the Senate. That would be an achievement.

That she should not be a candidate is based on three little words: She can't win.

• No question she can win the Democratic nomination. The activists in the party will come out in droves in the early primary and caucus states. And she will have the money to make her case. Once she gets the nomination, the problems arise and big time, as our failed vice president would say.
• Write off every southern and border state carried by Bush in both 2000 and 2004 (although I still think Gore won in 2000). Those red states are a huge obstacle for Clinton, and her supporters concede it. But Clinton folks maintain she can carry all the blue states and add either Florida or Ohio to the list. Wrong, especially in more conservative Ohio. Also, she could lose some of those blue states for a variety of reasons stated below.
• Clinton will lose some votes for the wrong reason. She's a woman. We like to think voters are more enlightened these days. Don't count on it after W won the last two elections. No woman except for Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 has been on the national ticket, and her running mate carried one state and the District of Columbia.
• The pluses and minuses of her husband's two terms will be in play. Republicans of the Karl Rove ilk are certain to harp on the minuses out front or in whispers or vicious fliers. You'll find elderly women of another generation hearing this: "Why didn't that woman leave or divorce him after he did those unspeakable things with Monica what's her name in the White House?" It will get ugly.
• There is the dynasty situation. Does the nation from 1989 to 2017 want a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton scenario? Bush the younger has demonstrated that the apple can fall far away from the tree. Dynasties in a democracy just don't sound right.

Surely the senator's advisers are smart enough to recognize these barriers even if she secures the nomination. If she and they pursue this risky undertaking, we face four or eight more years of GOP rule. Think about it.