Looking at the field of Democratic presidential candidates, it is difficult to imagine any of them taking the party's nomination by storm. If they aren't kooks, they're racists or corrupt incompetents or wafflers or self-important liberal robots or, in the case of Gephardt, too Democratic (Old Style). So, why won't the following happen? Since Hillary's sucking up all the air and airtime and sentiment and speculative energies of the media (and condemning ambulance chasers like Edwards to obscurity) anyway, why don't they draft her to make a run at Bush? It would most obviously be a trial run (maybe something like Dewey's run against FDR in 1944?), since there is no chance that Bush will lose, and it will set the stage for Ms. Rodham-Clinton to run for the empty throne in 2008.
Now, to counter her ambitions for the Presidency five years from now, what the Bush people have got to do is have Mr. Cheney choose to resign the Vice Presidency in 2006 (right around the mid-terms) and replace him with Dr. Rice, who would certainly pass all muster with conservatives and be in the perfect spot in 2008 to run as the virtual incumbent. A black woman as the GOP standardbearer in five years? What do you suppose the Democrats would do then?
Change their drawers is what.
At any rate, we'd certainly find out in a big hurry just how much conservatives believe in the individual, race-blind society. Could Cooter down on the bayou vote for a "nigra woman"? He will if he doesn't want Ms. Pantsuit to take over and implement a reign of soft Stalinism. He will if he doesn't want a [village] to raise his child, by God.