<img alt="Hillary Clinton" src="http://blogs.theguardian.com/news/archives/images/hillaryblog.jpg" width="102" height="204" border="0" style="float:right;margin:5px 5px 5px 5px;"/
US Senator Hillary Clinton. Photograph: Matthew Cavanaugh/Getty Images
The US Republican party, fresh from shooting itself in its born-again foot over the Terri Schiavo affair and led by a president with the lowest approval ratings since the second world war, has decided that the woman who might really kill it off in 2008 is Hillary Clinton.
The concerted anti-Hillary campaign was first mooted in February, but now New York's Republican party chairman, Stephen Minarik, has the bash Hillary bandwagon rolling with a fundraising appeal letter aimed at stopping her re-election as New York senator in 2006. This, the thinking goes on the right, would stop short any possible run at the White House.
You can smell the fear for yourself at StopHillaryPac, a murky political action campaign site that hopes to emulate the success of the ironically named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the anti-Kerry crusade of 2004.
Whatever political ambitions Clinton may or may not have, she should be charmed by the kind of power accorded her by Senate Republicans, as in this terrified bleating from the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
"We all know that she covets the presidency and is only using her time in the US Senate as a stepping stone to get back to the White House," the group of Senate Republicans cried during the 2004 election campaign. "We can't let her set the national agenda and go unimpeded in her race to get back to the White House!" Um, right, because that happened.
Minarik's letter, obtained by the Associated Press, bears the hallmarks of the Republican spin doctor Arthur Finkelstein, profiled here by the New York Times (registration required) in an article about his December marriage to his gay partner. Finkelstein has won many a campaign for Republican luminaries including New York governor George Pataki, mostly by tagging his client's opponents as liberal.
"In his four-page letter, Minarik refers to Clinton six times as a 'radical liberal' or 'ultraliberal,' and says she is the 'darling of the wealthy liberal left - especially the Hollywood left' and has a 'vast network of far-left contributors,'" AP reported.
The best comedy quote comes from the attackers on StopHillaryPac: "Back in 1992, most Republican insiders never thought that then-president George H W Bush could possibly lose to a draft-dodging, pot-smoking newcomer named Bill Clinton. So they took Clinton lightly and never even attacked his atrocious record!"
Did Al Gore think he could lose to a draft-dodging, alcoholic newcomer named George Bush? Attacking his record should be a doddle, even for an imploding Democratic party.
