Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Old enemies of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are out in force. Just weeks after she joined the Democratic Party's flock of presidential contenders, Clinton is being targeted by conservative and Republican-allied activists intent on derailing her campaign before the start of next year's primaries. They have surfaced with a flurry of planned projects: a Michael Moore-style documentary film, book-length exposes, and websites such as StopHerNow.comand StopHillaryPAC.com. Conservative admirers of the Swift Vets and POWs for Truth media blitz that helped torpedo Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential candidacy in 2004 are now agitating to "Swift-boat" Clinton. .........Clinton campaign...

Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that her unsuccessful health care reform effort in 1993 makes her more effective on the issue now as she seeks the presidencyThis week, rival John Edwards offered his plan for universal health care that calls for a tax increase to ensure health care coverage for all and a requirement that businesses provide insurance. The tax increase would pay for the plan's cost of up to $120 billion a year."The president can propose, but the Congress has to dispose, and if we don't have a consensus in the country that our present system is...

When her father Bill ran for the presidency in 1992, Chelsea Clinton was a gawky 12-year-old with braces and a mop of crinkly hair, ill at ease in front of the cameras. Some 15 years later, her mother Hillary has assigned her daughter a crucial role in the family's latest White House campaign as the former First Lady hopes to firm up support among women voters with a "mum strategy". Standing together: Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Miss Clinton, 26, who now works for a Wall Street hedge fund, has not appeared alongside her mother since the New York senator launched...

Jerome Corsi, co-author of the 2004 campaign book "Unfit for Command" attacking Sen. John Kerry's war record, joined up Tuesday with the organization intended to similarly undermine Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 campaign. TheVanguard.org is intended to be a right-wing version of the leftist MoveOn.Org. It was founded by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Gil Amelio, former CEO of Apple and National Semiconductor. Coming on board Feb. 16 as TheVanguard's full-time editorial and creative director will be Richard Poe, who has served as editor-in-chief of FrontPage Magazine. He has been described as the conservative movement's leading expert on MoveOn.Org's...

..... a new poll shows Sen Hillary Clinton running at the back of the pack.....running last among the top four contenders - former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack. Edwards leads, with 25% of support among likely Iowa caucus-goers, according to the survey by Strategic Vision. Obama had 17%, Vilsack 16%, and Clinton 15%. Clinton has trailed in Iowa polls for several months.....A KCCI-TV poll last month showed Edwards and Obama tied at 23%t, with Vilsack getting 12 % and Clinton 10%. Obama moved to crush a so-called smear percolating...

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last night ripped into 2008 White House contender John Edwards - her first direct assault on any of her potential Democratic presidential rivals. Clinton's surprising broadside came just hours after Edwards, in Harlem, delivered a sharp condemnation - clearly aimed at Clinton, although he didn't mention her by name - against those who fail to "speak out" against the war in Iraq. "Silence is betrayal, and I believe it is a betrayal not to speak out against the escalation of the war in Iraq," Edwards told a crowd at Manhattan's Riverside Church, where Martin Luther King...

For a candidate who is portraying herself as the most hawkish of the Democrats — and who, at least to judge by Jeffrey Goldberg's dispatch in the latest New Yorker, is the most hawkish of the Democrats — Senator Clinton's reaction to President Bush's speech on Iraq was quite a disappointment. Mrs. Clinton came out against sending more troops, and her statement began with the words, "based on the president's speech." But based on Mrs. Clinton's statement, it doesn't sound like she even listened to the speech.

<p>WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has spent much of the last month behind closed doors, putting the final touches on a presidential campaign-in-waiting.</p> <p>Her hectic schedule has been crammed with private lunches and phone conversations with elected officials and political operatives. She has sounded out Democratic Party officials from New York to Des Moines about her chances and hired a cadre of new campaign aides.</p>

THE first vote is still more than a year away, but the campaign to replace President George W Bush in the White House is already throwing up surprises. Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense. A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination. Despite winning re-election to the US Senate by a handsome margin in...

NEW YORK Just to prepare you for the new year's press frenzy surrounding the still-distant 2008 race for president, here are latest December poll results in key primary states from American Research Group.