It doesn't take a village. It takes 270 electoral votes!

Joe Klein of TIME Magazine has some advice for Senator Hillary Clinton. Don't run. Don't put the country through a repeat of the 1990s:

"It would doubtless be a circus, a revisitation of the carnival ugliness that infested public life in the 1990s. Already there are blogs, websites and fund-raising campaigns dedicated to denigrating her. According to the New York Observer last week, these sites aren't getting much traffic—yet. But they will."

Poor Hillary. I am ready to start crying.

Hillary Clinton is not a victim of any conspiracy. She is a smart lady who can play the "mean" game as well as anybody.

Hillary Clinton will keep talking about family values and defending the US. She won't be attending any fundraisers hosted by Whoopie Goldberg or Michael Moore. She will continue drifting to the right and positioning herself to run as a "Harry Truman Democrat" in 2008.

In early 2007, Hillary Clinton will make the big decision. Will she or won't she?

I don't think that she will. Why? She can't win. Hillary Clinton can not carry a single state won by Pres. Bush in 2000 or 2004.

Hillary Clinton won't run. We will be spared the anti-Hillary blogs and web sites. We won't have to hear about Whitewater, the missing documents, the FBI files, the last minute pardons, the Monica scandal, etc. We won't have to watch Bill fight Hillary for air time during the campaign. Who is going to tell Bill Clinton to take a back seat and let his wife do the talking?

History favors the Democrats in 2008. Most 2 term presidencies are followed by someone from the opposition party. Reagan was the exception in '88 when he was followed by VP Bush.

However, the Democrats need to find someone who can win a so called "red state".

All of this could change if we have another populist conservative like Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan running for President. Yet, I don't see that either. Perot is not running. Buchanan ran in 2000 and did not hurt Bush.

The Democrats' biggest problem is on the values front. They need someone who can connect with parents and middle class whites.

Don Lambro recently reported on The Washington Times:

"In the 2004 election, married parents supported President Bush over Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts by nearly 20 percentage points. Mr. Bush frequently talked about the importance of faith and morals in his campaign and the role that parents played in raising their children. Mr. Kerry and his party, much of whose campaign funding and political support came from liberals in the entertainment industry, rarely touched the issue.

"Democrats will not do better with married parents until they recognize one simple truth: Parents have a beef with popular culture. As they see it, the culture is getting ever more violent, materialistic, and misogynistic, and they are losing their ability to protect their kids from morally corrosive images and messages," said the study's author, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University and a senior fellow at PPI.

"To be credible, Democrats must acknowledge the legitimacy of parents' beef and make it unmistakably clear that they are on the parents' side," Ms. Whitehead said. " (www.washingtontimes.com)

James Tarranto wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal:

"And there are other reasons why married parents might tend to vote Republican. One is economic. Married people with children are in or approaching their peak earning years, and they need all the money they can get, for raising children is expensive. The Republican message of lower taxes is all the more compelling to a voter with mouths to feed.

On broader cultural and social issues--religion, abortion, gay rights, etc.--married people with children are likely to be more conservative than the average voter because cultural conservatives are more likely to marry and have children in the first place." (www.opinionjournal.com)

Hillary Clinton may be the darling of the left but that's not enough to get 270 electoral votes!

It does not take a village. It takes 270 votes to get in the White House!