Hillary for the White House in 2008?

[Ron Burgundy]

AFP - Hillary Clinton faces re-election next month as senator from New York, but the race on everyone's mind is the one two years from now.

Will the former First Lady be a candidate for the White House in 2008?

According to opinion polls, the wife of former president Bill Clinton will run away with the November 7 contest for senator from overwhelmingly Democratic New York.

Her Republican opponent, John Spencer, is a former city councilman and mayor of Yonkers and an avid supporter of the war in Iraq. A recent Quinnipiac University poll had Clinton leading Spencer by 65 percent to 30 percent.

"It's not even really a campaign," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute of the Clinton-Spencer race.

Spencer is such an underdog that he has even complained about a lack of support from his own Republican Party.

With re-election a virtual certainty, the focus has been on whether Clinton, who turns 59 on Thursday, will seek to become the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party two years from now.

Asked repeatedly whether she will make a bid for the White House, Clinton has remained noncommittal.

"I've been asked that question a few times, and as I've said many times before I am focused on this election, on my work in the Senate," she said during a recent debate.

"Obviously people are talking about whether or not I will or should run for president, and I'm flattered by that, but I have made no decisions," she said.

Analysts are divided on whether Clinton will seek to become the first former First Lady to make a run for the White House.

"The way it's going 'Clinton for President' can crank up and start working on November 8, the day after the election," said Quinnipiac's Carroll. "And I think it will."

Costas Panagopoulos, a political science professor at Fordham University, was less certain.

"One possibility is that she hasn't made a decision," he said. "Everyone treats it as a fait accompli but it's entirely possible that she hasn't decided.

"2008 is still a long way away," he said. "I'm sure she's thinking about it, but I'm not entirely convinced that a decision has been reached.

"If she has reached a decision, strategically it's easy to understand why she would not want to be communicating that; she doesn't want New Yorkers to feel the state is a stepping-stone to the White House."

Nevertheless the signs are there. Clinton has built up a formidable war chest -- much more than needed for a one-sided Senate campaign -- and is surrounded by heavyweight political advisers, not least her husband Bill, considered a brilliant political strategist.

She has stepped up her criticism of President George W. Bush in recent months, hammering his administration for its handling of the "war on terror," the budget deficit, North Korea and calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a chief architect of the war in Iraq.

"We need a new direction in America," she said recently.

During her six years as senator from New York, Clinton has paved a careful path gaining respect through her hard work on health and defense issues and cooperating with the right on a number of nonpartisan initiatives.

"She's trying to play down ambition," said Steven Brams, a professor of politics at New York University (NYU). "She's trying to appear relatively modest and at the same time very qualified because of her Senate career.

"She was accused during her husband's administration of being arrogant and I think that's exactly the image she doesn't want to convey now," he added.

Like the losing Democratic candidate in 2004, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Clinton is handicapped by a vote she cast in the Senate authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

"Under the circumstances she's done the best she can with that issue," said Fordham's Panagopoulos. "She hasn't backtracked to say that she's made a mistake but she's qualified her position about the war."

Even is she is a candidate Clinton is by no means guaranteed the nomination.

"She'll face significant new problems in running for president -- if she decides to do that," said NYU's Brams, noting that no women has ever won the presidential nomination of a major party.

He said the voting figures from November 7, particularly those from more conservative upstate New York, could play a role in an eventual decision on whether or not to run.

"The margin of victory is important," he said. "If she does OK upstate, dominates in New York City and even in the suburbs she's doing OK, all the demographics favor her."