Hillary I of the House of Clinton

The latest polls all show Hillary Rodham Clinton pulling ahead of her rivals for the Democratic nomination as well as potential Republican opponents in the general election.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll released today showed Clinton at 49% support, her highest total of the year. “For the seven days ending October 14, 2007, Hillary Clinton earns 46% of the vote,” Rasmussen Reports says. “Barack Obama is second at 23% followed by John Edwards at 11%. Bill Richardson attracts 4% while Dennis Kucinich at 3% and Joe Biden at 2%. Chris Dodd and Mike Gravel’s support each rounds up to 1% while 8% of Likely Democratic primary voters are undecided.”

The punditocracy has all but declared Hillary the nominee, without a single vote having yet been cast. Which prompted Geoffrey Wheatcroft to ask, Who Made Hillary Queen? Writing in last Sunday’s Washington Post, Wheatcroft asks, “What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits?”

Wheatcroft sees Hillary as being more like Lady Astor — who became the first member of the British parliament by inheriting her seat from her husband — than Golda Meir, who was born into poverty and rose to become Israel’s first woman prime minister on her own merits. An author of three books of history, the British journalist notes that “Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.” Disturbed by this tendency in the United States toward dynastic politics, Wheatcroft says of Hillary that she “has become a potential president because she is famous for being a wife (and a wronged wife at that).”

The Hapsburgs and the Romanovs may be dethroned and the Valois long extinct, but between the Bushes and the Clintons, there’s no need to look to Europe for willing and ambitious dynasts. As the Associated Press points out, “4o% of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House.” And now, “if Hillary Clinton were to be elected and re-elected, the nation could go 28 years in a row with the same two families governing the country. Add the elder Bush’s terms as vice president, and that would be 36 years straight with a Bush or Clinton in the White House.”

Yes, it’s true that George I was not succeeded immediately by George II; there were the eight years of Bill the Popular between them. But the regular alternance in power of two dynasties could be termed a ‘condominium’ — a monopoly on power held jointly, in this case by two families.

And the Bush/Clinton dynastic condominium may not end with Hillary’s two terms as president: Jeb Bush and his son, George P. Bush, are waiting in the wings, and if either one of them were elected to succeed Hillary, there is at least the hypothetical possibility of 36 years of Bush/Clinton, not even including George H.W. Bush’s eight years as vice-president.

“Now, I suspect, understandable disgust with the mess Bush the younger has made of virtually everything he’s touched has stoked a wave of Clinton nostalgia that Hillary hopes to ride straight into the White House,” writes Katy Burns, a columnist for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. But is dynastic succession a good principle by which to govern the American republic? Burns thinks not. “Dynastic succession is inherently undemocratic, un-American and just a little creepy. It was a bad idea in 2000. It’s a bad one today.”