Pasteur surely wasn't thinking of American politics when he riffed on the Boy Scouts' Motto, "Be Prepared."  But chance may indeed be playing into "boy scout" John Edwards' hands -- and his One America Committee has been getting prepared.

With a tip of the hat to Kevin Drum we learn there are some extremely high stakes power-players working to load the dice in favor of the former Senator and Vice-Presidential nominee's chances for a successful run at the '08 Presidential election.

 

The Washington Note's Steve Clemons reports, "Some high level Democratic Party political insiders," are whispering about Hillary Clinton taking over Harry Ried's leadership position as he moves down to "'whipping' the Party from behind," a role with less lime-light that he would allegedly prefer.

That is, of course, if should she decide not to run for President.

Cutting to the chase, while remaining highly skeptical, Ezra Klein opines that this could be a great big honkin' gift to JRE.

It's possible that the netroots' and lefty distaste for her is showing up in polling, influencers, or folks her advisors talk with.  If they realize she lacks solid support from the base and is too polarized to easily capture the center, she may back off.  While those trends haven't yet manifested in polls, Kos's Washington Post op-ed and general online anger may be convincing her team that it's only a matter of time before she faces a full-out rebellion.  And imagine the embarrassment if all their money and prestige and power fell to, say, John Edwards, whom the primary calendar now advantages.

Even the fact that this is being seriously discussed -- what a natural Hillary would be as the minority/majority leader -- that republican fundraisers who are fed up with Bush, uncomfortable with McCain, and wouldn't give a dime to Hillary if their tax write-offs depended on it are looking for a new horse to back -- that John Warner's netroots support doesn't measure up to John Edwards' appeal to labor, Southerners, the poor, people of faith, and just about everybody -- bodes extremely well for Edwards, the anti-Hillary.

There's no question in my mind that Hillary has the "balls" to make a great run at the presidency.  I have no doubt she has what it takes to make the right decisions when faced with any crisis situation that needs the Oval Office's attention.  It's getting there that worries me.  Her main hurdle is that she's just pissed so many people off.  Fairly or unfairly, there are twice as many people who flat out hate her than love her -- and the rest of us who don't mind her and agree with a lot of what says are extremely leery of her ability to clear such a high bar.

People that don't like Hillary Clinton, hate her with a blistering passion, making her barely electable -- if at all.   My instincts and anecdotal evidence for this are backed up by the polling data.  The same goes for Al "Hollywood" Gore, who along with Hillary, is the only other potential Democratic candidate who consistently rates higher than Edwards at this very early stage of the game.

I don't want to sound like Dorothy in The Wiz, closing my eyes, clicking my heels and just wishing away the next 900 days of the Bush regime as simply a bad dream to be slept through.  So very much can change, but according to PollingReport.com 47% of the people CNN/Harris Interactive polled in June would "definitely not vote for Hillary (22% definitely would), the same number who would never vote for John Kerry.  The negatives for Al Gore were slightly worse, at 48%.  (The number that restored my faith in the sanity of the nation was that 63% wouldn't vote for Jeb Bush under any circumstances.)

Hillary's negatives are consistent with a May ABC News/Washington Post Poll, showing her alienating 42% in a head-to-head match-up with John McCain.  That is a better number than she received in CNN's January run-off against Condoleeza Rice where a majority, 51% said they would never vote for Hillary.

This may be old news to political junkies, but it's nonetheless remarkable that Edwards is in such a fortuitous position to capture the nomination this early as a relative outsider to the halls of governance, both inside and outside the beltway.   But in the age of the Culture of Corruption, a likable outsider is just what the electorate is looking for.  

Conventional wisdom says that while a sitting Senator may be eminently qualified to be President, they have a difficult time indeed running from their record.  That same wisdom dictates, however, that a presumptive nominee have an institutional power base to rely upon, like a Governorship, Vice-Presidential incumbency, or like Ike, Grant and Washington, be supreme commander of a victorious war effort.  Nixon (who always seemed to break the rules), having spent the Kennedy/Johnson years in the political wilderness was hardly, however, an outsider running as an insurgent maverick.

Edwards may just have it all.  The political winds are blowing his way.  With his tireless work ethic he's captured the populist economic issue, poverty, that is the exact opposite of the corporate cronyism that has marked the last five years of compassionate conservatism.  He came out and denounced his vote on Iraq once he could do so without embarrassing John Kerry (too much), and has very little of the compromising baggage associated with political infighting that reduces almost every Senator to empty promises and pandering.

He has a great family, articulate without being superficial, attractive (He's JFK with dimples!), and already has a nationwide grassroots effort preparing to greet lady luck with open arms should she smile on him some more.