NOT-SO-NEUTRAL CORNER by Ciro Scotti

HILLARY IN 2000? KINDA HAS A NICE RING TO IT

I'm a reconstructed basher of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The key word there is reconstructed. Let me explain.

I bad-mouthed the First Lady endlessly after the election of 1992. You must have heard the riff elsewhere: "Hey, I didn't even vote for Bill, so why do I have to have some woman who happens to be married to him marching around the capital, running secret meetings, and deciding what my health care is going to be like?"

Travelgate and the curious death of White House counsel Vince Foster didn't help, and soon I was well on my way to being a card-carrying Hillary hater. Then came Whitewater, duplicity at Madison Guaranty (the "billing partner" Ken Starr calls her in his latest indictment of Webster Hubbell), sweetheart commodity trades that turned pin money into Lexus money, and Filegate. Primary Colors, the roman a clef by Joe "Anonymous" Klein, confirmed all my suspicions about the controlling, power-hungry, wicked witch of the Ozarks.

In the past year or so, however, a funny thing happened to me and -- if the elections are any gauge -- to a lot of other people as well. We found a new respect for Hillary, the stand-up woman who gracefully withstood the withering disgrace of Monicagate; for Hillary, the protective mother and globe-trotting ambassador of good will; for Hillary, the furious campaigner who flew a million miles, shook a zillions hands, and helped carry the day for a lot of Democrats who looked like dogmeat only months ago.

I guess I first started feeling that I was wrong about Hillary early last winter when I went to the Christmas party that the White House throws for the press every year. As a rube from New York, I stood in line to shake the President's hand and have my photo taken with him and Mrs. Clinton. I had been forewarned that I would feel Bill Clinton's mesmerizing aura. But when confronted with the Clinton mystique, I found that it belonged more to Hillary than to Bill. The President seemed almost cartoon-like. The First Lady, by contrast, managed to feel warm and welcoming -- no small feat considering that she had a houseful of rude and ravenous journalists.

Later, I heard a story from the aide to a Republican senator who had to shepherd two home-state kids to the White House. The youngsters had written prize-winning essays, and part of the prize was meeting the First Lady. Hillary could have easily shaken their hands and gone on to her next official chore. Instead, she took the time to talk with them, and from her conversation, it was clear she had read the essays. Egad! When was the last time a pol actually read what some little schnerds interrupting his day wrote?

So if Al Gore gets snared in Donorgate and Dick Gephardt decides he has a better shot at House Speaker than President, the Democrats can turn to a person who knows the job better than anyone. I'm not saying I would vote for Hillary (I don't, for instance, think it takes a village to raise anything but a barn), but I might. And wouldn't it be wise to start the millennium with a woman at the helm (the boys did such a great job this century).

Of course, Hillary for President is pie-in-the-sky thinking. The idea of the wife of a sitting President running for President is too fraught with complications to seriously contemplate. But as the pundits just proved, Washington these days is a place where -- to steal William Goldman's line about the movie business -- nobody knows anything.

Scotti, BW senior editor for government and sports business, often offers his views on Tuesdays for BW Online