Say a prayer for Hillary: if you want a Republican in the White House, that is.

AT a town-hall meeting in Derry, N.H., in January, Mitt Romney tried to stir the crowd in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's upset victory in Iowa: "We cannot afford Barack Obama as the next president!" About two people applauded. The next day, in Nashua, he mentioned Obama, but added, "I can't wait to meet Hillary Clinton face to face." Sustained applause.

Taken together, those two very different reactions provide a reliable barometer of conservative sentiment toward the Democratic candidates. Conservatives have long experience loathing Hillary Clinton. It has become second nature. If they ever do come to feel the same way about Barack Obama--and they may not--it will take time. Hillary Clinton will long hold pride of place as an object of scorn and a source of motivation for conservatives.

Hillary is smart, articulate, and disciplined; she has not made major strategic mistakes in her primary campaign. But she is hampered by his-and-hers political baggage, a fact that is especially apparent when she is compared with the charismatic, seemingly post-partisan Obama.

And Hillary has accrued additional weaknesses as the campaign has progressed. She began with high negatives, a chilly persona, and a liberal voting record. As a Washington insider who personifies an era of bitter partisan politics, she was always going to have to struggle to present herself credibly as "an agent of change," to use the phrase she favors.

But only over the past several weeks has Hillary's campaign given Republicans reason to wish devoutly for her success in the primary. She has earned the vocal disapproval of the liberal elite in a way the Clintons had never quite managed before, even through the fundraising scandals, the Lewinsky affair, and the payola pardons. If she wins the nomination, she will be forced to court the party's angry-Left base at a time when she would be better served by reaching out to the center. She has used Bill as an obvious crutch, weakening her own image and saddling herself with him for the rest of the campaign, while her feminist allies have made it clear they will do all they can to define her candidacy as an exercise in vintage 1970s-style feminism.

Hillary has gone from "inevitable" to "potential general-election disaster." Republican strategists are gleeful over the possibility that she'll win the nomination. What haunts the Grand Old Party is the specter of an Obama primary victory, which would deny Republicans their best opportunity to squeak back into the White House in what otherwise should be a difficult 2008. Republicans disdain Hillary, but feel that they need her--a twisted kind of political codependence.

The biggest shift over the last few weeks in Hillary's standing has been the amazing wave of revulsion directed at the Clintons by the liberal opinion elite. Early in the campaign, Hillary's coverage was positive--sometimes adoring. The media considered it odd that someone so "warm and witty" in person could be such a polarizing figure; only an irrational Hillary-hater, they argued, could see a committed liberal in this sensible moderate who has worked so diligently for bipartisan consensus. That Hillary is history. Now, the narrative is that she's a down-and-dirty fighter who is polarizing her own party's activists. The endearing chuckle has been replaced by a forced cackle.

In the 1990s, liberals felt obliged to defend the Clinton White House against a congressional assault; scare figures such as Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr could not be allowed to take down the Democrats' champions. But now there is no Clinton White House, no Republican Congress, no Gingrich and no Starr on the scene. Liberals can consult their moral compass again--and it's pointing toward Obama. If liberals who agree with the Clintons on most policy issues can't stand them, wait until voters who don't share that agenda make themselves heard in the fall.

WHAT WENT WRONG

A big part of the trouble, unsurprisingly, is Bill. As late as December, Hillary--in her iteration as policy maven and sensible hawk--had been holding her own on the campaign trail and debate stages. Bill hadn't been much in evidence. Her presidential bid looked like her campaign in New York in 2000. Then Obama beat her in Iowa. Now, Bill is back--and so, too, is Billary; the negative neologism invented by the Right has gained new currency among liberals.

Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post, characterizes the Clintons as "two people reeking of self-pity and spoiling for fights with anyone who has the temerity to stand in their way." St. Petersburg Times columnist Philip Gailey writes, "If the price of taking down Obama is to tarnish his post-White House image as a global statesman, Clinton doesn't mind paying it. The Big Dog is having too much fun doing what he does best, which is being un-presidential." Nicholas von Hoffman writes in the The Nation, "The Clintons cannot compete with the enthusiasm Obama sets off so they must destroy it. Their tactic is disillusionment. They are the quashers of the dream." And on and on it goes.

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"I think we've reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons," writes Jonathan Chait in the Los Angeles Times. Conservative loathing of Hillary Clinton, he writes, "seems a lot less irrational. We're not frothing Clinton haters like . . . well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they'd go away." He wonders: "Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along?" That is, "right about the Clintons' essential nature?"

It's not a bad question to ask, even if it is 16 years overdue. Liberals didn't complain when that "essential nature" was on rampant display while the Clintons were in power. From the early years of the Clinton presidency, when conservative talk radio was blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing, to the ruthless campaign to destroy their enemies during the impeachment scandal, the Clintons have always been masters of the low political blow, delivered with unpitying determination and self-righteous indignation.

Liberal op-ed writers and disenchanted former Clintonites aren't huge voting blocs. But they are a symptom of what will be an enduring problem for Hillary. If she wins, she will have to regain support from the party elites. She will have to court affluent liberals, the nostalgic Ted Kennedy crowd, and African-Americans. She already had a problem with the left-wing "netroots," many of whom have long considered her a sellout over the Iraq War. She went to the Yearly Kos convention--where she was booed--and will be obliged to do much more to repair those relationships. MoveOn.org, the liberal outfit originally organized to defend the Clintons from their series of scandals, has endorsed Barack Obama. The closely contested primary means that Hillary will be wooing the most liberal constituencies among her party's die-hards just when she would like to position herself as a pragmatic centrist who can appeal beyond the Democratic base.

Democrats who console themselves by arguing that the fluid GOP field presents Republicans with much the same challenge ignore the different dynamics that kept the parties from settling early on their nominees. Unlike Democrats this season, Republican voters have been promiscuous in their affections, with few deeply attached to any candidate and many capable of being wooed by the candidate of the moment. Such situational commitment makes it far easier to get behind the eventual nominee--especially when he stands in the way of a Clinton Restoration.

The Clinton-Obama dispute is entirely different. It's personal and, with little difference between the two on policy matters, it will stay personal. With relentless ambition and an aggrieved sense of entitlement, Billary has attacked the newly anointed heir to Camelot. Newark's mayor, Cory Booker, an African-American and an Obama supporter, complained, "We're trying to offer an alternative to the Republicans' fear-and-smear campaigns, and now we're being dragged down to their level by the Clintons." For their part, Hillary partisans deeply resent the presumptuous upstart whose supporters have played the race card against such stalwart liberal warriors as the Clintons.

The exuberant crowds, big fundraising totals, and large voter turnout on the Democratic side all demonstrate emotional attachment to particular candidates, which won't be so easy to overcome. Obama's supporters are being asked to abandon not just a candidate, but a dream.

Even today, much of the enthusiasm on the Democratic side is based on hostility to President Bush. Once the Republican nominee eclipses him, Clinton, if she is the nominee, will need to enthuse those voters all by herself. Even if she wins over Obama, she won't necessarily win over his voters. The Obama coalition includes independents and new voters who may be peeled away by a Republican nominee. Obama won a plurality of them in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina (where he won independent voters by 42 percent to Hillary's 26 percent). These voters have been both pushed toward the Democrats by Bush and the war, and pulled toward the Democrats by Obama's appeal. Will they stay excited by the divisive candidate who beat their guy with dirty tactics?

BOTTLING BUBBA

Absent some dramatic development, it will be impossible to put Bill back in the bottle so that Hillary can establish her independence again. In 1992, "two for the price of one" worked, even if nobody was quite sure what it meant. The implicit promise was that a loyal wife and committed children's advocate would be at the president's side. But "two for the price of one" now means a bare-knuckled political tag-team will be back in the White House. Our friend Tracy Mehan asks, "Do the Clintons hunt in pairs like those velociraptors in Jurassic Park?" And plenty of people will be asking the same question as Greg Craig, the attorney who represented Bill Clinton during impeachment. Suffering an apparent case of lawyer's remorse, he said, "Recent events raise the question: If Hillary's campaign can't control Bill, whether Hillary's White House could."

A Hillary Clinton candidacy won't have critics merely rehashing yesterday's scandals. Bill's post-presidential activities will be fair game in the campaign. Newsweek has already opined that his "private dealings raise inevitable questions about who might come seeking favors if he and Hillary move back into the White House." And in a recent New York Times story about Bill's wheeling and dealing on behalf of a major contributor to his private foundation, "Kazakhstan" replaces "Marc Rich" as shorthand for his greedy self-indulgence and adolescent judgment. Given his solicitous nature and his gallery of unsavory friends, an under-occupied Bill surely would be tempted to become the White House's designated favor-dispenser.

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Obama has not made this case. Obama's above-it-all image renders a whole swath of Clinton muck untouchable for him. When Hillary hit him for doing legal work for a "slumlord"--all of five hours of it--he couldn't turn back to her and say, "Two words, Hillary--Lincoln Bedroom." A Republican opponent won't be so constrained. Democratic voters may take it as a matter of gospel that all the Clinton scandals were nothing. The general public does not.

Hillary may also become a victim of her own identity politics. Barack Obama didn't become the "black candidate" of his own volition. When the Clintons started poking him in provocative ways, Obama wasn't quick to take offense on racial grounds--but his supporters were, and that was sufficient. Hillary risks having feminists do the same thing on her behalf (whether she likes it or not) and becoming the "feminist candidate."

Clinton will not win the presidency as the aggrieved feminist candidate whose opponents fear powerful women. Her campaign wisely backed off the charge that the guys unfairly ganged up on her during the debate in Philadelphia, but her surrogates kept it up. Following the encounter, the New York chapter of NOW took up poor Hillary's cause, declaring, "Gang-raping of women is commonplace in our culture, both physically and metaphorically." Her feminist sisters blamed her ordeal on the "patriarchal system that has persisted for millennia."

New York's feminists reacted to Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Obama by accusing him of an outrageous betrayal. "This latest move by Kennedy is so telling about the status of respect for women's rights, women's voices, women's equality, women's authority and our ability--indeed, our obligation--to promote and earn and deserve and elect, unabashedly, a president that is the first woman after centuries of men 'who know what's best for us,'" New York NOW wrote. Gloria Steinem and Erica Jong also promote Hillary by railing against the patriarchy.

The feminist stamp won't help Hillary's campaign deliver male voters. Democrats already have trouble with men--especially white men. No Democratic candidate has won more than 43 percent of white men since Jimmy Carter in 1976. Al Gore won only 36 percent of them in 2000, and John Kerry only 37 percent four years later. Democratic strategist William Galston has explained, "The gender gap is more a reflection of men leaving the Democratic party than of women joining it." He faults the "high-profile extremists" on the left for proclaiming white men "racist and patriarchal oppressors.... Republican strength among white men more than offsets Democrats' dominance of the African-American vote."

In South Carolina, more than 70 percent of white Democratic and independent men voted against Hillary Clinton. The female voters she is banking on are neither feminists nor the monolithic bloc of feminist fantasy. John Kerry carried the overall women's vote by three points, but lost white women by eleven points and married women without college degrees by 16 points.

RUN, HILLARY, RUN

These new or freshly evident vulnerabilities come on top of longstanding weaknesses that already had many Republicans rooting for Hillary to get the nomination before her latest round of troubles. "She has tremendous baggage, high negatives, and she can't be the candidate of change," says a top Republican strategist who pines for her to be the nominee. He explains that swing voters decide on the basis of personality and broad issues, such as whether or not the country is on the right track. He believes that Hillary opens up possibilities for Republicans in the same way that Al Gore and John Kerry did--in fact, she has the potential to act like a vote-repelling combination of the two. "Even though [swing voters] thought the country was on the right track, they didn't like Al Gore," the Republican strategist says of the 2000 election. Republicans won in 2004 through massive turnout. "She turns out the Republican base in a major way," he says. "The more people see her, the less they like her. How will people like that laugh in ten months?"

Republican pollster Frank Luntz reports that when he conducts focus groups of 30 swing voters in states such as Ohio, Florida, and Missouri, about 15 participants typically hate Hillary while only two express any hostility toward Obama.

Hillary's negative ratings remain a significant liability for her. She managed to get them down to 42-43 percent before the race got heated with Obama, but they have been creeping back up into the high 40s. Before the general election is over, they will surely be above 50 percent, and the only way she'll be able to win is to get her Republican opponent's negative rating above 50 as well. In other words, she'll have to depend on a mud-fest to get elected. As in her nomination fight, she may rely on her husband to handle the attacks. If disenchanted Democrats have had their fill of Bill, voters in the general election without a previous allegiance to the former president are even less likely to welcome his surrogate role.

Republicans will be adding a quadrennial favorite--scrutinizing liberal voting records--to the gauntlet of attacks that Hillary Clinton will endure. Democrats were taken aback by the effectiveness of assaults on John Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal" based on his history in the Senate. Hillary's rating from the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action for her Senate votes between 2001 and 2006 is 95.8--a score higher than Joe Biden's or Chris Dodd's, and almost 20 points above John Edwards's during his six years in the Senate.

There is bipartisan recognition that Hillary Clinton would be a liability for Democratic candidates seeking election in the fall. Congressional Republicans acknowledge the uphill fight they face with an unpopular president, an unpopular war, and a dispirited base. The good news they look forward to is the nomination of Hillary. A House Republican leader believes that about 40 of the 60 House Democrats in congressional districts carried by George Bush in 2004 are vulnerable. He predicts they will be even more vulnerable when "we can hang Hillary around their necks." GOP leaders also expect their anemic fundraising to pick up if Republicans are running against Hillary.

Across the aisle, Democratic officeholders from red and swing states will make it their business to get the Democrat most palatable to Middle America on the top of the ticket. In their judgment, Hillary does not seem to be that candidate. Even after he lost New Hampshire, Obama picked up the endorsements of Democratic senators Tim Johnson (S.D.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.). Arizona governor Janet Napolitano soon joined the parade. After Obama's win in South Carolina, Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius endorsed him, too.

While Hillary Clinton must change voters' negative opinions about her and her husband, Barack Obama is introducing himself to the national electorate. Like Hillary, Obama is a conventional liberal. National Journal's annual survey rated him the most liberal member of the Senate in 2007, but that's not what people associate with him (at least not yet). He taps into the deep-seated desire for less partisanship of the variety that Hillary represents. Nervous Republicans recognize the challenge his nomination would represent. His negatives could be driven up by attacks, but that would be a delicate operation. Given that his supporters cried racism in response to criticisms from fellow Democrats, Republican critics must dread what will be in store for them if they attempt to strangle the dream.

Barack Obama scores high on the likeability scale, appears to represent the change that restive voters are clamoring for, and enjoys the kind of fawning media coverage that is a distant memory for the Clintons. Republicans must hope that, over the demanding months ahead, his relative inexperience in national politics will be a handicap, his soaring rhetoric will ring hollow, and his appealing personality will be no match for misgivings about his thin resume.

For Republicans, the choice is clear: Go Hillary!