Hillary Clinton for President! A timely boost from Thatcher?

NEW YORK - Will the death of the Iron Lady light the fuse for a presidential run by Hillary Clinton in 2016? The news of Margaret Thatcher's passing took America by storm yesterday, dominating the headlines with very little of the doubt and nuance found in some quarters of the British press.

President Obama led the tributes, calling her "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty" and claiming her as an Obama family heroine - a feminist "example to our daughters that there is no glass ceiling that can't be shattered".

The New York Times concluded an editorial with words that not even the Daily Mail would dare set down in type: "The passage of time has drained much of the old anger and left behind her record of accomplishments."

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Americans always loved Mrs T. To them she was, above all, Ronald Reagan's favourite dance partner and natural ally, the kind of Brit "we can do business with", to borrow her own phrase.

Remembering Thatcher means remembering Reagan with rose-tinted specs firmly in place, his campaign slogan 'Morning in America' suggesting that that Americans enjoyed a bright dawn under the Gipper's leadership.

Would smashing the last glass ceiling by putting Hillary, a woman, in the White House bring that sunny dawn up one more time? It is the kind of political juju that can carry more weight in America than hard-drives full of statistics.

And the gods might be backing the idea. By coincidence, just last week a group supported by the old inner tabernacle of the Clinton coterie launched the Ready for Hillary 'super-Pac' - or independent political action committee - one of those devices of American politics that enable supporters to "bundle" infinite amounts of cash to spend independently of a candidate's audited campaign accounts.

James Carville, the political strategist from Louisiana who did more than anyone to take the unlikely Bill Clinton to Washington in 1992, has declared his support. And so has Harold Ickes, the manager of that first campaign who is credited with first steering the big money to the Clintons.

So far, Ready for Hillary is at that nascent stage at which everyone says that they have no idea whether Hillary will actually run, and that they cannot speak for her.

But Ickes told the Sunday Times that the organisers were "very solid and know what they are doing", while the super-Pac was "off to a very strong start". The money was already rolling-in, he said.

Carville, as usual, is more forthright. Last Thursday, he posted an e-mail to the Ready for Hillary website, urging supporters to sign-up, claiming that the "hunger for a Hillary Clinton presidency is unlike anything I have ever seen".

Opinion polls bear him out. After retiring as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has a 61 per cent approval rating, the highest of any American politician. A National Journal poll of Democratic staffers and elected officials found that 81 per cent agreed that she would be the 2016 nominee. It also found that 69 per cent of their Republican counterparts believed not only that she would run, but she would win.

At the weekend, Clinton stepped back onto the national stage as the top guest at a "power women" conference organised by Tina Brown of The Daily Beast. She sported a new, trimmer hair-do, and had junked the bottle-bottom glasses she wore after falling and suffering from concussion before Christmas.

She smiled enigmatically when Brown told the gathering that the "big question about Hillary is: what's next?" There were calls of "2016" from the auditorium.

And in her speech, Clinton described women's rights as "the great unfinished business of the 21st century".

What Thatcher would have made of that assertion is anybody's guess. But as America gazes over the pond and bangs the drum for Reagan's old comrade-in-arms, the idea that it is Clinton's destiny to follow her through the glass ceiling is more enticing than ever. The bandwagon rolls.