Thanks for the question about Can She Be Stopped?, John. Thought I’d answer it here, since it was asked here.
Right now — and of course we’re two years away from the conclusion of the primary season in 2008 — I see no plausible scenario in which she is stopped by other Democrats. She’s one of the two or three most famous people ever to run for president (Eisenhower and Grant being the only two others I can think of who were as or more famous than she). She will have more money than God, perhaps a hundred million more than her closest rival. She is 25 points up on any rival Democrat in the polls, and that includes the famous guys who might challenge her, like Gore and Kerry. Can someone run to her left? Maybe, although with the exception of her votes on Iraq, there isn’t very much room to her left. She has a 95 percent liberal voting record.
As for Warner, ask yourself whether there would be excitement about Mark Warner if he were, say, the governor of Kansas (also a Democrat, named Kathleen Sibelius) rather than Virginia, where so many reporters and pundits live. I think the answer is obviously no.
Hillary is as formidable a frontrunner as we’ve seen in decades.