Hillary too old to run?

Age won’t hurt her. If anything, it buoys up her core campaign pitch: She’s been around Washington for 25 years, she knows where the bodies are buried, and she’ll advance her agenda more effectively than the political parvenu who beat her in 2008 ever did. Are you an independent who mostly agrees with Democrats but got tired of Obama leading his initiatives into oblivion? Then the Clintons have just the candidate for you. If she can do another two years on the famously grueling presidential campaign trail, she’ll defeat all doubt that she’s physically up to the job.

And even if her health is poorer than we know, she might go for it anyway. A possibility that no one’s considering, including Charlie Cook in the excerpt above: What if she runs resolved (privately, not publicly) to serve only one term? Hillary doesn’t have some long policy wishlist that she’s burning to enact; even now, more than 20 years after the fact and despite her constant presence in the upper tiers of government, the only policy she’s closely associated with is the HillaryCare failure in Bill’s first term. She’s an icon not because of her ideas but because her public life is a sort of album of post-war feminist advances — accomplished lawyer stifled by the traditional trophy-ish role of First Lady runs for office and proves herself the equal of America’s most powerful legislators and diplomats. She won’t be running to kickstart some sort of new liberal revolution, nor do Democrats necessarily want her to. She’ll be running to become the first woman president and Democrats will back her because she’s their best chance to extend the party’s grip on the presidency for four more years, a would-be Bush 41 to Obama’s Reagan. Bill ended George H.W. Bush’s dream of four consecutive presidential terms for Republicans; if Hillary wins in 2016, she may see a lesson in that and decide not to press her luck by trying again in 2020. She wants to be a historical figure and she’s well positioned to do it. Why not do it then quit while you’re on top? Mission accomplished.