WASHINGTON -- Do my eyes deceive me? The morning after Super Tuesday
expired with a burst of fireworks enhaloing the hunk of granite that
is John Kerry's head, Senator Hillary Clinton -- still the most
popular Democrat in the country -- pops up at Washington's Mayflower
Hotel to give a major speech on trade and manufacturing, two burning
issues during the Democrats' primary season. What can this mean?

Several weeks back as Senator Kerry emerged as the frontrunner for the
Democratic nomination, that veteran Clinton-watcher with the keen eye
for political machinations, Dick Morris, announced that Hillary had
become a likely prospect as Kerry's running mate.

Morris's observation makes sense. Kerry is a regional candidate.
Hillary has national reach. She is the most popular Democratic
candidate in the land. Owing to her feminism and to her cachet with
the other building blocks of the Democratic coalition she could, as
Morris puts it, turn the presidential campaign into a "national
crusade." Moreover, with the vast financial resources she commands,
she could be for Kerry's campaign what his wife has been for Kerry's
lifestyle, a bonanza.

What is more, sources have told me that Clinton loyalists have been
calling Democrats around the country telling them to prevail on Kerry
at least to invite Hillary to be on his ticket. Kerry needs help. For
most of his senatorial career he has been a loner, and the source of
too many bizarre utterances. As recently as December his candidacy was
dead in the water. Kerry has not been the consensus Democratic
candidate. Rather, he is the candidate the consensus has settled on.

Hillary is at the center of the party. Some would say she sits atop
it. The Clintons' servitor, Terry McAuliffe, heads the Democratic
National Committee. Her political action committees are prodigious
fundraising mechanisms. Another of her servitors, Harold Ickes,
controls financial honey pots with reserves of over $100 million. Thus
Hillary is the most likely source of prestige and funding for the
impecunious Kerry.

More recently, sources tell me that long-time Clinton supporters
including those in the now defunct Clark campaign have been told to
sit tight and await unfolding events as though "something big" is
about to happen. And Hillary's fund-raising operations have curiously
slowed. She has been the top Democratic fundraising draw since 2000.
But three months ago her fundraising appearances seemingly fell off.
In the last election cycle she did four to five fundraisers a week.
Now she is down to one or two.

With her early morning speech just after Super Tuesday she may be
approaching that "something big" that her old supporters have been
promised. In addressing trade and manufacturing at the Mayflower on
Wednesday she confronts two staples of Ralph Nader's song and dance, a
song and dance that will be heard many times as his third party
candidacy gets underway. Nader's candidacy could become a political
"giant sucking sound" of votes away from Kerry. At the Mayflower
Hillary demonstrates her political value to Kerry as a neutralizer of
Nader.

It makes perfect sense for Hillary to get into the Democratic
presidential action now. She has enormous power, and as with all
political power if you do not use it you run the risk that you might
lose it. Running as veep on a Kerry ticket might not doom her to
second fiddle for eight years. The trial might last only eight months,
and if the valiant ticket goes down to the hellish Bush she would be
seen as the loyalest of loyal Democrats, a Joan of Arc to her party.
Her rights on the presidential nomination in 2008 would be secure.

Then too, some shocking revelations might surface about Senator John
Pierre Kerry before convention time. Things like that have happened
before in this Democratic race. Ask Dr. Howard Dean. Come to think of
it, ask Kerry. In that event, Hillary, the loyalest of the loyal,
would be there to lift the party from chaos and against the Forces of
Darkness. Whatever transpires, the Clintons are active again.