Also, I don't really think that Clark qualifies as "establishment" in anything like the sense that Clinton, Kerry, Biden et al do. I certainly don't see how he's any more "establishment" than Warner or Richardson, for example. To say the very least. Part of the establishment flirted with him briefly in 03-04 as the only apparent alternative to Dean, but they dropped him like a cold fish as soon as their boy Kerry surprised everyone by actually winning Iowa. Gore has also moved quite a ways away from the establishment over the past couple of years. I know that Clark, Gore and Feingold all appeal in different ways to many people who are dissatisfied with or infuriated by the current establishment, and while I can't see the numbers I would suspect that there is probably a significant correlation between support for these three here as well. That's a hypothesis based on substantial anecdotal evidence, anyway.

If you took a netroots poll in 2002 (after Gore said he wasn't running, let's assume), you'd have seen Dean on top.  You'd probably have seen Clark make a small blip.  Gephardt would have shown up fairly low, Lieberman nowhere, and Kerry moderately strong.  That poll would have been highly relevant and informative to those who knew what it meant.  Public polls at the same time, of course, if they even asked about Dean or Clark, wouldn't have bothered to report the insignificant results for those two.  They all would have showed Lieberman with a commanding lead, and Kerry and Gephardt as the likely second tier.  Those polls meant nothing.

I see the point Art is trying to make, but I think the message I suggested would be more obvious to the media and the electorate and that's what they'd take away. I will amend my point though. Someone like Richardson or Biden who doesn't have anything to prove on foreign policy might pick Clark, but I doubt anyone else would.

I forgot Boxer, because I don't consider her a serious candidate. I probably put her right below Schweitzer, because she's a woman. I've been adamant that the American people will not elect a woman President and CinC in a time of war. Won't happen.

It doesn't matter if Boxer (Iraq exit strategy) or Hillary  (a smarter, more compassionate war) were the nominee. They would both lose to nearly any white Republican man. Anyone who thinks America is progressive enough to elect a woman President in the current climate hasn't been paying attention.

Women are struggling to keep their right to make their own health care decisions without help from men. How can anyone pretend Americans are ready to vote for a woman to be CinC?

The same principle applies to Condi. The idea is laughable. Condi would lose to any white male Democrat. I have no idea who would win a Condi/Hillary race, but a lot of men would just not vote. I'd guess maybe 10% of white men would just not vote.

That might not be a bad thing. hmmm. That could actually be a good thing.

Because there haven't been any serious female candidates for president in the past, we can't say for sure what the GOP would do to Hillary. However, their typical response to female opponents is to try to masculinize them, usually through innuendo and whisper campaigns. Look at what Rove and co. did  to Ann Richards in Texas. They implied she was a butch lesbian. Witness further what they did to Hillary Clinton when her husband was president. They suggested she was ambitiously scheming her way to the top, that the marriage was just for show, that she was frigid, that she was a lesbian, etc. "Ball-Busting Bitch" was the image they tried to paint for her. The rationale for these attacks was to cultivate distrust by tapping into the public's misgivings about people who don't live up to traditional gender roles.

However, they may have miscalculated. The reason a woman would have trouble getting elected to the presidency is that the traits associated with leadership are strongly associated with masculinity, so much so that people use perceptions of masculinity as a proxy for perceptions of leadership. However, by trying to make Hillary seem masculine, they have been imbuing her public image with many of the traits she'll need to convince the public that she's a capable Commander-in-Chief, and unwittingly doing her work for her.