The neocons, deprived of a John McCain presidency, have latched onto a new potential female savior. No, it isn't Sarah Palin. It's Hillary Clinton. Two new pieces in the Weekly Standard make it clear that the neocons see Hillary as their best hope over the next four years. In "Hail Clinton," Michael Goldfarb, until recently a McCain campaign aide, blogs that "Clinton's a hawk. Not only did she vote to authorize the war in Iraq, she delivered her vote in style -- her floor speech on October 10, 2002, went so far as to connect Saddam to al Qaeda..."
There's more. Noemie Emery, in an online piece titled "The Great Right Hope?," muses that
"For the moment, Hillary Clinton will be the conservatives' Woman in Washington, more attuned to their concerns on these issues than to those of the get-the-troops-home-now wing of her party, a strange turn of events for a woman whose husband was impeached by Republicans just ten years ago, and whose ascent that party had dreaded since she went to the Senate two years after that."
Now, it's certainly possible that Clinton will be the neocon of the Obama administration, pushing it to the right. In this thinking, she would deal as ruthlessly with Vladimir Putin as she tried to dispose of Obama during the primaries. But if Clinton has shown anything during the campaign, when she morphed from establishment to working class candidate, she has an elastic sense of the possible. Whether she will become the standard-bearer of the interventionist wing of the Democratic party remains an open question. But as the neocons have discerned, it is a possibility and one that they welcome.