A Prediction, for the Record

I just posted the following over at the Crunchy Con blog, in a discussion about who the 2008 presidential nominees would be. Rod Dreher thinks Obama/Edwards for the Democrats; I doubt it. I'm posting this here, just as a way of officially going on record with my prediction about Hillary, so you can laugh at me two years from now if I'm wrong, and I can crow if I'm right. And also to make sure that I've recorded for posterity my favorite observation about Bill Clinton:

I don't consider myself very savvy about electoral politics, but, that said, count me among those who don't think Hillary will ever be president. I don't have a prediction as to whether she'll run or not but I think she's just too damn irritating to too many people to get elected. I'm sometimes tempted to withdraw that prediction when I watch her making her moves to the center, but I don't know if that's really working within the party. An awful lot of people see her as both unscrupulous and sanctimonious, sort of the secular counterpart of a crooked preacher (come to think of it, that's similar to what I always said about Bill--the Manley Pointer of American politics). If that perception is as widely shared as I think it is, it's a major obstacle.

I have a hard time seeing Edwards as the Dem nominee. One reason he's disliked in the South is that he comes across as--to be brutal--a slick twerp lawyer who got rich suing people. He could be acceptable as a poor twerp if he were evangelical enough, or as a rich trial lawyer if he had a Senator Sam-type persona. But he's got the worst of both.

I wouldn't count McCain out.