Hillary Clinton, who hovers over the presidential field like the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor, can afford to argue, as she does at private fund-raisers, that this fast-forward obsession with 2008 is an unnecessary distraction from the immediate task of recapturing Congress. Other would-be Democratic presidents — including current flavor-of-the-month former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner — do not have Hillary’s luxury of dynamic inaction. For them, initial decisions have to be made about campaign strategy, fundraising, staffing and key issues well before the November congressional elections.

This is why one of the major occupations of Democratic consultants and party insiders these days is writing memos about the probable rigors and potential rewards of the 2008 race. After a series of not-for-quotation conversations with prominent members of the Democratic memo-writing class, I have a sense of what the White House dreamers have been hearing, especially about running against Hillary. In an effort to convey what has been happening behind the scenes, I have distilled this wisdom (conventional and otherwise) into the following memo to an imaginary Democratic presidential possibility with the fine old political name of John P. Wintergreen:

Memo

To: JPW
From: Walter Shapiro
Subject: Running to Win in 2008

Let’s not be under any illusions here. If you get into the presidential race (and you have repeatedly told me that you’re ready to spend the next two years getting four hours sleep per night in Holiday Inns), you have to assume that you’re going up against Hillary, since I put the chances of her running at 80 percent. If she somehow bows out at the last moment like Mario Cuomo in 1991, you can consider yourself the luckiest border-state governor in America.

But otherwise, you will face in Hillary the most formidable presidential front-runner in modern political history. (And, yes, I am counting George W. Bush in 2000.) Here are 10 reasons why the junior senator from New York will be a daunting foe:

1) Universal name recognition. (In contrast, JPW, only 3 percent of likely Democratic primary voters know that you were originally the president in the Gershwin classic “Of Thee I Sing.”)

2) Her capacity to raise $100 million without once working late into the night cold-calling strangers to beg and grovel for money.

3) The ability to dominate the free media. Hillary will never make a public appearance in this campaign without being tracked by 100 reporters. (In contrast, JPW, imagine how much coverage you will get for your first press conference bragging about your gubernatorial record and the “Tennetucky Miracle.”)

4) Her emotional support from a significant percentage of women voters out to make history.

5) Nostalgia for the Clinton era of peace and prosperity in the 1990s.

6) Continuing Democratic resentment over impeachment.

7) Hillary’s over-cautious political style that avoids risk and, quite likely, deliberate mistakes.

The most potent candidate surrogate in political history in the form of Bill Clinton.

9) The ability of the Clinton name and legacy to attract 75 percent of the African-American vote and a large slice of the Hispanic vote.

10) At least a half-dozen candidates (including JPW) who will divide the anti-Hillary Democrats, so that she could win major primaries with just her hardcore base of, say, 35 percent of the vote.

This is obviously not a race for the fainthearted. But there is a ray of hope — and, no, I am not talking about the “Tennetucky Miracle.”

No presidential favorite in the history of contested primaries has ever had the nomination handed to him by acclamation. For every Bush in 2000, there is always a John McCain to emerge out of nowhere to add drama and uncertainty to the horse race. The press has a vested interest in a hard-fought contest — and Democrats, in particular, like being given more of a choice than voters in, say, North Korea. So Hillary will have, at minimum, one serious challenger and a few nail-bitingly anxious weeks on the road to the convention. Your goal, JPW, is, of course, to be the dragon-slayer who stops her.

The Non-Hillary Field: Start with Mark Warner and 2004 V.P. candidate John Edwards, who are unabashedly running. Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh has privately put his own odds at 90 percent, and the latest word from Iowa is that Gov. Tom Vilsack is similarly poised to run. Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold — who wins headlines every other week with an anti-Bush gambit like a censure resolution — has to be counted among the likeliest contenders. And finally, Sen. Joe Biden, the Delaware motor-mouth who performed so garrulously during the Alito confirmation hearings, keeps insisting that he’s definitely running.

Depending on whom you talk to, John Kerry is either running or merely keeping his options open for a mid-2007 decision by maintaining his visibility and e-mail list. (An e-mail appeal from Kerry raised over $100,000 for Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran running for the House in Illinois.) Al Gore represents another puzzle; his wife, Tipper, is said to be definitely opposed, while his politically active daughter Karenna seems severely tempted. Bill Richardson is seriously mulling his chances, while former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is also playing the maybe game. And don’t forget former Gen. Wesley Clark, who has never lacked ambition or self-confidence.

How to Think About the Field: Like old-fashioned slot machines, the final round of most presidential races comes down to three possibilities. (Granted, there have been a number of past years when pushing the lever produced three Democratic lemons.) The conventional method is to group the contenders in starkly different terms. There would be the left-wing political purist option, which would right now go to Feingold, though Gore and even Kerry could make claims based on the fervor of their antiwar rhetoric. Hillary, of course, would have an Heiress Apparent slot of her own. And the final position would belong to the winner of the Democratic Electability Bake-off: Warner, Edwards and Bayh are all vying for that honor. Yes, JPW, you’re in this final mix with your landslide border-state reelection victory and, yes, the “Tennetucky Miracle.”

But there is another way to slice and dice the 2008 wannabes. And that is to assume that the race will ultimately come down to Hillary, one intriguing fresh face (Warner, Bayh, Feingold, JPW, etc.) and one sadder-but-wiser repeat candidate (Gore, Kerry, Edwards, Clark or even Biden). The importance of these slots is to figure out who is vying against whom for supporters. Are Feingold and Warner battling to be the candidate of the blog-based “netroots”? Or is Warner, say, locked in a battle of Southern pragmatists with Edwards?

Money: To compete in 2008, a Democrat has to raise between $30 million and $40 million by the end of 2007. This is the price of admission, no exceptions. To think otherwise puts you in the 2004 Dennis Kucinich protest-candidate mold. JPW, this means that you need 500 to 700 fundraisers who can deliver (not merely promise) $50,000 to $70,000 each. With the maximum legal contribution a little more than $2,000 (the exact number depends on an inflation adjustment), that’s heavy lifting.

In the old days, a candidate might bet it all on Iowa and New Hampshire, knowing that he could only raise more money if he won. Now merely to get to that early stage, you will need your $30 million to $40 million. And you will need it shockingly early in the cycle. In the third quarter of 2003 (the political equivalent of the summer of 2007), most Democratic presidential contenders began spending more money than they took in. With everything speeded up this time, candidates may begin heavy spending by the spring of next year. These financial realities are why most 2008 contenders have to make their am-I-really-in decisions over the next six months.

Yes, Howard Dean and then John Kerry permanently upended the traditional rules of campaign fundraising by harnessing the Internet in 2003 and 2004. But Dean was the anti-Iraq war candidate and Kerry was the de facto nominee against Bush. You don’t raise big money on the Internet merely by putting up a Web site complete with a blog. To steal a song title from “Gypsy” — that legendary 1950s musical about burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee — “You Got to Have a Gimmick.” Right now, it is easy to see how a cause-oriented candidate like Feingold would appeal to the online community, although I would hate to have to develop an Internet strategy for a seemingly bland contender like Biden or Vilsack.

The Calendar: Leave it to the Democrats to take an irrational political schedule and cleverly come up with a way to make it worse. The Democratic National Committee is poised to approve a scheme to add two caucuses between the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and the opening-gun New Hampshire primary. The underlying notion is to add diversity to a process dominated by Iowa and New Hampshire, two states not known for their vibrant minority communities.

These two new caucuses would be in a Southern state (South Carolina, with its large African-American vote, is the current favorite) and a Western state with a significant Hispanic population (Nevada and Colorado are the leading contenders). But New Hampshire threatens to move its primary to late 2007, if necessary, to maintain its traditional supremacy — and about the only certainty regarding the calendar is that it is going to be chockablock with early contests. All this, unfortunately, plays to Hillary’s advantage, since New Hampshire is the one state with a proven anti-royalist tradition in presidential politics. (This is the place where McCain beat Bush in 2000 by 20 percentage points in a dramatic manifestation of this anti-front-runner sentiment.)

Here’s one plausible scenario under which the calendar works to Hillary’s advantage. Begin on a Monday in January with the Iowa caucuses that presumably would go to Vilsack, the home-state hero, with Hillary running second. Assume the following Saturday there is a caucus in Nevada with the results split between Richardson (the only Hispanic in the race) and Hillary. Meanwhile, the same day South Carolina divides its caucus votes between Hillary (again!) and Edwards, who won the state in 2004. Three days later, it’s on to New Hampshire where another candidate (say, Feingold) runs neck-and-neck with Hillary. At that point in the process, virtually every other Democratic contender is broke and Hillary, who has never definitively triumphed anywhere, is now in a position to sweep the board.

A Final Word: I never promised you a rose garden, especially not the one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But nothing in politics is foreordained — not even Hillary’s nomination. Many things could trip her up: her hawkish views on foreign policy; a sense that she is by far the least electable Democrat; new revelations about Bill’s extracurricular activities; a certain “no questions, please, I’m the front-runner” arrogance on the stump; or even a growing boredom with all things Clinton. But while we would all love to see Wintergreen in the White House, make no mistake, JPW, getting the Democratic nomination will require surviving one of the most daunting obstacle courses in modern political history.

So Wallace, following a 92nd Street Y panel last night, said this:

“There will be pressure to elevate a woman but there will be an equal amount of pressure to pick someone who is prepared,” Wallace said.

And then she said this:

Wallace flagged one female official in particular who she thinks would be a good choice this year.

“Nikki Haley — she’s great,” she said. “She’s the most effective surrogate Romney has.”

If the Sarah Palin problem was a problem of preparation and vetting, Haley … might present some issues? Specifically an odd and mostly unsubstantiated sex scandal and also these rumors that she might at any moment be indicted on tax charges. The tax thing might be bullshit and the affair story was the product of a self-promoting creep but they’re “out there,” as they say.

More important, Haley has been governor of South Carolina since January of 2011. As in very slightly longer than one year. And slightly less time being a governor than Sarah Palin had in 2008. It’s almost as if Wallace is making a pick not based on the principle of Who Would Be Best For the Nation but on demographics and optics?

Wallace also apparently suggested Carly Fiorina, which, lol. Romney/Ex-CEO who famously received a giant golden parachute when she was forced out of her company 2012, everyone! Just the ticket for the new economy.

That is sort of a shame. The Palin thing is the most heavily over-covered story line of the entire 2008 campaign, so focusing on it might be totally logical from a marketing perspective, but it’s unfortunate from an artistic one. The film re-creates various moments of YouTube campaign ephemera very well — remember when that old white lady called Obama an Arab and McCain looked uncomfortable? When it takes us behind closed doors, it’s to witness scenes any moderately close observer of the election and its aftermath could’ve dreamed up him- or herself. It might have been fun to see a TV movie about the Democratic primary fight; the personality clashes of the disastrous Clinton campaign would have made for entertaining television, and Mark Penn is surely a creature crying out for a grotesque Emmy-winning portrayal by, say, Paul Giamatti.

Instead, McCain has won the nomination three-and-a-half minutes into the film. Soon we’re watching Julianne Moore watch Tina Fey on TV. You remember the “SNL” sketches making fun of Palin, right? In case you don’t, “Game Change” airs lengthy chunks from most of them. It also has tons of actual footage from CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, and it re-creates debates and speeches and the Couric interview and the Charlie Gibson interview and a bunch of other things you saw either live or on YouTube when they happened.

Moore’s performance is not just fair but maybe even flattering. (For one thing, she doesn’t hit those flat upper Midwest vowels as gratingly as the real Palin.) Woody Harrelson plays strategist Steve Schmidt — the film’s protagonist — as a grizzled, “too old for this shit” campaign veteran called back to the trail against his better judgment. Jamey Sheridan is given barely anything to do as Mark Salter, McCain’s “conscience.” Salter, the primary author of his “Maverick” mythos, is limited, after the Palin selection, to making a hilariously over-telegraphed face of concern as everyone else in the war room applauds her first speech.

But the film is about Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace because they were pretty clearly Halperin and Heilemann’s primary sources, and we watch them become horrified by the depths of Sarah Palin’s ignorance at exactly the same time as everyone else in America became horrified by her ignorance.

Because it’s Hollywood, there’s very little politics in the film’s depiction of politics. Policies are simply things for Sarah Palin to write on note cards and not memorize. Operatives confidently declare, in faux Sorkin-ese patter, that if this or that meaningless decision is made, it means “we’ll lose by five.”

There is a sheen of faux cynicism (McCain swears like a sailor!) but it masks complete naiveté: Everyone is basically honorable and decent. Nicolle Wallace — a member of the Bush administration communications team — is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of someone as dangerously ignorant as Sarah Palin in the White House. On election night, she breaks down in tears as she admits to Schmidt that … she didn’t vote. They embrace.

The film subscribes to the simplest theory of Sarah Palin: That she is childlike, vain and incredibly ignorant but also an essentially decent person and wonderful mother. The moments that come closest to “unfair” — Sarah Palin doesn’t know that the head of Great Britain’s government is the prime minister, not the queen — are basically plausible. This isn’t Andrew Sullivan’s conniving, dangerous pathological liar. It’s an overwhelmed working mother whose most unhinged moments are explained by a crash diet. Her convention speech is largely stripped of its snarling attack lines, imagining a world in which it appealed to “the base” because of Palin’s heartfelt commitment to special-needs children and not because she was very good at saying mean things about Obama. (The film actually repeats the bullshit story that her teleprompter broke midway through, and she kept going.) Even when the film has her take a major heel turn — “if I am single-handedly carrying this campaign, I am gonna do what I want!” — after “winning” her debate with Joe Biden (played by video footage of Joe Biden), she is still basically an innocent seduced by the adoration of riled-up crowds and national attention. (Todd Palin barely does anything.)

The constant use of actual news footage adds a bit of verisimilitude but also constantly raises the question of why this lightly fictionalized version of the election actually needs to exist. “Game Change” is not really for serious political junkies, who remember all the stuff that did happen and will scoff at the stuff that didn’t. (At one point, John McCain answers his ringing iPhone in the middle of the night. He used a BlackBerry, HBO.) But if casually politically involved people want to see their assumptions about Sarah Palin reinforced, well, there are still those “SNL” sketches.

In the end, the Republican operatives who foisted Sarah Palin on an unprepared nation are rightly horrified that they created a monster, but at no point does anyone act concerned that their actual candidate was himself an angry, warmongering old crank with extremely fungible principles. Sure, Sarah Palin didn’t know what the Fed did. Do we have any proof John McCain knew what it should’ve done? Maybe everyone actually was totally unfair to poor Sarah Palin.

Rice, the national security advisor in George W. Bush’s first presidential term and secretary of state in his second, is currently a professor at Stanford with the requisite right-wing think tank fellowship. She has not said or done anything “political” in years. But Curl has been hearing things!

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Oh, a month-long tour in support of her book about her time in the Bush administration! She must be running for vice president, along with Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan and George W. Bush.

There’s more. (And not just the part where Curl calls Rice “a spicy Rice dish” and waxes fetishistic about “her guns” being “a match for those of our first lady Michelle Obama.”)

Plus, her selection would be a giant chess move to counter the expected replacement of Vice President Joseph R. Biden with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Sure, the White House denies and denies, but that should really make any political watcher more suspicious. One White House insider even told me that the position swap was the only reason Mrs. Clinton joined the administration in the first place.

Curl has so many inside scoops packed into this column! I had no idea that our first presidential running mate swap since Ford’s 1976 campaign was basically a foregone conclusion and not just a weird Beltway journalist fantasy! But yes, I can see why the still  un-chosen GOP candidate would definitely be looking pretty closely at Rice — who’s been strongly making the case for her selection by not explicitly denying interest in the position — in case Obama replaces Biden with Clinton, which he will surely do.

The column gets worse (“Funny thing is, she is, unlike Barack Obama, an ‘American black’”) but that’s not really important. What’s important is exploring how someone like Condoleezza Rice ends up a perennial name on the fantasy ticket list.

Rice has been a subject of these columns since 2005, when she became Bush’s second secretary of state, and the White House tasked communications operative Jim Wilkinson — previously known best for inventing the false story of Jessica Lynch* — with getting Rice (and her boss) some much-needed positive press. Wilkinson did his job beautifully (remember when Rice’s knee-high boots were a topic of actual serious news coverage for weeks?) and Rice began receiving the “rock star” treatment.

In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, author of the 2007 Rice bio “The Confidante,” summarized the exact moment of the birth of the presidential speculation:

In March 2005, before Rice sat for an interview with the Washington Times, Wilkinson slipped a note to the editorial page editor, Tony Blankley, suggesting that she be asked whether she would consider running for president. It was an audacious proposal — she had been secretary for only six weeks — but such speculation would bolster Rice’s image as a leader. (Wilkinson and Blankley said they do not recall the incident, but others present said they saw Wilkinson’s note.)

Oh, the Washington Times.

Shortly thereafter, Dick Morris wrote a book claiming — nay, insisting — that 2008 would be “Condi vs. Hillary.”

As Iraq descended into a violent civil war in 2006, Rice-for-president buzz bizarrely grew. There was enough of a false grass-roots movement for a paint-by-numbers AP trend piece with a silly nickname and everything. Tim Russert asked her point blank. As always, she said no in no uncertain terms.

Then, of course, everyone began to speculate that she’d be McCain’s running mate. Robert Novak claimed as much on Fox. Dan Senor said she was pushing for the pick on some Sunday show. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a Talk of the Town piece on the subject! McCain and Rice both finally denied “reports” that she was angling for the spot on the ticket.

Now, I guess, it’s time to start up the rumor mill anew.

But before you put pen to paper on that column about how a Gingrich-Rice ticket would surely win moderate women in Ohio, consider this: In addition to the fact that she’s always denied wanting the job, and in addition to the fact that she was an unmitigated failure in the Bush administration, downplaying terrorism as a priority prior to 9/11 and selling the public on the Iraq invasion with untruths, Condi Rice is pro-choice.

*Update: Jon Krakauer recently rescinded his claim that Wilkinson, then a communications aide to General Tommy Franks, was responsible for the initial false Washington Post report on Lynch’s apparent heroics before her capture. Though Wilkinson was obviously involved in the PR campaign surrounding Lynch’s rescue and return to the U.S., he apparently isn’t responsible for falsifying her actions or leaking that false story to the press.

The New Black Panther Party is a cartoonish fringe group of a couple guys who play “’60s radical” dress-up and say mean things about whitey for Fox cameras in order to scare old white people. They have been explicitly rejected by the old Black Panther Party. For some reason, various conservatives have dedicated themselves to proving that this weird, marginal group of Nation of Islam cast-offs is somehow supported by or deeply connected to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration in particular, because, you know, Eric Holder and Barack Obama, those are two guys who very obviously share the values of extremist anti-white proponents of racial separation.

So Breitbart “proves” something or other about the essential anti-white racistness of the Obama campaign by noting that members of the inane New Black Panther Party were spotted by cameras near Obama, at various times, and also NBPP head Malik Zulu Shabazz spoke at the event.

(Brietbart goes on to publish two pictures of the event despite the photographer withholding permission, because “The First Amendment allows photographs of such enormous public importance to see the light of day.” Good luck with that argument in court?)

Andrew C. McCarthy gleefully endorses Breitbart’s story in a breathless post at the National Review’s The Corner:

This is a shocking story, and a breathtaking indictment of the mainstream media which went out of its way to avoid vetting Obama as a candidate — and to make sure anyone who tried to do due diligence got no sunshine. A candidate who chose to appeared in the company of, say, the KKK, would have provoked relentlessly hostile media coverage and, in short order, have been marginalized as disqualified to hold responsible elective office.

If only the media had reported that some fringe weirdos also participated in this event that both Democratic candidates and thousands of other people participated in, and then the fringe weirdos sort of followed Obama around for a while. That would’ve opened America’s eyes! (I mean the media besides NPR, which did report that the NBPP was there.)

Here’s the bit of this sad, desperate reach that is the saddest and most desperate: “Andrew further reminds us that, in March 2008, the Obama campaign website posted an endorsement of Obama by the New Black Panther Party.” Whoa, did they really? Shocking if true! It is, of course, not true. It was a user-generated blog post on the Obama campaign site that the campaign removed as soon as they became aware of its existence. Because websites do not “post” things to themselves, generally, McCarthy’s statement can’t even be charitably described as technically accurate. It’s just a lie.

A random stupid incorrect Breitbart smear is worth paying attention to only to the extent that the smear threatens to bubble up to the more reputable conservative press, or Fox, or Republican elected officials. The McCarthy endorsement means keep an eye on this one!

Here’s my reaction to those revelations: Sarah Palin is a person! She’s done drugs and pissed people off and slept with people, like 90 percent of American humans. If Sarah Palin was smart she’d dismiss the book with a chuckle, say nobody’s perfect, laugh off the “gossip,” and move on.

Sarah Palin might not be smart.

The Palins always prefer grand self-pitying martyrdom to quiet dignity, of course, which is why picking on them can be so profitable: They will always respond, and always help you drum up more publicity for your Palin-attacking venture. Instead of depriving the book of oxygen, they launched a multimedia attack on Joe McGinniss before he’d finished the first draft, and what they accomplished was … giving him more material and ensuring that even more breathless anticipation awaited the book’s release.

Now that the book’s rollout is underway, the Palins might as well get paid for their marketing efforts. Todd Palin angrily denounced it, again accusing McGinniss of having a “creepy obsession” with Sarah Palin. Oooh, it’s so creeeepy to write an unauthorized biography of a prominent public figure, right?

How bad did the Palins allowed themselves to be trolled? Sarah Palin’s people released a statement on behalf of Brad Hanson, Todd Palin’s former business partner, with whom Sarah Palin is alleged to have carried on an extramarital affair, some years back. The statement is a blanket denial, but what does having the supposed beau directly address the press accomplish, exactly? It just drives more interest in the book’s salacious, shocking revelations about the secret life of Sarah Palin. This guy, of all guys, should be kept out of it.

I am sure that Todd and everyone else is very personally pissed off that McGinniss went to Wasilla, talked to a bunch of people who hate them, and published a book full of stories about how bad and awful they are, but blowing up publicly just sends the message that there’s stuff in the book worth getting worked up about.