Hillary at the Helm

On the weekend Senator Clinton took command of the race for the Democratic nomination for president, I returned to the Chappaqua Starbucks at the corner of Greeley and King streets to survey the field from frosty Westchester. The after-church SUV traffic scurried by the lawns sprinkled with snow. The latte drinkers entertained themselves with vanilla and cinnamon. And in the newspaper box facing the bay windows, Mrs. Clinton's bright-eyed face on the front page of the county daily proclaimed her clever announcement on Saturday, January 20: "I'm in. And I'm in to win."

The moment is auspicious, and is reminiscent of another Saturday that changed the course of American history. On Saturday, March 12, 1864, the War Department in Washington issued General Orders 98, "Lt.-Gen. U.S. Grant is assigned to the command of the armies of the United States. The Headquarters will be in Washington, and also with Lieut.-Gen. Grant in the field." With this terse dispatch, a crafty, obtuse Illinois son became the one who could hammer together the dysfunctional Army of the Potomac and set it on its grinding course for Richmond while turning the ferocious William Sherman loose on the enemy. In sum, Ulysses Grant became the man who knew how to win.

Mrs. Clinton also knows how to win, and like Grant, she will not burden herself with strategic pontificating from Washington. The candidate immediately goes on the road both actually and virtually in order to tour her forces and to recruit more for the wasting contest ahead. Mrs. Clinton knows that the first competition is for the loyalty of those who twice financed her husband's campaigns. And she also knows the sweaty labor is to encourage her raw base while she plans for the general election. Certainly she has in her husband as able a subordinate as Grant had in Sherman, and Mr. Clinton will be given his head to take Atlanta, Charleston, Des Moines, and Manchester and to dash wherever he is needed to grab headlines and demoralize the opposition.

Senator Clinton is a fighting general for our times with the strengths of clarity of command — "Let's go to work" — and also of personal courage. Her recent trek to Baghdad included a corkscrew C-130 landing through dangerous weather and a high-speed armored vehicle convoy from the airport to the Green Zone along the notorious improvised explosive device trap called the Highway of Death.

Senator Clinton's "I'm in" remarks suggest that she has chosen to campaign not only with the dutifulness of Grant but also with the sophistication of another victorious general who gained the White House, the Europe-crusader Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1952, Eisenhower's challenge for the Republican nomination against the anti-communist Bob Taft of Ohio, and then in the general election against the internationalist Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, was to convince the electorate that he was a public servant committed to improving the daily lives of Americans and not just a tough guy looking for a scrap with Moscow. Eisenhower's finesse drove Taft too far to the right and Adlai Stevenson too far to the left, whereby Ike won the nomination easily and the November election in an Electoral College landslide.

Mrs. Clinton faces a challenge in her own party not unlike what Eisenhower once faced in his party, with the logical caveat that today's Democratic Party features its left wing. Senators Obama and Edwards both press Mrs. Clinton in the primaries in the way Taft once threatened Eisenhower: by playing to the party activists, in this case the anti-war, pacifist, isolationist voices. Mrs. Clinton's maneuver to blunt the caviling to her left is to emphasize her domestic agenda of health care, education, and retirement security in a "national conversation" — while speaking tersely of the war. The ambiguous, "How do we bring the war in Iraq to the right end?" will frustrate the edges of her party while satisfying the crucial center that she will do what is appropriate overseas. Mrs. Clinton will do to her rivals what Eisenhower did to Stevenson, forcing the opponent to speak more and more of war to distinguish himself, while Mrs. Clinton stays on message with her homespun autobiography, "I grew up in a middle-class family in the middle of America."

Notably, Mrs. Clinton's "I'm in" speech goes out of its way, both on video and in the longer text, to avoid mention of September 11, the global war on terrorism, Iran, and even the archnemesis Osama bin Laden. What she leaves loudly unsaid of national security threats will serve her even better in the general election, where Senator McCain or Rudy Giuliani will make the mistake of trying to out-commander-in-chief a woman who does not intend to gab of her generalship from on high. Like Grant, she just intends to win.

Mr. Batchelor is host of "The John Batchelor Show," now on hiatus.