Below The Beltway

Hillary Clinton has a request.

Please forget about that impeachment thing:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has a new commandment for the 2008 presidential field: Thou shalt not mention anything related to the impeachment of her husband.

With a swift response to attacks from a former supporter last week, advisers to the New York Democrat offered a glimpse of their strategy for handling one of the most awkward chapters of her biography. They declared her husband’s impeachment in 1998 — or, more accurately, the embarrassing personal behavior that led to it — taboo, putting her rivals on notice and all but daring other Democrats to mention the ordeal again.

“In the end, voters will decide what’s off-limits, but I can’t imagine that the public will reward the politics of personal destruction,” senior Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson said Friday, when asked whether the impeachment is fair game for Clinton’s opponents. Earlier in the week, Wolfson dismissed references to President Bill Clinton’s conduct as “under the belt.”

Unfortunately for the junior Senator from New York, impeachment follows her wherever she goes:

[T]he issue has lingered at the edges of the nomination battle, starting with Clinton’s quip about her experience with “evil and bad men” at a forum last month in Iowa on her debut trip to the early-caucus state. While many in the audience assumed she was referring to her husband, several Clinton advisers said it was more likely a dig at Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel in the inquiry into Bill Clinton, or Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who as House speaker vigorously pursued impeachment — in either case still a reference to that rancorous time.

In his interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Geffen, a onetime Clinton fundraiser, gave voice to fears privately held by some Democrats that Republicans intend to revisit past Clinton issues and try to dig up new ones.

“I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Geffen said. Speaking of Republicans’ view of the former first lady, he said: “I think they believe she’s the easiest to defeat.”

All of this reinforces something that is becoming clear very early in the race. Hillary Clinton is vulnerable and the biggest threat she faces right now is Barak Obama.