In light of Hillary Clinton’s downright slaughter of her Republican opponent, John Spencer, I think I should share a fantastic new cover feature on her from New York magazine. In it, Chris Smith paints a positive portrait of the senator from the eyes of a former skeptic; more importantly, he makes a convincing argument that Hillary should stay in the Senate for now and try to become the Senate majority leader. She has almost inarguably proven herself to be an effective senator, able to work with both parties to get money for her state and push issues important to her. She is not in a position to win the Presidency right now, but maybe with some years in her belt as a legislative leader, her image in American minds will be less extreme and vicious. She won over upstate New York, something unheard of for a Democrat; perhaps she could do the same to the rest of America.

Who needs the presidency, though? The majority leader of the Senate is a huge position. Hillary would have great power in that role, and it’s entirely feasible that she could secure it relatively soon, if not this coming year. Imagine the two houses both being run by Democratic women. It’s like the universe is collapsing into itself.

“If Hillary runs, it will be in part because Bill pushed and her own campaign machinery pulled. But ultimately it will be her call. Clearly, ego will be involved. But, corny as it sounds, Hillary Clinton is a true believer in public service. In these past six years, she’s seen government’s capacity for good and evil in a fine-grained detail—and experienced her own firsthand ability to move government—that she’d never known before. To Clinton, her political career is about us, not her, and that’s why she’d submit herself to a brutal 2008 campaign. Skeptics will never believe it; they’ll see a grab for power, the arrogance of a woman who thinks she knows what’s best for the little people. Yet central to Clinton’s decision will be her judgment of where she can do the most good, for New York and for the nation.”

“I’ve chased Clinton from Buffalo to Washington, and she’s looser and warmer than I’d expected. I have a better understanding of where she’s been creative and where she’s been cowardly in the Senate, and why. Clinton is a pragmatic progressive, and after eight years of ruinously inflexible ideology in the White House, her incrementalism would be a quantum improvement.”

“Clinton has developed the crucial retail-politics skills that seemed alien to her in the First Lady years—the warm handshake, the casual banter. Way back in 1993, Lawrence O’Donnell clashed with Clinton. He was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s top staffer on the Senate Finance Committee, which became an enormous roadblock to Clinton’s health-care proposal; she was the inflexible crusader who slammed any compromise health-care proposal as “incremental.” Today, O’Donnell is a TV writer (The West Wing) and a political pundit, and he looks at Senator Clinton with nothing but admiration. “In 2000, her polling got significantly better by Hillary Clinton campaigning,” O’Donnell says. “People think that’s the way it works; no, it isn’t, at all. This time, Hillary is going to win counties upstate that Democrats never win. She is the rare politician who has the ability to change minds. That’s the reason I look at her and think she could win a presidential election.”

FULL STORY: Hillary Clinton: The Woman in the Bubble