Last Sunday there was a crucial TV 'debate' between the Republican men who are fighting each other for their party's nomination to contest the next US presidential election.

This was their chance to set out their stalls.

It is still 67 days until the first of the primaries but political wisdom has it that people lose interest in public affairs as they enter the holiday season that begins with the run-up to Thanksgiving. Round about now, apparently, the undecideds make up their minds. But there was really only one stall. In the debate, Hillary Clinton was mentioned . . . that is to say, she was trashed . . . by the candidates 34 times.

George W Bush, the President and Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America and leader of the free world, was mentioned twice.

She's so far ahead of the other contestants for the Democratic party's presidential nomination that, on the face of it, Barack Obama and John Edwards might as well stay at home. But if a week is a long time in politics, just imagine what might happen in a year . . . the presidential election itself doesn't take place until 4 November 2008. Also . . . never forget . . . Teddy Kennedy and Gary Hart were once just as far in front of their fellow Democrat contenders.

And they didn't make it.

And they weren't even women.

'End America as we know it'

NOW that hatred is beginning to creep into the campaign . . . and last Sunday, the Republican debate relied for what passion it had on hating Hillary . . . you begin to wonder how safe it is to do anything other than stay at home. A few weeks ago, there were interviews with some poor, rural, black women in theNew York Times and several of them said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, that they didn't want Obama to run because if he did he'd be murdered.

I thought that was just talk. But the television coverage of the Republican debate included two visits to a horrendous 'focus group' which had been brought together in Orlando, Florida. And that group made me wonder whether there aren't many American people who would be psychically unable to tolerate a black man putting himself forward to be their president, or even a brown man, like the Mexican-American Democrat candidate, Bill Richardson.

I mean, Hillary Clinton is not a demonic type. I'd have thought that her manner repels strong emotion of any kind. But this roomful of sullen men and women . . . some of the men with the kind of weight problem that makes a person sullen . . . didn't have anything to say, really, except that they loathed Hillary.

"Hillary Clinton does not have American values, " one man began.

"She'll end America as we know it, " a woman cried.

"I think people have very long memories about Bill Clinton and what it was like to live through that hell, " another man said, almost weeping with self-pity.

"Hillary Clinton is just nothing but socialist and communism, " someone else contributed.

"Every time they mention her I hear my taxes going up, " someone else said.

And so on.

The words look harmless enough, but the atmosphere was dark with anger and paranoia.

Perfunctory attention to Republicanism THE default setting of the whole night was Hillary-bashing. The show got off the ground with a rousing call from the stage to the 3,000 people in the audience.

"Anyone here want to vote for Hillary?"

"NO! , " the audience roared back, with as much fervour as if they were renouncing the devil and all his works and pomps.

After setting the tone with that, there was only perfunctory attention to what Republicanism itself is . . . and it is a perfectly arguable political philosophy . . . or to how whatever Republican who might succeed George W Bush is going to address complex problems like disentangling from Iraq or reforming the crazy US healthcare system.

Instead, Mrs Clinton hovered over the vast convention centre like some nightmare miasma from outer space.

The Republican frontrunners, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain, each tried to give the impression that they are insouciantly certain of beating her in a general election. And they could be right. In the most recent polls, those three are only a few points behind Hillary in the swing states, a gap which is within the margin of statistical error.

The trouble for the Republicans is that noone who might beat her is without Republican sin. In primaries, it is only registered party members who vote, and they're committed people . . . they're not looking for a centrist or a conciliator or a president for all the people.

They want a red-blooded warrior who'll embody their ideology in the most implacable way. Republicans want a guy who'll grind Hillary into dust and who is now and always has been anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-low taxes, pro-free market and in a position to get American troops out of Iraq, but to "get them out" . . . as someone on the platform shouted to huge applause . . . "winning!"

The candidates started out by dragging Hillary into whatever they were talking about.

Then the television hosts started mentioning her in their questions. Then they devoted an entire segment to her, allowing each candidate to bash her fully and directly.

This is the kind of thing that had the audience cheering.

Senator John McCain picked, of all things on which to challenge Hillary, her support for a grant for a museum on the site of the seminal 1969 Woodstock festival. (Woodstock is in a depressed part of New York state, which is Hillary Cinton's senate constituency. ) "Now, my friends, I wasn't there, " McCain said about Woodstock. "I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time, " he deadpanned.

And he got, of course, a standing ovation.

But this wasn't just one of his many references to his years as a prisoner of war . . . references which seem to me well-earned and directly relevant to a presidential hopeful. This one implied that Hillary Clinton (then aged 22) in some way stood idly by while he was being tortured by the Viet Cong. It was also an invoking of those standard Republican demons . . . hippies. It shows how far from common sense Hillary-hating can lead.

Because whatever else might be said about Hillary Clinton, she is surely the least hippie woman in the world. She is so discreet and controlled that she makes the queen of England seem inclined to let it all hang out.

The boy from 'Mad' magazine

MIKE HUCKABEE is the candidate you haven't heard of yet but he's increasingly . . . the polls show . . . a horse who's coming up on the rails behind McCain and Romney and Giuliani. He's a Baptist minister and he looks like the boy from Mad magazine, or as if the top of his head has been sliced off. This may have something to do with what he's famous for, which is losing 100lbs when he was governor of Arkansas. (He wrote a book with the memorable title, Quit Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork. On the other hand, some people who were fond of their food accused him of running a "grease police". ) Huckabee announced that if Hillary Clinton becomes president of the US, "Taxes go up, health care becomes the domain of the government, spending goes up, and our military loses its morale. I'm not sure we will have the courage and the will and the resolve to fight the greatest threat this country has faced: Islamo-fascism. We've got an enemy that wants to kill every last one of us. We cannot be soft, we must be strong."

And while the audience was still shuddering in its boots, so to speak, Mitt Romney (Mitt the Twit, as I believe he is sometimes called), as a change from his usual twinning of Hillary and Karl Marx, charged her with having no experience. She hadn't run as much as a corner shop, he said, and he accused her of being prepared to learn the job of president by doing it . . . "as if she had an internship".

"Internship?" someone remarked in a blog.

"C'mon, have at least a little class." Because Mitt . . . the perfect, monogamous father and grandfather and Mormon-but-not-in-anembarrassing-way . . . is usually the winner in the smarm stakes. It isn't difficult, of course, to be smarmier than the abrupt Giuliani or the dour McCain. But here the smarm has peeled off. Romney is reminding everyone of history's most famous intern, Monica Lewinsky.

Romney had better look out, all the same.

The gay Log Cabin Republicans, in a daring attempt to become as formidable a force within their party as any of the other pressure groups, have spent a lot of money on an ad which they've run nationwide and in Iowa, where Romney has spent millions of his own money and is likely to get a great boost from being the Republican winner in the first primary. Romney himself is shown in various video clips with a voiceover from a gushing, admiring narrator.

In a video extract from 1994, Romney says, "I believe abortion should be safe and legal." In another old clip he says, "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush.

I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."

And the ad ends with the narrator intoning, "A record fighting the religious right. A pro-choice record.

Massachusetts values. Mitt Romney."

The ad doesn't spell out that he flipflopped on gays too, that he once promised that he could do more for gays than Senator Edward Kennedy, though these days he reveals himself, to the delight of the anti-gay elements in the Republican party, to be exceptionally anti-gay. Only the credits reveal that the ad is ironic and was paid for by the Log Cabin people.

"If Romney becomes president, " an internet commentator remarks, "the group faces even further exile as the lavender sheep in the GOP family."

Factoring in the Bill factor NOT that Monica Lewinsky wasn't a worthy intern. Not many people know it but, amazingly, she survived her intimacy with Bill Clinton and all that it led to and, a year or so ago, graduated with an MA in social psychology from the London School of Economics with a thesis called 'In Search of the Impartial Juror: an exploration of the third person effect and pre-trial publicity'.

Bill Clinton himself isn't on nearly as clear a personal path. His self-image, now, is one of the human and cultural questions that make this such an outstandingly interesting election. He and Hillary are in uncharted territory, and it must, if anything can, make the pair of them uneasy.

Though . . . do they do uneasy? Professor Susan Estrich, who knows them, said to me carefully: "They're not like you and me, you know. They're driven people."

I imagine they're both enjoying the contest itself. She, certainly, is so much in charge of herself and shows such confidence and control in her TV appearances . . . apart from a cackling laugh - that if Bill sees her as his pupil he must be delighted with her. But the Clintons are at least as mysterious as most couples. It is the rest of us who will be challenged in our responses to a power-shift between a husband and wife that, because it is happening at the very apex of public life, has implications for all gender roles.

New York magazine captured the uneasiness with a cover, which upset some readers, that pasted Bill Clinton's clever, wary face onto a woman's body, little black dress, pearls and all.

Bill as First Lady, or, as he joked in a Scottish accent on Oprah, First Laddie. What men are supposed to be and women are supposed to be becomes a startlingly open question when you look at the picture. So do questions like, what is he going to do all day, if she gets into the White House? Who is going to do the wife stuff . . . supervising the menus, choosing the china, chatting up visiting wives? (Bill? Showing a visiting wife around the White House? ) How will he remain what we think of as virile and she what we think of as feminine? What would the pair of them even be called? The former and Mrs President Clinton? Mr and Mrs Presidents Clinton?

President Clinton and Mr Clinton?

So far, Bill Clinton has made carefully judged campaign appearances, and not many of them . . .

the fact that he's personally far more popular than Hillary cuts both ways. But he is surely the rock on which she stands, in that he's the money man. He can acquire money, and acquiring money is a fundamental gauge of strength in the USA, a society whose transactions between materialism and religion are quite different from ours in Ireland.

It seems to me that it is not enough to have money in the States.

John Kerry and Teresa Heinz Kerry had all the money in the world and it didn't count. Ross Perot had money.

Mike Bloomberg has money. Come to that, Mitt Romney has so far contributed about $20m of his own money to his campaign. But Bill Clinton has the network of contacts and the heft to be given money. That's what matters.

Even his charm has been for sale, on Hillary's website. You could get to watch her on a Democrat debate with him if you won a raffle you entered by sending a donation. You could even win the prize of watching with him and John Grisham, in the unlikely event that watching with Bill alone wasn't enough.

And though he and Hillary will have raised more than $100m by the end of this year and . . .

very importantly . . . made Obama seem weak by adding more donors in the third quarter than Hillary did, Bill is not taking any rest. He wants you to be one of the family, now. He wants your heart as well as your money. It's not enough to be just a distant supporter. On www. hillaryclinton. com/birthdaymessage you can see and hear Bill say the following:

"In 36 years, Hillary and I have shared a lot of birthdays, and each year I'm amazed at everything she has accomplished. This is a very special year: we're celebrating Hillary's 60th, and I hope you'll join me in sending her a birthday message, sharing your wishes for her and your hopes for the coming year. I'll make sure to share your message with Hillary. And please encourage your friends and family to send their messages as well."

And I said Mitt Romney was smarmy?

Bill Clinton as 'First Laddie' BILL came up, though not by name, when all but one of the wives of the frontrunners on both sides met in a discussion moderated by Maria Shriver . . . Mrs Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . this week. Shriver said someone had told her that, "for the American public to truly understand the role of the first lady, a man's got to take that job."

Some of the wives laughed, some of them disagreed, and Ann Romney observed that former president Clinton "is not here at this forum".

"We invited him to serve coffee, but he was busy, " Shriver joked. "No. I'm only kidding.

Only kidding."

The whole thing was pleasant and thoughtful and, of course, folksy. Michelle Obama, for example, said her children's main concern about the presidential race was whether or not they could get a dog. John Edwards' brave wife Elizabeth said they had two new dogs already this year. Jeri Thompson, wife of Fred Thompson, the Republican candidate who despite being a TV actor is the most lacking . . . and this is a hotly contested position . . . in any sign of joie de vivre, said that the biggest change in her life was that "my dry cleaning is a little more expensive now". And her biggest fear, she said, was, "I'm afraid of embarrassing Fred.

That would be my biggest fear, of not doing the right thing. It would break my heart."

How Judi embarrasses Rudy THE wife who was a conspicuous absentee is the one who has, it seems, embarrassed her husband. Judi Nathan Giuliani is more likely than any of the other women to end up in the White House . . . Rudy Giuliani, though not the favourite among hardcore Republicans, is the national favourite to contest the presidency on behalf of the Republican party. But she's not let out much any more.

Judi and Rudy have been married only since 2003 and they're said to be very much in love.

But a previous marriage of hers she hadn't mentioned was discovered and she worked for a medical accessories firm, allegedly demonstrating stapling techniques on large, live dogs, and the Giuliani children don't speak to her and she calls her husband all the time, including when he's in meetings, and his staff don't like that one bit. (Remember how Garret FitzGerald was sneered at for keeping in touch with Joan by phone during the day? ) The Giulianis provide yet another of the perspectives on marriage in which this election is so rich. What if Bill or Hillary slips, or there's another horror like 11 September 2001, or something else unforeseeable happens, and Rudy Giuliani is poised to win the White House?

He's riding high at the moment. He came into last Sunday's Republican debate fresh from assuring a large gathering of influential religious leaders that he's as holy as you can get and prays a lot and is a "strict constructionist" when it comes to the constitution, which is code for saying he would appoint anti-abortion judges. He rattled efficiently through the debate, displaying a good deal more energy than his fellow Republican candidates (even if, like Donald Trump's hair, his teeth should have a show of their own). But what if the wife he plainly loves costs him the presidency? Or what if he does get in, but by turning her into a nodding puppet? Wouldn't that be a reversion to the bad old days when political wives had to be emblematic little wifeys, even when, like Betty Ford or Kitty Dukakis, only alcohol or pills was getting them through?

By the time this gladiatorial campaign is over there'll be blood on the tracks, and some human being will be paying with a broken life for some other human being's ambition. But our cast has only recently assembled. There are never tragic exits in a first act. So far, so light-hearted.