Now that Hillary's officially in the Presidential race, it's interesting to take note of what's shaping up to be the official conservative narrative on her candidacy: The idea that she's forever doomed to be vacillating between "center" and "left" — that is, as conservatives define these terms, of course.

Case in point: Bill Kristol's new column in Time magazine. Key quote:

The examples of Muskie and Kerry are Clinton's Scylla and Charybdis. She will spend the next year trying to navigate between the twin dangers of being too moderate on the war for an antiwar primary electorate and going so far in mollifying that electorate as to weaken her chances in the general election. Like Muskie, a Humphrey backer in 1968, and Kerry, an Iraq-war authorizer in 2002, she's saddled with the original sin of being an original war supporter. Like Muskie, she's been moving gradually away from that position. Like Kerry, she'll soon have to cast votes on various legislative proposals related to the war.

Note the underlying assumptions here: (1) That someone who was for the war could only become anti-war out of opportunism; (2) That being against the Iraq war is out of the mainstream within the country at large; and (3) That being for the war is the better position politically in a general election.

These assumptions ignore the simple possibility that a politician might be reaching his or her position by responding to the conditions that exist in Iraq now, as opposed to ones that existed in the past, and hence is changing his or her mind about what the right course of action is right now. They also ignore the glaring reality that sizeable majorities now oppose the war, want it to be brought to an end, and handed Dems Congress in 2006 so that they could do just that.

The outstanding question: Will this narrative become the chosen storyline of the big news organizations if conservatives repeat it often enough?