Hillaryland.

The New Republic (subscription required) gives us some insight into the powerful world of Hillary: (emphasis mine)

Ever since 1992, when a young campaign staffer answered a phone call from Hillary with the greeting "Hillaryland," the future first lady and her devoted, mostly female aides have embraced the cutesy sobriquet as a way to describe their unique, un-Bill (and sometimes anti-Bill) sorority. In the 1992 campaign, it described a small corner of office real estate in Little Rock where her staff toiled. In the Clinton White House, Hillaryland grew into an influential but often frustrated power center inhabited by dutiful staffers whose first allegiance was to the first lady, not the president. "[W]e were also our little subculture within the White House," Hillary writes in her memoir. "My staff prided themselves on discretion, loyalty and camaraderie, and we had our own special ethos. While the West Wing had a tendency to leak, Hillaryland never did. While the president's senior advisers jockeyed for big offices and proximity to the Oval Office, my senior staff happily shared offices with their young assistants." Bill Clinton staffers regarded the dwellers in Hillaryland as Kool-Aid drinkers with awful political judgment. Hillarylanders saw Bill's people as showboats and referred to them dismissively as the "white boys." Hillary "took a dim view of many of her husband's West Wing advisers," writes John Harris in The Survivor, his excellent account of the Clinton years, "who she regarded as too immature and too worried about currying favor with the Washington press." Hillaryland was different.

Today, Hillaryland is a vast political empire based in Washington and New York that, in its scale and ambition, is unrivaled in Democratic politics. But the spirit of Hillaryland, as well as many of its leaders, remains the same. Alan Patricof, Hillary's Senate campaign finance chair, who has been raising money for the Clintons for two decades, says, "She's got a very loyal group of people around her who have supported her for a long time." In fact, everyone in Hillaryland says that. They prefer to compare Hillary's operational style to George W. Bush's rather than Bill's. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, premise is that, unlike her husband's White House team--not to mention the last two Democratic presidential campaigns--there are no mercenaries in Hillaryland, only true believers, a culture they say is hardening now that many Democratic sharks are circling Hillaryland, looking for a way in. "I have been involved with her for seven years. [Advisers] Patti [Solis Doyle] and Maggie [Williams] are going on 15," says one close adviser. "There is an intense loyalty."

For anyone who doubts that she will get the '08 nomination, you seriously underestimate the empire that Hillary has carefully and systematically built.

...getting answers to simple questions is always a little harder in Hillaryland. Part of the problem is that there are so many power centers. For most senators, there's only one--their Senate office. But, in Hillaryland, the Senate is just one outpost in a sprawling political organization. Says an adviser, straining not to offend Hillary's Senate aides, "Let's just say there are big and important players outside of the Senate office."

The office is, however, an interesting microcosm of greater Hillaryland. It is relentlessly on-message and extremely wary of reporters. When I called the communications director to ask about the culture of the office and the backgrounds of its senior employees, she read me a staff directory. "Tamera Luzzatto is our chief of staff. ... Miguel Rodriguez is the counsel. ... Phillippe is the press secretary...." According to other denizens of Hillaryland, the Senate staff is especially tight-lipped because many aides don't have longtime Hillary connections and realize that most of Hillary's top strategists and advisers work elsewhere. "It's a unique Senate staff, in that the main decisions don't get made by the Senate staff," says one Democrat.

A look into Hillary's "centrist" move tells us how she will shape her presidential bid including moving to the right of her previous issues.

..for example, Hillary's new legislative director, Laurie Rubiner. The newest senior staffer in Hillaryland, Rubiner came to Hillary by way of former Republican Senators John Chafee and Bob Dole and, most recently, the aggressively centrist New America Foundation, where she ran a program on universal health insurance. Her hiring says a lot about where Hillary is headed on the issues that may define a presidential campaign. Rubiner favors a universal plan, whereby the government mandates the purchase of health insurance, just as it does car insurance, from competing private providers, while subsidizing the neediest. Back in the '90s, this was the centrist alternative to Hillarycare, and it was sponsored by Rubiner's ex-bosses, Chafee and Dole.

The Senate office has also been instrumental in executing Hillary's high-profile campaign to co-sponsor legislation with practically every extremist Republican in the Senate. Her policy seems to be: The more right-wing the co-sponsor, the better; extra points for anyone involved with her husband's impeachment. There was the legislation to ban flag-burning, co-sponsored with Utah's Robert Bennett. There was the video game violence bill with Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum and the work on National Guard benefits with impeachment leader Lindsey Graham. Most of the issues on which she has allied herself with Republicans are symbolic, an effort to show, in the words of one senior adviser, that she's "a little more socially conservative than people think."

She is making sure no one can call her a leftwing radical. I believe that every single step she has taken in the Senate is carefully planned with a white house run in mind and always has. I don't think she is guided by principles any more than her husband was. The difference is Bill wanted to be liked, Hillary just wants to win.

The article describes the small population of Hillaryland. It is a close tightknit group of people devoted to Hillary. They are powerful and loyal and they make sure that nothing but good press goes out regarding Hillary and they are very good at it.

And then there is the money. Oh goodness..is there money:

If you really want to understand Hillaryland, you have to look outside the Senate at the array of political machinery that runs and finances the Hillary empire. Between her own political and campaign committees and the fund-raising she has done for other Democrats, aides say that Hillary has raised some $50 million since 2001. In true Hillaryland fashion, the person who actually manages this expansive operation is almost unknown in political circles. She rarely talks to the press, save for an occasional anodyne quote about successful fund-raising numbers or one repeating how focused Hillary is on her Senate reelection, not the White House. She never appears on television. She declined to cooperate with this article. Her name is Patricia Solis Doyle--Patti to everyone in Hillaryland--and her job is running Hillary's two main fund-raising entities, HillPAC, a so-called leadership committee, and Friends of Hillary (FOH), the senator's reelection vehicle.

The money machine continues:

HillPAC, which is really the holding company for Hillary's political machine, supplements the salaries of Hillary's Senate staffers. It pays the consultants who write Hillary's speeches for, say, a Gridiron dinner. It pays for the Beverly Hills firm Capital Strategies, which lassoes Hollywood money for Hillary. It pays about $5,000 a month to Hudson Media Partners, the political arm of the Glover Park Group, the powerhouse corporate consulting firm of Hillary's top communications guru, Howard Wolfson. It writes checks to Occasions, the swanky Washington caterer that outfits Hillaryland events at Whitehaven. One of its largest expenses is to direct mail firms like O'Brien, McConnell & Pearson and Merkle Response Services, which are canvassing every nook of the United States for Hillary donors. By 2008, Hillary may have the most massive fund-raising database in politics.

Where does the "middle of the road" messages come from?A man named Mark Penn.

Penn has been the messaging mastermind of Hillaryland. His stubborn centrism, arrived at by sifting through tons of granular-level psychographic polling--that is, psychological and demographic--has long angered liberals, and it is likely be the greatest source of future tension in Hillaryland.

Like Bill, Hillary will depend on locking into what the people want. Not just through polls as Bill did, but by even more intense probing of the American mind. She will discover what people really want and run on that. Of course we all know that doesn't mean she will govern that way. I feel pretty confident that the deep lefty politics that she is devoted to will emerge when she wins and I figure the left will hold their nose at the right of center messages to get her elected.

Everyone here wonders why I still think McCain is the one to run against her. Let me assure you of something. No novice, no first timer, no matter how wonderful, is going to overtake the Hillarymachine. No way. McCain is the only one I see having the political muscle to take her down.