ABC'S NEW SHOW, Commander in Chief, starring Geena Davis as the first female president of the United States, along with new books by Democratic political consultants Dick Morris and Susan Estrich, is fueling the notion that a woman can lead America. No one need guess who the liberals in Beverly Hills and Georgetown would like to see in the Oval Office.

But before anyone else in the Democratic party suggests short-circuiting the 2008 presidential nomination process and just handing the crown to Hillary Rodham Clinton, consider this: the Democratic party has rarely nominated its front runner in non-incumbent years. John Kennedy was not the frontrunner in 1960, it was former Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson . . . or Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson . . . or Missouri Senator Stuart Symington . . . or Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey . . . which is why Kennedy had to campaign and win in all seven primaries that year to prove himself to the party elders.

In 1968, underdog Robert Kennedy would have surely wrested the nomination from the front runner, Vice President Humphrey, had he not been assassinated. And that's because the real frontrunner, incumbent President Lyndon Johnson, had been chased from the field by yet another underdog, Senator Gene McCarthy of Minnesota. In 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie and not the eventual nominee, Senator George McGovern, was the frontrunner. He fell to the peace candidate's grassroots brigade. McGovern also, for the first time, successfully used the Iowa caucuses to his advantage and developed important momentum,

Only in 1984 did the frontrunner, Walter Mondale, win the nomination, after almost losing to the candidate of "new ideas," Senator Gary Hart. But four years later, in 1988, Michael Dukakis was certainly not the frontrunner when he won his party's nomination.

Senator Clinton knows from personal experience that her husband was not the frontrunner in 1992--New York Governor Mario Cuomo was. The next non-incumbent year, 2000, actually saw the frontrunner, Vice President Al Gore win the nomination. But this was, in many ways, the third nomination of Clinton, not the first for Gore. And we all remember last year when Howard Dean emerged as the leader of the pack over a talented field that included Senators John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman.

CURIOUSLY, and perhaps tellingly, the Republican party always nominates its frontrunner. Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Richard Nixon in 1960 and '68, Barry Goldwater in 1964, Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bush "41" in '88, Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000 . . . were all frontrunners despite hotly contested campaigns in many of those non-incumbent years.

Although history is rarely a straight-line projection, it is also prologue; which is good news for Sen. John McCain, for a time (and bad news for Hillary Clinton). Interestingly, Republicans don't mind nominating men who have previously lost presidential runs--Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. But since 1956, Democrats have never nominated a previous presidential loser. So, if not Hillary, who?