Senator Clinton’s new re-election campaign Web site, launched last week, is up and running at HillaryClinton.com. If it’s any indication of what we can expect in the 2006 Senate race and 2008 presidential campaign, hang on, because it’s going to be a long three years, starting with “Conversations With Hillary,” a video installment that features the senator sitting in front of an American flag with her “friend and hero,” Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

Mr. Lewis is a hero of ours, too, and of many Americans, for his sheer physical bravery in the fight for desegregation and civil rights. He had his skull cracked by an Alabama state trooper’s nightstick in Selma in 1965. In the nine-minute “conversation” on the Web site, Mrs. Clinton frames her ideas in religious terms. She describes the civil rights struggle as the realization that “we were not going to be the nation God meant us to be if we did not embrace each other.” She speaks of making sure that “everyone has the opportunity to live up to their God-given potential.” After Mr. Lewis speaks, she replies, “Amen.”

It’s a sign that Mrs. Clinton and other Democrats are trying to use the techniques through which President Bush appealed to religious voters in the 2004 election. The civil rights struggle was driven in part by a religious vision. Mr. Lewis recalled how, in the 1950s, when a Supreme Court decision favorable to desegregation came down, it was greeted by one black woman in the South with the words “Thank God, God almighty, spoken from Washington.”

But if Mrs. Clinton is laying the groundwork for appealing to Bush voters by speaking in religious terms, she is taking the Lord’s name in vain. For she spent the rest of the video implying that Republicans and Bush supporters are racists, just like the men who bashed in Mr. Lewis’s head. “What we are experiencing today is a real movement to turn the clock back on the rights of Americans,” Mrs. Clinton said. Rep. Lewis said, “They want to put out the lights on justice, on fairness.” It’s a baseless and divisive libel for Mrs. Clinton to tell visitors to her Web site that a “real movement” is afoot to turn back the gains of the civil rights era. Is this the same movement that elected a president who named Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as his secretaries of state?

According to Mrs. Clinton’s Web “conversation,” this is all somehow related to the fight over Supreme Court picks. “Unfortunately, the people who are being appointed to the courts all too often have a pre-existing idea of what they are going to decide,” Mrs. Clinton says. Maybe some nominee will quote that back at Democrats on the Judiciary Committee when pressed to take a stand, say, against abortion rights or in favor of racial preferences in college admissions.

The problem for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Lewis is that they aren’t running against racist opponents. They are running against, in many cases, candidates with just as lively senses of justice as they have, in some cases even more so – particularly when it comes to international affairs. The same Mr. Lewis who fought so valiantly 40 years ago against Jim Crow last month released a statement on the war in Iraq that said, “It was wrong to go into Iraq two years ago, and it is wrong to stay there now. …” He called Saddam’s Iraq “a sovereign nation that posed no threat to us” and said, “We have not been called, we have not been ordained to be the policemen of the world.”

One can debate whether Iraq was an imminent threat, but to claim it posed “no threat to us” is both naive and callous. We don’t think Mrs. Clinton would endorse that view: She voted for the war. To allow Iraq to use the cloak of sovereignty to gas its own Kurdish citizens and murder the 30,000 Shiites that were discovered in mass graves at Hilla – all with relative impunity, merely because of the false belief that such actions threaten no Americans – well, talk about putting out the lights on justice.

That battle and the policy struggles like it over the struggles for freedom and against tyranny in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea are among the great civil rights struggles of all time. So long as Republicans field a candidate who recognizes that and can explain it as well as Mr. Bush did last year, Mrs. Clinton will have a hard time succeeding in vilifying Republicans on religious or justice grounds, no matter whom she sits next to in her campaign videos.