Jeanine Pirro, the Republican prosecutor looking to challenge Senator Clinton’s 2006 bid for re-election, has a simple question for the former first lady: Just what are your intentions beyond next year?

Thus far, neither the Westchester County district attorney nor New Yorkers, have gotten an answer beyond Clinton’s stock line that she is totally focused on winning re-election.

Like any good prosecutor, Mrs. Pirro knows that you don’t ask a question unless you have a very, very good idea what the answer is. As far as Mrs. Pirro is concerned, the answer is clear: Mrs. Clinton is running for president in 2008 and wants to use her re-election race as a stepping stone to that.

“When Hillary first came to New York and said she wanted to be a New Yorker, she asked us to put out a welcome mat and New York did,” Mrs. Pirro said August 10 as she kicked off her announcement tour. “But now she wants to use New York as a doormat to the White House.”

Statewide polls show Mrs. Clinton far ahead of Mrs. Pirro while national polls have the former first lady as the clear front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

While ambition is expected in politics, and is not necessarily considered a negative by voters – Democrat Mario Cuomo’s popularity as New York governor was never higher than when speculation raged that he might run for president – Mrs. Pirro’s point is more precise.

Noting that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts missed almost all of the Senate’s votes when he was the Democratic presidential standard-bearer in 2004, Pirro said recently that “the issues we face, the needs we have as a state, are too important to leave to a part-time senator.”

“I don’t believe you can serve two masters,” Mrs. Pirro also said, noting she opted not to seek re-election as district attorney this year “knowing I would be running for statewide office right away.”

Critics have suggested Mrs. Pirro may have had another more prosaic reason for not seeking re-election, a fear of losing. Her re-election win four years ago was narrow.

In 2000, when Mrs. Clinton was initially running for Senate in her newly adopted state, and critics were suggesting even then she was using the race to set herself up for a presidential run in 2004, she responded by pledging to serve her full six-year Senate term if elected.

Mrs. Clinton has, at least thus far, refused to renew that pledge. Her husband, the former president, has said she shouldn’t make such a pledge again.

New York polling isn’t completely clear on how voters feel.

In a late September poll, Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion asked voters if Mrs. Clinton “should pledge to fulfill another six-year term and not run for president in 2008, or should she not make such a pledge?” Thirty-seven percent said she should make the pledge while 53% said she should not.

In an early October poll, the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute asked voters: “If Hillary Clinton runs for reelection to the Senate in 2006, do you think she should pledge to serve the full six-year term or not?” Fifty-nine percent said she should make such a pledge under those circumstances while 30% said she should not.

The different results can be explained in part by the different wording. The Quinnipiac poll keeps the presidential issue out of its question while the Marist poll links the two clearly together.