While Senator Clinton may be focused primarily on re-election from New York, her campaign team is looking farther a field, angling for a decisive victory in 2006 so the former first lady will be able to keep her “options open,” Mrs. Clinton’s top communications aide, Ann Lewis, told The New York Sun in an interview.

“I want her to get re-elected well,” Ms. Lewis said during a recent meeting in Washington, “and I want her to have options for what to do next.”

The likeliest option to pursue is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Mrs. Clinton has proven already that she has the sort of fund-raising chops needed to make that happen.

That she has star presence is also evident. Yesterday, during a visit to Grand Central Terminal with the new secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, Mrs. Clinton was greeted with whoops and hollers as she made her way from the podium. Walking up the stairs, onlookers broke into spontaneous applause.

“They are looking to out-Schumer Schumer,” a Baruch College professor, Douglas Muzzio, said. Senator Schumer won re-election in 2004 with 70% of the vote.

“If I were making decisions for them I would say, ‘I want at least 72%,'” Mr. Muzzio said. “Given the paucity of the Republican field running against her, Hillary might get it, and that opens huge possibilities. It would be a slingshot effect coming out of the 2006 election.”

Campaign-finance reports released this month showed that Mrs. Clinton raised nearly $4 million in the first three months of this year alone. She has brought in nearly $15.2 million and spent about $6.5 million on advertising and direct mail, among other things, the filings show. At the end of March she had $8.7 million in her campaign coffers, one of the largest such sums in the Senate. Under campaign-finance rules, any money Mrs. Clinton raises for her Senate re-election campaign that she doesn’t use could be transferred to a 2008 presidential race. The maximum donation allowed is $4,200.

Certainly, Republican leaders are taking Mrs. Clinton’s possible presidential ambitions seriously. A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors April 13 that he expected not only that Mrs. Clinton would win re-election in 2006 but that she would capture the Democratic nomination as well.

“Any Republican who thinks she will be easy to beat has total amnesia about the Clintons,” the Georgia Republican said, adding that she has “the smartest American politician as her adviser.”

Earlier this month, Mrs. Clinton wowed a crowd of the Democratic faithful in the swing state of Minnesota, according to published reports. While Mrs. Clinton, as has been her practice, took care not to say she was running for president, Senator Dayton, the Minnesota Democrat who introduced her, asked the crowd, “Please welcome the next great president of the United States of America.” Mrs. Clinton got a standing ovation.

Whatever the attitude of party loyalists, it is unclear whether a majority of American voters are ready for a female president, much less one who draws the kind of fire Mrs. Clinton inspires from her critics. When a pollster, Scott Rasmussen, asked a national sample this month if they would be willing to vote for a woman for president, 72% said yes. When he asked if family, friends, and co-workers would do so, however, only 49% said yes.

In another national sample, pollsters at Siena College, near Albany, found that 62% of a sample of voters said they think the country is ready for a woman to become president in 2008. In a head-to-head match-up between Mrs. Clinton and Secretary of State Rice, Mrs. Clinton was favored by 53% and Ms. Rice by 42%.

Those kinds of numbers have Mrs. Clinton’s detractors mobilizing. New York’s Republican chairman, Stephen Minarik, has started a “Stop Hillary Now!” fundraising drive. A longtime GOP operative, Arthur Finkelstein, is looking to raise $10 million in his separate “Stop Her Now!” campaign.

And the coy candidate said,”’06, ’06, ’06,” politely declining to discuss her plans beyond the Senate.

Ms. Lewis similarly refuses to be drawn into specifics. “I’m not getting into discussions about national politics,” she said, when asked for more detail about the junior senator’s future. “We’re concentrating on the Senate race.”

Speaking to a reporter during lunch, Ms. Lewis can’t remember the first time she met Mrs. Clinton.

She thinks it was nearly a quarter century ago, in 1981, when the nation’s youngest sitting governor, Bill Clinton of Arkansas, had just become the nation’s youngest defeated governor. Ms. Lewis, political director of the Democratic National Committee at the time, remembered meeting Governor Clinton at the Washington headquarters. Hillary, she thinks, might have been with him.

She remembers with more certainty the moment she realized that Mrs. Clinton knew how to connect with an audience as well as her husband did. It was at an Emily’s List luncheon in New York in 1992 aimed at getting more women to run for higher office.

Mrs. Clinton stood at the podium and quoted Tom Hanks as Coach Jimmy Dugan in the 1992 comedy “A League of Their Own,” about a women’s baseball team during World War II. “It’s supposed to be hard! If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it,” she told the women. “The hard is what makes it great.”

Ms. Lewis didn’t start working with the first lady until 1996 when the two went to New Hampshire to file the president’s nominating papers. “It wasn’t until then, in 1996, that I really starting to get to know her,” Ms. Lewis said.

Nearly a decade later, Ms. Lewis finds herself directing HillPac, the senator’s political action committee on K Street, on the front lines of what might end up being an unprecedented race for the presidency with a woman at the top of the ticket.

Mrs. Clinton has clearly come a long way from her first senatorial campaign. She raised and spent roughly $30 million in 2000, when she won Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s old seat in the most expensive Senate race in New York history.

Mrs. Clinton was pitted against two Republican challengers who raised immense sums from Republicans across the country. Rudolph Giuliani spent $20.7 million on the race before dropping out for health reasons. A congressman from Long Island, Rick Lazio, spent $40.6 million, according to campaign-finance records, and ultimately lost to Mrs. Clinton.

Republican strategists have said that raising hefty sums of money against Mrs. Clinton in 2006 (or 2008) will be relatively easy, no matter who runs against her, because of the strong anti-Clinton sentiment she inspires among conservatives.

Ms. Lewis, 67, as communications directors are wont, said the senator’s ability to raise money is all about the hard work she has done in New York. She points to Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in a new e-commerce program in upstate New York, sponsored by the St. Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce, aimed at expanding the customer base of isolated businesses. Last month, Ms. Lewis is quick to say, a local entrepreneur who makes fishing lures received a $165,000 order from a company in Vietnam.

A major plank in Mrs. Clinton’s 2000 platform was revitalizing the upstate economy.

Earlier this month, Mrs. Clinton was at the controls of the world’s first drivable fuel-cell truck, developed for the Army at Honeoye Falls, in Monroe County. The modified Chevrolet truck will be leased to the Defense Department for non-combat uses. “I have an easy job comparatively,” Ms. Lewis said. “The way I see it, she does all the work and I do all the bragging.”

Actually, Ms. Lewis does more than brag. She was a key campaign operative for the Clintons in 1996 and became the communications go-to person whenever the administration had trouble transmitting its message. Much as the Bush White House turns to Bush confidante Karen Hughes when the coverage grows negative, Ms. Lewis was brought in just months before the Monica Lewinsky story broke in 1997 and worked to tamp down fires until 2000.

At the time, reporters would complain that Ms. Lewis would fix upon her own version of reality and never waver from it, no matter how the facts might fly in the face of what she was saying. Her supporters say she has a knack for simplifying complicated messages and transmitting them clearly.

“Many people who are verbal or gifted linguistically don’t necessarily think in a rigorous way,” a Democratic political consultant, Howard Wolfson, said. “Ann is both very creative and very rigorous. She figures out how to say something and distills the elements down to the basics. That is a great skill.” Mr. Wolfson was Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman during her 2000 campaign and is now a partner at a policy consultancy, the Glover Park Group, which still counts Mrs. Clinton as a client.

So many people, on both sides of the aisle, find Ms. Lewis so effective at political communication that her arrival at HillPac last December vanquished doubts that Mrs. Clinton has decided to take a run at the White House: Ms. Lewis is seen as such a heavy hitter that analysts say a national race for her boss cannot be far behind.

“Ann Lewis is very effective for her side and a big plus to Hillary,” a political consultant who often faces off against Ms. Lewis on TV political shows, Mike Murphy, said.

“I like her a lot, despite her occasional weakness for raving liberal femi-nutty zealotry,” he joked of Ms. Lewis.

To hear Ms. Lewis tell it, the political bug bit her early.

The sister of Barney Frank, the fiery Democratic member of the House from Massachusetts, she said: “When you grow up with the name Ann Frank, you grow up thinking who governs is literally a matter of life and death.”

“So I was interested in politics from the start,” she added, recalling that she passed out flyers for the Hudson County Democratic organization in New Jersey in support of Adlai Stevenson in 1952, when she was 15.

By 1960, Ms.Lewis was going door-to-door in Miami trying to get out the vote for John F. Kennedy. Her former husband was a legislator in Florida, and through her brother she got her first government job with Mayor Kevin White in Boston in 1968.

That was followed by an unbroken string of races: Barbara Mikulski’s first Senate race in Maryland in 1974 (she lost, but has served in the House and then the Senate since 1976), Senator Birch Bayh’s run for the 1976 presidential nomination, and finally a job as chief of staff for Rep. Stanley Lundine of New York the same year. Ms. Lewis eventually became Congresswoman Mikulski’s chief of staff, and then the political director of the DNC. She was working at Planned Parenthood when she was tapped by the Clinton re-election campaign.

Ms. Lewis, who has been active in Jewish causes since she was a child, has been given much of the credit for helping Mrs. Clinton hone her position on Israel.

Last month, at a gathering of Jewish activists in Washington, the senator lashed out at the continuing support of terrorism that comes from Syria and Iran. She blasted Damascus for its “aggressive posture” and said there was “no more important task before the United States than to support the spread of freedom and democracy.”

Ms. Lewis calls this a coherent approach to national security, and it is in keeping with the sympathy she says she has always felt for Jewish causes and, in particular, for Anne Frank, the young Dutch diarist who died in a Nazi concentration camp. Political analysts see it in different terms: Ms. Lewis has found a great way to woo Jewish votes.

Certainly, she knows how important Jewish votes can be, locally and nationally. Ms. Lewis is a member of the Chairman’s Council of the National Jewish Democratic Council and she was asked to deliver, with some other strategists, a postmortem of the Jewish vote in the 2004 election. About 75% of the votes of Jews went for Senator Kerry.

In 2000, Mrs. Clinton won the Jewish vote relatively narrowly, by 55% to 45%.

Analysts said Ms. Lewis will help that margin grow.

When asked what one thing friends don’t know about her, Ms. Lewis returned to Anne Frank.

“In every office where I have worked I have always kept a copy of a book we bought in Amsterdam at the Anne Frank house,” she said. “It is bright yellow. It is ‘Anne Frank and the World.’ “