Why would Murdoch do it? That’s the question for us Fox News Channel watchers, New York Post and Weekly Standard readers, loyal customers of Rupert Murdoch’s right-of-center – I mean, “fair and balanced” – news and commentary empire, having received the news that the chief executive of News Corp. will host a campaign fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Murdoch’s outside spokesman, Howard Rubenstein, referred the question to Mr. Murdoch’s inside spokesman, Gary Ginsberg, himself a veteran of the (first) Clinton White House. Mr. Ginsberg didn’t return my call, leaving me to speculate, which is potentially more fun, anyway, and which may even get us closer to the truth of the matter.

It may be that Mr. Murdoch is merely serving his company’s financial interests. News Corp. is an international company that includes Internet businesses, a movie studio, and broadcast and satellite television networks – all subject to regulation in Washington. It can’t hurt to have a friend in the Senate.

Federal Election records show that the News America Holdings Inc.-Fox Political Action Committee has supported a number of Democrats over the years, including $13,500 to Rep. Howard Berman of California,$4,000 to Senator Boxer of California, $4,500 to Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, $46,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and $5,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Rep. John Dingell, a Democrat of Michigan, got $7,500 from the political action committee. Rep. Edward Markey, the top Democrat on the House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, collected $15,000. Left-wing Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Senator Kennedy, Charles Rangel, and Senator Reid have all benefited from the largesse of this political action committee. Senator Schumer has taken $6,000. Rep. Edward Towns, a New York Democrat, took $9,000.

In that context, the support for Mrs. Clinton is just part of a pattern of Mr. Murdoch – and his more Democrat-leaning fellow executive, Peter Chernin – trying to prevent their profitable business from becoming a target of a Congress that all too often is hostile to profitable businesses.

But there’s another possible explanation. Mr. Murdoch appears at times, with his investments in the New York Post and the Weekly Standard, to be motivated by more than strictly economic interests. If he reads his own papers and watches Fox, he understands that America is in a war against Islamic extremist terrorists who want to re-conquer Europe and establish a new caliphate, while turning Manhattan into a crater.

That’s where his support for Senator Clinton starts to get interesting. For Mr. Murdoch has supported the left-wing party’s prime minister in Great Britain, Tony Blair, as Mr. Blair has stood resolutely with Mr. Bush in the war against Islamic extremist terrorists. Maybe Mr. Murdoch thinks there’s a chance that Mrs. Clinton may emerge as a Democratic Tony Blair.

There may be little resemblance between Mrs. Clinton and Democratic hawks like Senator Lieberman or Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. One of Mr. Murdoch’s star columnists, John Podhoretz, has just written a lucid and well-argued book about Mrs. Clinton. Titled “Can She Be Stopped?,” the book urges readers to “get to work” to prevent the arrival in the White House of a candidate who, he suggests, is close enough to the lunatic left that her election would be “a catastrophic mistake.” Mr. Podhoretz proposes “the plan to stop Hillary Clinton”- at the same time that his boss is reportedly planning a fundraiser for her. And it is true that Mrs. Clinton’s experience on the presidential campaign of George McGovern doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that she’ll take a hard line in the world war.

Yet there are indicators that Mrs. Clinton just might emerge as a Democratic warrior. She voted for both the Iraq war and, unlike Senators Kerry and Edwards, for the $87 billion to fight it. One foreign policy thinker who met with Mrs. Clinton recently told me that the senator got quite testy at the idea that America would ease up in the war on terrorism if a Democrat took over from President Bush. A hawkish Jewish leader in New York told me she’s been quite supportive on issues related to Israel, even when there was no publicity to be garnered.

Even if Mrs. Clinton’s instincts aren’t hawkish, she may be forced by events into a hard line. Imagine, for instance, if three months into the Hillary Clinton presidency, Iran tests a nuclear weapon, and, just to signal America what a bad idea it’d be for us to try to take the nuclear weapon out, it also sets off suicide bombers in, say, crowded waiting areas at Disneyland and Disneyworld. It’s hard to imagine Mrs. Clinton could avoid retaliating in a way that put America into a full-scale war against the regime in Tehran.

Even if the likelihood that Mrs. Clinton, as president, would emerge as a hawk is slim, the potential reward of a Democratic president adopting the Bush doctrine of taking the war to enemy ground and advancing freedom and democracy abroad would be great. It would destroy the enemy’s fantasy that he can win by out-waiting Mr. Bush and taking advantage of a divided American public. It would put the war on Islamic extremist terrorists on the same bipartisan, consensus basis as the Cold War, a cause that was advanced by Democrats like Truman and Kennedy as well as by Republicans like Eisenhower.

The McGovern candidacy in which Mrs. Clinton participated helped usher in the end of that Cold War consensus, so it’d be an ironical turn for her presidency to help advance a new consensus in a new war. Lots of people see the risk of a weak Clinton presidency as outweighing any benefit of a strong one. There is a lot of time between now and 2008. But you don’t get to be as rich and successful as Rupert Murdoch without a highly tuned sense of the tradeoff between risk and reward.