During the “All Star” panel on the May 5 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, Roll Call executive editor Morton M. Kondracke presented a “theory” for why Sen. Hillary Clinton may be having a “good time” on the campaign trail: "[S]omebody I know has a theory about this. Remember back when [Bill] Clinton was president of the United States, people said that he's really Satan because he walks through life and people collapse around him and go to jail and die, and all this kind of stuff? Well, this person says Hillary's a vampire. She's sucking the blood out of Barack Obama, and you can watch him wilt and she gets healthier and healthier every day."

Kondracke did not name his “theor[ist],” but the purported “theory” has been publicly articulated before, by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who, in her April 27 column, wrote:

Maybe I've been reading too many stories about the fad of teenage vampire chick lit, worlds filled with parasitic aliens and demi-human creatures, but there's something eerie going on in this race.

Hillary grows more and more glowy as Obama grows more and more wan.

Is she draining him of his precious bodily fluids? Leeching his magic? Siphoning off his aura?

It used to be that he was incandescent and she was merely inveterate. Now she's bristling with life force, and he looks like he wants to run away somewhere for three months by himself and smoke.

Dowd has also wondered -- in a March 11, 1998, column -- whether Bill Clinton was, in fact, “the Devil”:

Well, Mr. President, this is a case of you know you're in trouble when ... You know you're in trouble when all the Hollywood liberals and Scientologists do their best to soften Joe Klein's mordant novel and give you a valentine -- and the sweetened version depicts you as Lucifer.

It had occurred to me that Bill Clinton's swelling popularity could be explained by America's love of bad boys and anti-heroes. He's the charming Butch Cassidy to Kenneth Starr's relentless Pinkerton man. Hillary and Bill are the joyriding Bonnie and Clyde to Kenneth Starr's killjoy Texas Ranger.

It had even occurred to me that Bill Clinton was so preternaturally lucky he seemed to have cut a deal with the Devil. Given the carnage that always surrounds Mr. Clinton, and given the fact that he always smilingly walks away stronger than ever, I could easily see him as Faust or Dorian Gray or Joe Hardy in ''Damn Yankees.''

But in light of the latest triumphs of the President -- in public opinion, at least, he has vanquished the hymn-singing, holy-rolling Starr, as well as Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and the Nosy Parkers of the press -- Time is right. We must think cosmically about this.

Perhaps Bill Clinton is the Devil. It would explain a lot. Certainly, Hillary Clinton is condemned to her own little hell. Certainly, the voters have closed their eyes and made their pact with the Devil: Keep us prosperous and we won't hold you to any special moral or ethical standards.

The Mephistophelean scenario has a wonderful logic. It would explain the extraordinary level of human sacrifice around Bill Clinton -- why so many people around him end up dead, jailed, betrayed, shackled, exiled, subpoenaed, depressed, humiliated, broke, ruined and smeared. (And, in the case of poor Buddy, neutered.)

James McDougal dies abruptly, a broken, crazy man, in solitary confinement in Federal prison while his ex-business partner has more political lives than a black cat.

It explains why our moral universe has turned upside down. It's fine if Mr. Clinton preaches against tobacco one day, and the next goes to a fund-raiser given by a lawyer trying to reap a tobacco windfall.

From the May 5 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume:

BRIT HUME (host): It is one thing to seek to appeal to those voters, Mort, but it is quite another to be so obviously happy and comfortable and seemingly in her element doing it.

KONDRACKE: Well, if everybody is cheering you all the time, and there are a lot of them, and the results are good, as they have been in the big states, and she's got an argument --

Look, she is throwing herself at this task with everything she has. She's coming from behind. She may catch up or she may not catch up. And why should she look morose about it? She may as well look as though she's having a good time, and she has every right --

[crosstalk]

HUME: It doesn't seem forced, though, does it?

KONDRACKE: It doesn't seem forced.

You know, somebody I know has a theory about this. Remember back when Clinton was president of the United States, people said that he's really Satan because he walks through life and people collapse around him and go to jail and die, and all this kind of stuff?

Well, this person says Hillary's a vampire. She's sucking the blood out of Barack Obama, and you can watch him wilt and she gets healthier and healthier every day.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER (Fox News contributor and syndicated columnist): I have a less exotic theory.

HUME: Please!

KRAUTHAMMER: I think that she is genuinely energized because she's figured out how to run against him. The frustration of running a year and a half without understanding how to do this, I think, was killing her. Win or lose, she has a strategy.