Don't stop believin?I'm almost certain that Barack would rather eat ground glass than have Hillary Clinton on the ticket; I'm also almost certain that Democratic power brokers would rather be fed into a wood chipper than have this thing drag out until the convention in August. My best guess is that the party leadership would win out if push came to shove: after all, Obama did, with their implicit support, end up with the top spot, so why should he not consent to Hillary as number two in the name of party unity? And it's difficult to deny that, while accepting Hillary comes with some obvious risks (a lot of people hate Hillary Clinton, for one), there are also advantages: she would give Obama more credibility with party's traditional working class base (right now, upper class intellectuals, college students, and African-Americans are not a guaranteed winning coalition), be forced to actually try and help him win (if she chooses to sit out the general, the silence could be deafening), and, hell, since change is the meme of the election, what could be fresher than an African-American and a woman on the same ticket? Certainly, the more contrast the Democrats can draw between themselves and an increasingly geriatric McCain (where did he give that speech last night, a mortuary?), the better their prospects in November.
But what does Hillary get out of being number two? Well, she becomes second in line for the presidency, and should Obama win two terms, first in line for the nomination in 2016. Also, she doesn't have to go straight back to being a backbencher in the Senate, where seniority matters over star power, and where there are a lot of warm bodies between her and a committee chairmanship. Yet what might be most important to remember is that as First Lady and a member of the Senate, she had a front row seat to two of the most powerful vice-presidencies in American history: those of Al Gore and Dick Cheney. (Certainly, Cheney the puppeteer has long since overshadowed Gore's contributions, which were more the product of partnership between he and Bill Clinton - a partnership, incidentally, which Hillary helped to sour.) Perhaps she thinks that the office has permanently become more than a "warm bucket of spit" and that she could be a key voice in the putative Obama administration. While I believe that Obama is far too intellectually independent to accommodate a Cheney-like role for Clinton, I also think that he's too savvy to believe he can just consign her to four years of attending foreign dignitaries' funerals and breaking ties in the Senate. She would have to be accorded a key portfolio of some sort - perhaps health care, although that didn't work out so well the last time - and undoubtedly she would expect to be consulted routinely as a matter of course. This relationship certainly could work, although it could also devolve into an executive branch civil war, given the already-extant obvious mutual distaste and Clinton's honed reputation for not playing well with others. Doubtlessly, it is this last point that fuels Obama's reluctance to select Clinton: why would he want to spend the next five months (and possibly the next four years) worrying about being undercut by Hillary?
Of course, I could be wrong about what it is that Hillary wants: perhaps she's jockeying for a better position in the Senate, or maybe she's genuinely trying to assess whether or not she has sufficient support to carry on the fight for the nomination. What remains clear is that nothing Clinton does is selfless: on a night when she could have bowed to reality and graciously conceded, thus becoming part of the Democratic Party's historic celebration, she stood ominously apart, alone in a room of her own surrounded by dead-end fanatics. It was the epicenter of the ever-shrinking bubble where Clinton's candidacy is still considered viable; denial, it seems, is not just a river in Egypt.
