Interesting speculation by John Heilemann
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/05/heilemann_what_hillary_wants_a.html#hpThere’s been a lot of talk over the past few months about whether the 2008 presidential campaign just might turn out to be 1988 all over again. The comparison has been driven by the fact that Republicans plainly intend to try to cast Barack Obama as a black Mike Dukakis — as too liberal, too inexperienced, too weak, and, crucially, insufficiently patriotic to occupy the White House. But a different analogy occurred to me the other day, one perhaps less comprehensively apt but so delightfully ironic that it would be a crime not to point it out. As anyone politically sentient in 1988 will vividly recall, the endgame of the Democratic primaries that year revolved around a challenger seen by his fans as a historic figure and his foes as a potential party-wrecker, and what concessions he might insist upon in order to fade quietly into the background. The inescapable question of the hour was, “What does Jesse Jackson want?”
Hillary Clinton, of course, is no Jesse Jackson (but neither, pace Bill Clinton’s comments on the eve of the South Carolina primary, is Obama). But the question posed by her behavior in the home stretch of this year’s nominating contest is precisely the same: “What does Hillary want?”
Whenever this query is put to me — which only takes place, oh, on the order of 100 times a day — my response is simple: She wants to be president. Duh. And if it ain’t gonna happen this year, then her central objective is to make it as likely as possible in 2012. As I’ve written many times, Hillary believes with every fiber of her being that Obama is going to lose this year. (And so does her husband.) So her aim is to put herself in the best position possible to stand up on November 5 and say, if perhaps a tad more subtly than this, “I told you so.”
From these core facts — and based on everything my reporting these past few months tells me, facts is what they are — flow plausible answers to a raft of more granular questions about Clinton’s motives and what she plans to do in the days ahead. For the purposes of brevity, let’s stick to the top five.
1. Is she going to quit sometime soon or fight on to the convention?
The former. Indeed, my guess is that she might very well be out of the race by the end of next week. For Hillary to be the Democratic nominee in 2012, she must limit the extent to which she’s seen as having caused Obama’s (in her mind, inevitable) loss this fall. And setting off on a scorched-earth march to Denver runs in diametric opposition to that goal. True, she keeps saying that she’s going all the way; true, she continues to press for the seating in full of the Florida and Michigan delegations. But Clinton has other things she might want from Obama, from a prominent speaking slot in Denver to help paying off her campaign debt. The more delegates she has in the end, the stronger her bargaining position.
2. Does she want to be offered the VP slot?
No, she does not. If it’s offered, she has to take it, because turning it down would be a signal to her supporters that she doesn’t support Obama (see above). And if she’s on the ticket and Obama goes down (again, as she’s convinced he will), she is then complicit in the loss, and her prospects in 2012 are damaged. Does Hillary want be the next John Edwards? The question answers itself.
3 MORE POINTS AT LINK, INCLUDING "WHAT WILL SHE DO NEXT?"
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