Hillary's Revenge

I've always said the Clintons have a political Samson complex.  If Hillary couldn't have the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination - and don't count out her chances of pulling off the upset next week - then La Clinton Nostra will make sure that the nomination isn't worth having.

That process is already well under way:

Yet perhaps the biggest factor keeping the presidential race close has been Obama’s inability to close the deal with some of Hillary Clinton’s supporters. According to the poll, 52% of them say they will vote for Obama, but 21% are backing McCain, with an additional 27% who are undecided or want to vote for someone else.

What’s more, those who backed Clinton in the primaries — but aren’t supporting Obama right now — tend to view McCain in a better light than Obama and have more confidence in McCain’s ability to be commander-in-chief.

For these reasons, Hart believes that Clinton’s speech on the Tuesday night of the Democratic convention will be a significant event. “The Democratic convention is more than a coronation,” he says. “It is an event where the words of Hillary Clinton are probably going to be exceptionally important.”

Hart adds, “The Hillary Clinton campaign may be over, but the Clinton factor remains an important part of the election.”

Rest assured, my friends, the Hillary Clinton campaign is NOT over.  It's just not operating above-ground.  They did yeoman's work cultivating and retaining the support within the Democrat Party that they amassed during the primary season, and though they fell just short in pledged delegates, Her Majesty retains enough loyalty from and clout with her backers - whom, along with their heroine, Barack Hussein Obama has both dissed and double-crossed over the course oof the summer - that fully a quarter of the Democrat rank & file still has not closed ranks behind The Great Half-Black Hope.  And, really, the Clinton Machine hasn't had to do much of anything to nudge Barack Hussein Obama toward his own self-implosion except stand back and let him do it.  You can rest assured that her keynote speech next Tuesday will do nothing to heal that breach.

Nor will it widen the divide - because the Empress' minions will be doing it for her:

A massive e-mail and Internet campaign is under way aimed at derailing the nomination of Barack Obama and making Hillary Clinton the party’s standard bearer next week at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

“It’s downright nasty,” said Memphis, Tennessee, superdelegate and city council member Myron Lowery, who has shared dozens of the messages he’s received with The Memphis Commercial Appeal.

“I think it’s divisive for the ‘Support Hillary’ campaign to continue at this time. She made the decision to fully support Mr. Obama,” said Lowery, who initially supported Clinton but later switched his allegiance to Obama. “I don’t know why they’re not taking their cue from Hillary and falling in line.”

Lowery said he does not believe Clinton herself is behind the effort, but that it’s “her supporters, acting on their own because they’re proud of what they have done for her.”

What a naif.  Of course Mrs. Clinton is behind this effort.  Behind the usual six degrees of separation, as usual, but ultimately she's pulling all these strings.  There is nothing - NOTHING - that Bill and Hillary Clinton do in the political realm that is not meticulously planned and calculated to have the most devastating result  possible on their enemies while keeping their own hands clean and their own images protected from any blowback.

Sixteen years of watching La Clinton Nostra operate ought to be enough to get that lesson across.  But here's a redundant example of their "fingerprints":

Most of the messages Lowery has received from across the country come from Hillary supporters making the case that she won more voters’ votes in the primaries, she won bigger states, that Obama won states that won’t vote Democratic in November, and that she is the only “electable” Democrat.

"Count every vote"?  The popular vote is all that matters?  "Selected, not elected"?  Do these themes sound familiar?  For Dems, it's gotta be tattooed on the inside of their eyelids by now.  It's a chord within each and every last Donk that has yet to be stilled, and for "PUMA"s, an irresistable appeal to "fight [another] good fight," to submarine the nomination away from BO in a convention floor fight, or, failing that, mobilize and work against him in the general campaign and tip the election to John Sith McCain in November (see above).  A case of Obama winning a (nomination) battle but losing the (election) war.

Given the current downward direction of The One's political fortunes, it is becoming increasingly clear that the shrewdest move he could make on a veep selection is....Hillary!  Yeah, he'd be surrendering effective control of his administration before it even exists, but at some point - which is now within the next forty-eight hours - he's got to decide whether 'tis better to become a "token black" president, the new face of a de facto Clinton restoration, or never become president in any guise at all.  As a practical matter, burying the hatchet with Medusa in so dramatic a fashion is the only way BO can possibly unify the Democrat Party and save his once overwhelming chance of realizing his Ascension.

Best of all, it would, in effect, call Mrs. Clinton's bluff, as she certainly doesn't want to be veep, and stuck in that backwater post, another crack at the White House in her own right would be eight years away instead of four - at which time she'd be almost as old as McCain is now.  Yet she'd hardly be in any position to turn down such an ostensibly magnanimous gesture that would be unquestionably in the interests of the party.  It would be a piece of PR jiu jitsu worthy of the Clintons themselves.

Happily for Her Nib, such a move would require two character traits of which False Messiah is utterly bereft: prudence and humility.  His ingrained, inbred sense of hauteured entitlement will never allow him to perceive, even to himself, that he is in a position of weakness, and even if it did, his towering ego would never let him admit it, much less allow the Clintons to reduce him to figurehead status.

On a disinterested observer like moi, who long believed that it would be John Sith McCain sabotaging the 2008 GOP nominee that would put Hillary in the White House, the irony of this Donk disintegration is not lost.  I cannot help but wonder, though, whether Obama's accelerating political suicide will get so bad, so fast that he'll be forced to accept an "intervention" that will save his campaign from himself.  Will he really be allowed  - or allow himself, even - to drown in his own sea of rookie mistakes?

UPDATE: It occurs to me that the bombshell of a Hillary for VP pick at the Donk convention next week would quite likely have the additional advantage of goading McCain into slitting his own political throat by a "going for broke" pick like Joe Lieberman, based on the tit-for-tat notion that he had to come up with a jaw-dropper himself to negate the race-changing momentum of Bama-Rod.  Only in his case it would estrange him from the GOP base once and for all without making so much as a dent in the center-left, its PUMA dissent evaporated into the ether of Bama-Rod rapture and the remainder hating Lieberman's warmongering guts even more than McCain's.

It's all right there for the taking, Barry.  You can unify your misbegotten party, panic your geezer opponent into disarray from which he'll never recover, and ensure your (co-)election.  All you have to do is swallow your pride (rather like an anaconda swallowing an overweight adult warthog) and agree to become the Clintons' manservant when the press isn't around.

UPDATE II: Chet Edwards???  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....

UPDATE III: ....HAHAHAHAHAHA {snort} s-sorry, no offense meant to the Texas Blue Dog congressman, it was just a visceral {hyuk} reaction.

Ostensibly the grounds for dubbing the non-adulterer Edwards is that he's a DINO:

• Voted for Operation Iraqi Freedom 
• Wants to drill off-shore
• Wants to drill in ANWR
• Opposes amnesty for illegal aliens
• Opposes CAFE standards
• Opposes sodomarriage

Which does Chet no favors, since he'd have to spend the next two months explaining why he abandoned all those positions overnight and defending hard Left positions he presumeably loathes.  But he would be Obama's token to bipartisanship, if only ideologically, as well as destined to become the most obscure, forgotten veep since Schuyler P. Colfax.

The real reason the Chosen One would, um, choose Chet?  Only thing I can come up with his acute insecurity.  Slow Joe Biden is a buffoon and Evan Bayh is a dullard, but they both blow His Highness away on experience.  Senator Hairplugs has been in the upper chamber for thirty-five years - or since Barry was in the sixth grade.  The elapsed time since his first presidential run - as well as Senator Bayh's decade on Capitol Hill and two terms as governor of Indiana - is more than six times the length of Obama's Senate tenure to date.  Picking either of these two would simply heighten the perception that the ticket order was backwards.  Hell, even Chet has logged eighteen years in the House of Representatives, but since nobody has ever heard of him outside Waco, Texas, that superior background would presumeably not be a perceived threat to False Messiah's pre-eminence.

The closest recent historical analogy I can think of in terms of veep selections is George H.W. Bush's choice of, ironically, then-Indiana Senator Dan Quayle in 1988, which was similarly based upon the desire of the GOP nominee not to be "overshadowed" on his own ticket.  Whether that would have been the case with a Bush-Dole or Bush-Kemp duo is debatable, but what does it say about the vanity of a man who believes himself to be the Savior of America that he would seriously consider a veep choice that would be about two notches above eschewing a running mate altogether?

Ironically, if Barry wants to minimize the experience differential, his two options of the remaining rumored veep contenders are Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius (five-plus years) and....Hillary Clinton (eight years in January).  And going with Sebelius is about the only thing Obama could do to alienate the PUMAs more than they are already.

It's real simple: if Ba-ROCK wants to guarantee victory in November, he'll choose the Empress.  But every report I've seen indicates he has made a snub-calibre point of refusing even to covertly consider her.

Barry and Chet.  Bill & Opus had more dignity.