What is Hillary Clinton Really Up To?

Hillary Clinton's actions over the last couple of weeks bode ill for the success of the Democratic Party in this fall's presidential election. She seems to be more concerned with elevating John Grampaw McCain over Barack Obama than she is with electing her own party's candidate, handing the Rethugs enough ammunition to cut Obama off at the knees in the general election.

So what's up with that? Well, here's my take on it. She can see the handwriting on the wall that she's not going to be the Democratic standard bearer this year, so she is positioning herself for a run in 2012. The only way she can successfully mount a campaign that year is if the Rethugs own the White House again; if Obama beats McCain -- which he would under ordinary circumstances -- he would be the repeat candidate in 2012 and Hillary would have to wait all the way until 2016 to run. Better to have him lose and clear the decks for her victory four years later.

In 2016 she would be 69 years old, which is really too old to be running for president, as evidenced by the doddering confusion exhibited by Grampaw McCain ("Al Qaeda is being trained in Iran", blithely dismissed as a "senior moment" by McCain's press spokesman, Britt Hume of Faux News -- as if that was going to make us feel any better about it...).

If we have yet another four years of the BFEE, which we would have in spades with a McCain presidency, she figures that at long last the American people would have enough of Rethug rule and she will be able to ride in on a white horse and deliver us from evil.

It's hard to believe that someone would be this amorally cynical, this politically calculating, but it's one theory that makes sense out of her actions.