Election 2008: The Clinton Millstone

On some levels I feel sorry for Barack Obama. Yes, he’s got what he seems to lust after – the chance to run for President. He actually stands – despite a massive lack of experience – the chance to get elected President. He’s not done too badly for himself.

Yet he has a massive headache. In fact, he has an eyeball popping migraine of a problem. It is, of course, Hillary Clinton. Now, Obama and his campaign might feel she is no longer a problem – after all, he seems to have finally consigned her campaign to the dustbin of history. Yet she still looms over him, like a shrill, demented sword of Damocles. Because, having failed to win the nomination, she now has set her razor sharp, Terminator-esque eyes on the vice-presidential nomination.

The simplest thing to do would be to offer Clinton the vice-presidency. He would have her onside, and he would have the considerable support she mustered in the primaries behind him as well. Yet how long would it be until she started to think that she was the one running for President rather than Obama? If their ticket won the White House, how long would it take her to assume she was President? You’d have to be delusional and arrogant to make that that sort of assumption – but after her endless campaign for President, you could argue that Clinton is both.

However, the latest intelligence seems to suggest that Obama is shunning Clinton. Fair enough, but this strategy has risk attached to it as well. And that risk can be summed up by the question “just how insane is Hillary Clinton?” If she is snubbed again, what will she do? I doubt, given her campaign for the Presidency increasingly showed the *tenacity* of a rabid poodle savaging a child’s face, that she will simply shrug and walk away. So how destructive will she be? Will she just refuse to campaign for her unlikely victor? Will she start a whispering campaign against him? Will she completely lose the plot, and run as an Independent - thus throwing the chances of the Democrats winning the White House back straight down the crapper?

Make no mistake; Hillary Clinton is a millstone around the neck of Obama. And it is a millstone that could drown the Obama campaign, just as surely as it drowned the once invincible Hillary ’08 campaign.