What about 2012?

Everything will change in the next 4 years.

I believe she has resigned herself to doing the work she wants to do in the Senate. The only way I can see her running in 4 years is if Obama is an abyssmal failure, and I don’t expect that.

Calvin Coolidge was the last incumbent president to not receive his party’s nomination (and he was not elected, he was a VP who took over cause the President died), so it’s hard to see what Hilary could possibly do in 2012 if Obama wins.

However, if McCain wins, 2012 will be quite interesting as Hilary and Obama are both young enough to run again in 2012, and McCain has already asserted he would NOT seek a second term in office if he won the presidency. Palin is young enough to run in 2012 as well, so 2012 would definitely be a crazy year if McCain wins tomorrow.

Clinton will be on the Supreme Court by that time.
I’d rather shoot myself than consider 2012 today.

@jballou / dalepetrie: lurve.

I think what we saw in this campaign was that Barack Obama used grassroots support and the strength of his charisma and oratory to unseat Hillary Clinton, who I think saw herself as the anointed candidate from the beginning of her campaign.

I read some comments during the Obama/Hillary race for the nomination that said, basically, if Hillary doesn’t get the nomination she’s politically dead, because she is the obvious candidate, and she expended a lot of political capital and money to get as far as she did; while if Obama loses the nomination, well, he’s new and untried and he can run again in four or eight years without the same stigma because he didn’t start from a position of strength and national name-recognition.

I’m not sure that’s accurate, but I think it’s a fair place to start. Hillary has lost a lot of appeal as a Presidential candidate, both because she lost to a relative newcomer and because she kept on campaigning long after it was objectively hopeless, arguably because she thought the superdelegates would all break her way because of long service to the party.

So if Obama wins, the Democratic Party is going to change, because it’s clear that the rank-and-file voters and party members are not dancing to the tune that the Clintons want to call—Hillary may not reflect the actual face of the party accurately by 2012. And if McCain wins, the Democratic Party is going to have to change, because, well, the rank-and-file voters did not vote for Gore, for Kerry, or for Obama in sufficient numbers (and it was clear that the rank-and-file voters preferred Obama to Clinton on top of that)—so the party will have to change its focus and its candidates to attract voters.

So in any case I really don’t see Hillary running in 2012 or 2016 unless she wants to fail dismally, and I think she’s smart enough and savvy enough to figure that out.

And Palin? She’d have to do an incredibly impressive job over the next four years in order to be taken seriously as a Presidential candidate. About the best thing you can say for her is that she holds the sort of ideological positions that the Religious Right loves; but she doesn’t have the political savvy to make it to the White House on her own, and she doesn’t have the political connections to be put there by someone else.

As long as SarahIdioticPalin doesn’t make a reappearance, I’ll be happy.

Palin/Quayle 2012…

That’s a very frightening prediction, Zaku!

Are you all ready to start thinking about 2012? I don’t want to see/hear a poll, a friend, a fellow american, a maverick, an anti-american, a joe or a sarahIIdioticpalin for a very very very long time!

I can’t imagine that Clinton would run against Obama. I think she has resigned herself to continue being the best senator she can be, though she might like to be on the Supreme Court some day.

Frankly, I think she’d be a masochist to go through running for President again. Why take all that abuse?

I see the Clintons as diplomats. Hillary doesn’t have the experience ( did I actually use the E word?) to be a Supreme Court justice. A good justice must have more than a law degree and the right demographic. S/he needs to be a constitutional authority with a judicial and/or law professor background,

Part of the change we need to see in the next 4 years is to put the best people in appointed positions instead of filling them with cronies, fundraisers and political supporters.

The best thing that could come out of this election is Sarah Palin’s return to Alaska where she can have 3–4 more children, keep an eye on Russia and make moose stew to her heart’s content