The New York Times has an interesting hypothesis: that the true battle this fall could very well be Sarah Palin vs. Hillary Clinton.
This raises an interesting question for Hillary Clinton. Does she want to work very hard to elect Barack Obama? On the chance (however slight) that he doesn’t make a complete disaster out of his presidency, Hillary will be another 4 years away from running for President. But on the other hand, if Obama utterly fails and ends up damaging the nation even more, Hillary will be one of the people who put him there. There’s only so much that saying “I told you so” can help.
But to make matters more complicated for her ambitions, if Hillary doesn’t break her back to elect Obama and he loses, the far-leftists who make up Obama’s base won’t lift a finger to elect her in 2012. It’s a very interesting conondrum in an election where white working women (or “Wal-Mart moms” as Democrats condescendingly refer to them) could swing certain battleground states.
But the true danger, I think, is Barack Obama running against Sarah Palin. The reasons for this are twofold: because it raises Governor Palin to an even higher level; and because more people find Sarah Palin favorable than find Obama or McCain or Biden favorable. The more people learn about Sarah Palin, the more they seem to like her (unless they’re liberals). If he tries to go after her, even if she goes after him, it will backfire–we’ve seen this already in the past week. I could go on for days about how people only find Governor Palin’s attacks on Obama’s smug self-worship to reaffirm their distaste for his antics, but that’s for another post. The long and short of it is that the usual tricks aren’t going to work against Governor Palin.
But can Obama trust the Clintons to try to move against her, given the way he threw Hillary under the bus?
