Watching the ongoing, erratic gyrations of Hurricane Hillary, and talking with friends over the weekend (in addition to attending an event Friday with Obama supporters and a senior campaign official here in Florida), I have come to a conclusion: Hillary Clinton can only be continuing in the race for one of three reasons. (Bear with me, this will take a bit of explanation.)



Hillary Clinton can count just as well as I can, and that means she must know that mathematically, as The Politico analysts Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen, and others have stated, she cannot win the Democratic nomination for president . Even if you count Florida and Michigan's outlaw primaries, she won't catch up in the popular vote. Even if she wins every remaining contest (unless she does so by an improbable 70-30 blowout,) she won't catch up to Barack Obama in pledged delegates. And since Super Tuesday, she has given back a half dozen superdelegates, while Barack has gained more than 40. So why is Hillary Clinton still running for president (and while we're at it, why is the media continue to pretend that she's not Mike Huckabee, pre-Texas, or Ron Paul now?) There can, in my estimation, be only three possibilities:



1. Hillary Clinton is insane. She has had a complete psychotic break due to the stresses of watching her presidential dream slip away, and has lost touch with reality. In her mind, she will be president, somehow, and her aides (and her husband) are afraid to confront her with the truth, lest she lose whatever's left of her mind.



2. Hillary Clinton knows that she won't get the nomination, so she is determined to make sure Barack Obama doesn't get the White House. Having failed to convince the villagers to make her their queen, this version has Hillary burning the Democratic village to the ground, not to save it, but just for the sheer joy of watching it burn. (Stupid villagers.) For this to be true, Hillary Clinton has to believe, as I do, that John McCain would be at best, a mediocre president, incapable of Eisenhowerian or even Reagensque greatness, and that through a combination of his total lack of charisma, his determination to plow ahead in Iraq, LBJ style, and his age, he will surely be a one-term president. And so she and her closest allies are already printing up the "Hillary in 2012" bumper stickers.



3. Hillary Clinton is pushing for the vice presidency. Seriously. In the Dick Cheney era, the veep job has become much more powerful than the warm bucket of shizznit at a foreign dictator's funeral that it used to be (a trend that the Dark Lord accelerated from Bill Clinton's time, when Al Gore wielded greater than usual power to push policy.) Hillary obviously would know that, and having anointed herself as the candidate more versed in foreign policy, more capable of dealing with Congress, more prepared to answer the red phone at 3 a.m. and so well traveled in her 35 years of "experience," she could easily see herself in the role of Barack's Dick Cheney, right down to selecting herself for the job.



Hillary and her team claim she has passed the amorphous "commander in chief test," which coincidentally, is also the lone test for the vice presidency outside of meeting the age requirement (she's 60, so "check.") So maybe her continued war games are aimed at putting the super delegates -- the really big ones like Gore, Howard Dean and Jimmy Carter, in a box wherein they would have little choice but to go to the convention and broker a deal that puts Hillary on the ticket as Barack's VP. It may sound crazy, but Hillary also has got to know that Barack wouldn't willingly draft her as vice president, so forcing him to do so might be her only hope of gaining power -- not the power originally sought -- but something damned near close to it. In that light, all of the talk of a "dream ticket" out of Camp Hillary is counter-intuitive, but real.



Besides, I'm sure Hillary has figured out that it's Cheney who really runs the government, and that would surely be alright by her. Labels: 2008 election, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, presidential candidates