Hillary's Pivotal Role: Help Obama or Let Him Twist in the Wind?

Well, Hillary Clinton is finally out of the race. Sort of. Her campaign is suspended, and her hopes for 2008 are officially over, sort of, meaning it's now appropriate, sort of, to reflect upon the meaning of her run for office this year.

And that, folks, is already saying something -- the fact that it's not time to write a political obituary for Clinton. Had she lost in New Hampshire this year and then bowed out of the race -- and she came within a few percentage points of having that scenario unfold -- she most likely would have been finished as a presidential hopeful for good.

But she stayed in it, amazingly, fighting off four or five near-death experiences to remain a viable candidate. The mere fact that she survived New Hampshire, and Nevada, and Super Tuesday, and Texas, and all of those other fail-safe points earlier on in the race is incredible enough; she could have bowed out at any time after those primaries and it would still have been an amazing run.

But in one of the weirder episodes in the history of American presidential politics, she stayed in it long after the math had already been decided (which was basically after the Potomac primaries) in Barack Obama's favor, with the result that we now enter the general election season looking at an almost unheard-of triangular scenario: The American electorate is now basically split into thirds, and how Clinton proceeds from here will shape the future of all three groups.

If Clinton sits out the general election season, or campaigns halfheartedly for Obama, and John McCain wins, she becomes the automatic front-runner for the Democratic ticket in 2012.

Clinton, of course, must be aware of this calculus and as such is faced with an unprecedented moral/ethical choice heading into the fall. If she campaigns hard for Obama and helps pull all of her disaffected voters back onto the Democratic ticket, Obama will probably win this thing in a landslide. If she pulls a slowdown, however, and a big chunk of her voters sit this one out or vote for McCain, it will greatly enhance her own prospects for the presidency four years later.

Clinton, therefore, must choose between two loyalties: party and self. Depending on how one looks at things, one might even say the choice is between country and self. Assuming that one believes the differences between a Republican presidency and a Democratic presidency would be profound, Clinton now must decide if she thinks that the country would be better off suffering through four years of McCain before getting a shot at putting her own excellent, experienced self in the Oval Office, or whether it would be better off putting a man whose platform is almost identical to her own in there right away.

Anyone who thinks that should be an easy choice -- that the "right" thing to do is obviously to put party over self, and not only help Obama get elected but help strip the Republicans of power -- is kidding himself or herself. The American presidency is the biggest prize on the planet Earth. Should a beaten and fatigued Obama fall even one vote short in a race against a very old and very flawed Republican candidate, Clinton suddenly becomes about a 1-3 Vegas favorite for the Big Seat four years from now.

Ask yourself how hard you'd stump for a once-loathed rival in that scenario. Better yet, ask your friendly neighborhood psychiatrist how easy it would be for a woman who has suffered as much public abuse and humiliation as Clinton has over the last few decades to rationalize the many subtle forms of sabotage that are now open to her with regard to Obama's campaign, should she choose to go that route.

As this increasingly strange campaign season unfolded, I often had people ask me what the hell Clinton was doing. Particularly after the Potomac primaries, the actual motives of Clinton for continuing on and punching holes in the presumptive Democratic nominee as she did seemed to many of us campaign reporters to be a genuine, Agatha Christie-worthy mystery.