Hillarysworld

President Obama holds most of the crucial cards. But he is by no means invulnerable. Even before the Democratic Party suffered severe losses yesterday, the polling data suggested that 51% of the voting public hoped that he would be a one-term President and that 47% of Democrats wanted someone to challenge him in the primaries.

He is, moreover, caught between a rock and a hard place. If he gives way to John Boehner – if he acquiesces in an extension of the Bush tax cuts, if he accepts severe cuts in the federal budget, if he gives way to a repeal of Obamacare – the left will turn on him with a vengeance. If he refuses to give way on an occasion in which the Republicans have been given a clear mandate from the voters, the opposition tide will continue to grow – especially, if (as is inevitable) unemployment remains stubbornly high.

This Hillary Clinton undoubtedly knows – and anything that escapes her will surely not escape her husband, who is as canny as he is wayward. President Obama will undoubtedly attract opposition in the primaries, and unhappiness within the party will be sufficient that he will lose at least some of those contests. Moreover, even if he is renominated, those who oppose him in 2012 will be better-positioned for the nomination struggle in 2016 than those who remain on the sidelines, especially those who – how shall I say it? – are getting a bit long in the tooth.

Had he taken my advice, had he deigned to attend Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, and to ask of her father a favor on the one day in which, as everyone knows, an Arkansan can deny no man’s request, President Obama might now be sitting pretty with Hillary signed up as his next vice-presidential nominee. But he did not grace the Clintons with his presence; he has announced that Joe Biden will once again be his running mate, describing his original choice in this regard as “the single best decision I have made”; and Bill Clinton in recent weeks has gone out of his way, as he ostentatiously put it, to make at least one campaign “stop for everybody that helped Hillary run for president.”

It is, of course, possible that Hillary Clinton so likes her present job that she no longer has any great desire to become President. But I doubt it. In October, 2009 – after I had suggested here, here, and here that the political tide had turned and that a realignment might be in the offing – I bet a small sum that the Democrats would take a shellacking in November, 2010, that in the aftermath the nation’s Secretary of State would resign from that office over a matter of principle, and that she would run for the Democratic nomination. It looks like a wiser bet with every passing day.