There's a news headline fluttering around the net currently that basically claims: Hillary Clinton is negotiating with Obama to pay off campaign debts. I don't know if the headline is complete accurate, and note that it comes from a Blog by a writer for the UK paper the Telegraph.
Regardless of whether or not the headline is true, if I were walkin' in Barack Obama's shoes on this issue I'd be telling her to take a long walk on a short pier on this question.
Her loss in the campaign has been a foregone conclusion for several weeks now. Make that months really. As she was getting her butt handed to her back in the days before Pennsylvania, then later in West Virginia and Kentucky, and back when she basically pulled out not much better than a tie in Ohio, it was obvious that she couldn't make up the ground she needed to make up, and it was just as obvious that unless she was going to be able to count every single delegate from Florida and Michigan for herself while somehow getting about 100 other delegates to abandon Obama, well, there was no way she could win.
Her supporters (especially the wacko one shown in the video that has been making the rounds....) may want to deny it, but the writing has been on the wall. She can claim she wanted to make sure the voters had a choice, but even while providing that choice to voters she was offering nothing more than false hope and continuing a campaign that has brought up just that much more stupidity and racism (again, see the video that has been making the rounds). Hillary's most ardent supporters claim she wouldn't have been beaten by Obama if he wasn't a Black man. Bull. She wasn't beaten because she's a woman. She wasn't beaten because she's a white woman. She was beaten because she's Hillary Clinton and approximately half of her own party DOES NOT WANT HER and instead wanted someone else, anyone else please, to be the party's candidate.
Hillary blew her shot at becoming President badly. Not in the last year, but nearly 5 years ago. She had her chance to beat the snot out of George W. Bush and didn't take it. She waited, she let John Kerry take the lead for the party and she let him get his butt handed to him. She claimed to not have the experience, claimed that her place was in the Senate serving for the people of New York, etc. (which is precisely the place she should be relegated back to now). She could have run, should have run, but didn't. She waited. She assumed that 4 more years of George W. Bush would give her a chance to come riding in as the savior of the nation. She assumes that after 8 years of George W. Bush *any* democrat can win the election against any republican that runs. That might still be true, but she isn't just any democrat and she won't be leading the charge now. Her negatives are still too high and people had a legitimate choice in the democratic primaries.
Too bad (I'm crying a river over here as I type this...) she'll likely never get another shot at the White House. If she's really lucky whomever is elected will have her over for a state dinner at some point.
In anycase, Obama may yet offer some financial olive branch to Hillary, but I firmly believe he shouldn't! Let her deal with her own campaign debt, and let her go back to the Senate and go back to being the Junior Senator from New York. Perhaps in 8 years her daughter will make a run for the White House and the Clinton name will ride again. Or perhaps the country will be spared that mess and we'll move on to new blood. Here's hoping.
