If a motto in French is good enough for the Queen, it's good enough for me.
The Clintoons have arranged so that the nomination will be useless for anyone but Hillary.
That's the idea.
With ten people in the race, either no one will emerge from the primaries with enough ballots in their pockets for the nomination, which would allow Hillary to step in to unify the party.
That's the idea. Additionally, she wouldn't have to go through the bruising primary process and answer questions from the other democrats that would give Bush ammunition during the general election.
Or the party will be so divided the nominee will have only a minority of a divided party and be destined to lose.
I order of preference for Hillary,
1. She becomes president.
2. She gets the nomination and Bush wins. She is the front runner for the 2008 nomination.
3. Some other democrat gets the nomination and Bush wins.
4. Some other democrat becomes president.
Don't believe the decision has been made yet whether she will or will not run. But she is trying to ensure that should she decline running in '04, no other Democrat can win.
Exactly!
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Don't count on this. Lots of people who get the nomination and then lose are never heard from again. Dukakis, Mondale, Gore, etc. If she were to be nominated, her reputation could end up so muddied from the campaign that the nation will finally wake up and see that she's not fit to be elected to a county school board. And that would be the end of her career.
This is why I think there's no chance in hell she'll run in 2004. She could risk having her years of scandal brought back up day after day if there was nobody on the other side who could touch her and she was virtually guaranteed to win barring a whole NEW set of scandals. (If, say, she were running against the presidential equivalent of Rick Lazio.) But she wouldn't have that luxury; she'd be running against Bush and the Karl Rove Campaign Machine. And Rove would make sure she had no reputation LEFT by the end of the 2004 campaign.
So she could either risk losing everything, and going through hell in the process, or else just sit back, let the Ten Dwarves fight it ought amongst each other and then have the "winner" lose big to Bush in 2004, while she spends the next 4 to 5 years trying to rebuild her reputation in preparations for a 2008 election is which she would be the ONLY obvious frontrunner in either party.
I don't know about you, but I'd pick the latter option any day.