Frankly, I thought they had all shot their wad.
I'm talking about the centrist-conservatives in American politics (some who call themselves Democrats) who have yearned for Hillary Clinton to challenge Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president in 2012. Such a fantasy has never been promoted by our Secretary of State, of course, and why would she? She has by all accounts been a great representative of the president's foreign policy agenda, and has shown zero inclination to freelance to promote herself or go all Jon Huntsman on Obama and challenge him for his job.
No, it's always been the Dick Morrises of the world who have not only promulgated this theory, but predicted it. And they've been dead wrong.
But as we now are within a year of the general election, two so-called "Democrats," the Fox News boys Patrick Caddell and Doug Schoen, have co-written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal called "The Hillary Moment," in which they say because Obama can't win by running a "constructive campaign," for the good of the country he ought to quit and let Hillary be the nominee.
He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president's administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.
This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2011.