For the sake of this exercise, assume Obama is (a) elected in November and (b) still in office in January 2011. What must happen for Hillary to mount a credible primary campaign in the next cycle?
She can/will run only if Obama loses, or if he has such a horrible first 3 years that no one will vote for him again.
If he wins, and has a reasonable rating then there will be no reall opposition to his re-nomination for 2012.
Only one president has been cut off by his own party after one term, so all Obama has to do is not emulate Franklin Pierce.
She’d be better off keeping herself in shape and eyeing 2016.
Well, that’s what I mean. If he wins, what could go so far wrong that she’d feel emboldened to try to force him out?
He could bug an opposition building.
He could have an affair with a White House intern.
He could invade Iraq, blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11. :rolleyes:
Let’s read up on Franklin Pierce. He supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed for popular sovereignty in the slave state/free state decision and helped pave the way for the Civil War, and apparently was considering making an offer to buy Cuba from Spain, and perhaps go to war over it if it didn’t work.
What are the odds of Obama doing that?
I guess a more comparable, or at least more plausible, example would be Obama turning into Lyndon Johnson - getting into a deeply unpopular war that he couldn’t get out of and thus losing a big chunk of the Democratic base. Or, again more realistically, somehow not only failing to get out of Iraq, but actually expanding the war with disastrous consequences. So we’d have to have Hillary as the anti-war candidate. Given that this crowd doesn’t like or trust her, it’s likely that somebody else would lead this faction, and she would try to win most of it over, along with a more mainstream group, by proposing a more moderate course. She wasn’t particularly successful at this in the primaries in 2008 (Obama did it better).
The bottom line is this: she’s not stupid. If he wins in 2008, she’s not running again in four years. She’s making preparations to run again if he loses, but she won’t split the party with an insurgent campaign combining the worst parts of 2008 and 1972 - because that’s what we’re looking at here. She clearly considered the damage to the party when suspending her campaign in June and throwing her support to Obama thereafter, and again this week, so it’s very hard to imagine her doing the opposite next time.
Hillary Clinton’s Presidential bids are over. I don’t think she will run again if Obama wins or loses. I just don’t see it happening.
Obama could die close enough to the next convention that Biden wouldn’t have time to establish him as the incumbent, thus opening the door for challengers.
She’ll be 68 when that times comes to run again. I don’t see it happening, she may risk what Mccain has gone through with his age. Although Chelsea Clinton will be older then 35 by then.
Assassination
First off, I think it’s VERY unlikely. Given the OP’s assumptions, though, I think Obama would have to screw up so badly in his next three-plus years in the White House that Ford, Carter and Bush I (all of whom drew serious primary challengers) would be seen, by comparison, as noble statesmen on a par with George Washington. Democrats would have to be seriously pissed off and tired of him. Three years is an eternity in politics, I know, but I just can’t see it happening.
Far more likely, she would run to succeed him when/if he chose not to run for reelection in 2012 (and Biden decided to retire then, too), or in 2016, after he’d served two full terms. She’d be older, sure, but not necessarily TOO old (given Reagan, Dole’s and McCain’s runs).
I expect her to run in 2016. Her next four years as Senator she gets to be no longer a newbie senator but a Grande Dame with deep political roots all over the country. OTOH, if she becomes Senate Majority Leader she may not WISH to be Prez.
Sadly, if anything untoward did happen to Obama (fate forfend), enough people would suspect the Clinton’s of orchestrating it that it would be very difficult for her to get the nomination.
He could institute universal healthcare and ROYALLY fuck it up. It’s likely that any UHC plan would go over like a fart in church in America anyway, so royally fucking it up beyond belief wouldn’t really be that hard.
Damn, you’re exactly right. Sad.
It would have to be something personal. If Obama does so badly in the political arena that he’s not a viable candidate for re-election, then he will have brought the rest of the Democratic party down with him.
I disagree. If McCain wins, it might well be perceived by Democrats that Obama was too “pure” and that he was beaten by a negative campaign. If that’s the case, the Democrats may decide that they need to stop playing nice and nominate an attack dog of their own - and Clinton’s image will be seen as an asset instead of a liability.
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Die. Obviously, if he dies, all bets are off. He doesn’t have to be assassinated; people just die all the time for lots of reasons.
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Be the worst President in living memory, or at least be perceived as one, which would mean
a) Presiding over an honest-to-God New Depression,
b) Being implicated in a scandal of impeachable proportions, or
c) Getting into a war WAY worse than Iraq.
He could choose not to run again in theory. Regarding the OP.
If he were to suffer from some mental disease that left him unstable, there might be some interest in mounting a primary campaign.
Something that might (appear to) compromise his ability to lead physically, a severe stroke, MS, tramatic paralysis or maybe some unknown genetic condition.
He could choose to run for re-election despite having cancer that would like kill him in a year or two. That weakness might be giving too much advantage to the GOP to field him as a candidate. Although it would be more than just Clinton mounting a challenge.
Unlikely hypotheticals all, except maybe my first one. I know I couldn’t stand all that pressure. If the job started seriously effecting family, I could someone passing on a 2nd term.
Yeah but if the Democrats were half the politicians the Republicans are they could blame that on Bush. 