Hillary vs. Obama in 2012? It'll Never Happen -- I Don't Think

I come to you today, my friends, with good news and bad news.  First the bad news.

If Hillary Clinton looks at the polls and decides that Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter all over again, and if she figures, what the hell, and makes a run against him, she will win.  Not just the Democratic nomination.  The whole thing.

Hillary can beat Mr. Obama and anyone the Republicans nominate.

In the primaries liberals wouldn’t even have to feel (too) guilty about abandoning America’s first black president.  They could convince themselves that with the economy in the dumps, Mr. Obama can’t win in 2012.  And it’s not as if they’d be dropping the president for some vanilla white guy.  They could feel good about themselves knowing that in 2008 they made history by helping to elect America’s first black president … and in 2012 they would be making history again, this time by helping elect America’s first woman president.

As for the general election, while Republicans would turn out in droves to vote for anybody but Hillary, she’d certainly get a huge percentage of the party’s base (except for some black voters furious that she ran against Mr. Obama) and more importantly, she’d probably pick up enough of those crucial independent votes to become President Clinton.  Independents, after all, went Democratic in 2008.  And just because the polls show a majority of them no longer support President Obama, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton – especially if the Republicans go crazy and nominate Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry.

Of course none of this would be good for the country, since Mrs. Clinton would try to impose her liberal worldview on all of us just as President Obama has.  No, she’s not as liberal as Mr. Obama, but she’s liberal enough to drive conservatives nuts.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is this is a crazy drama that will never play out.  She won’t run.  No way.  I don’t think.

But if President Obama continues to drop in the polls, if Americans continue to think he’s doing a terrible job handing the economy, you never know.

Nah!  Can’t happen.  At least I hope it can’t.