is as follows:

1) She’s in the Obama administration. Whatever else happens, she can’t credibly emerge as a vociferous opponent of an administration that she has worked for without complaint for over 2 years. That gets her nothing in either the primary or the general.

2) As SoS, Hillary’s main focus has been on foreign policy. While that might have been relevant in ’04, voters today don’t really care about foreign policy. As her husband said in another age, it’s the economy, stupid. Voters are concerned that they, or their friends and family, might not have jobs — not that the Libyan people or whoever might not have enough freedom. That might change; a lot can happen in the year. Nonetheless, as things stand today, voters aren’t going to give a fig about Clinton’s foreign policy bonafides.

3) If the public suddenly started caring about foreign policy again, they sure as heck wouldn’t agree with Clinton. ’06 (and to a lesser extent ’08) was a rejection of the foreign policy consensus from 2003 onwards. This was a consensus that Hillary Clinton, by and large, supported, and which has seen a good deal of continuity in the Obama administration. The few changes (cosmetic and substantial) that the Obama administration has wrought have generally been seen as failures or unnecessary; Libya was one of the wars least supported by the public in recent memory (even OIF started out at 70-80% approval), and bungles like the “reset” button have reminded the general public how naive and incompetent Democrats can be about this sort of thing. Hillary cannot run against this record: something which hurts her in both the primary and the general.

Many progressives feel about Clinton the same way that conservatives feel about Bush. Moreover, the handful of progs who actually are anti-war would have a big problem voting for Clinton. I don’t agree that Clinton has a very good shot at all; if there’s a challenge to Obama in the Dem primaries, it will probably come from his left.

The Democrats in ’68 didn’t run McNamara. Likewise, they won’t run a candidate whose claim to fame was 1) an enormously unpopular push to institute single-payer healthcare, and 2) someone who has been hard at work maintaining and expanding the status quo in her capacity as SoS. If Obama stepped aside to make room for another Dem, it would more likely be a governor with few connections to Washington, not the madame with connections to Washington out the wazoo, and connections to Obama’s policies.

Was this meant to be a reply to someone else? Not sure how it relates to what I wrote.

not reality. In the case of Hillary, the time to mold perceptions is long gone: she’s the harpy who pushed for HillaryCare in the 90s, who worked with Obama as SoS, and who voted for the Iraq war and stumped for it in that disingenuous way that only a Clinton could pull off.

Get a governor/former governor from some state who doesn’t have significant ties to Obama and the Washington of the past couple of years (Bill Richardson, maybe? Mario Cuomo?), and one could still mold perceptions to some extent.

I expect Obama to make a half-hearted run, but if for whatever reason he yields, I don’t expect Hillary to be coronated in his stead.