It’s the mystery that has the whole country guessing, said Karen Tumulty in Time. Barring a last-minute miracle, Hillary Clinton will not—repeat, not—be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Why, then, is she still furiously campaigning? The simplest explanation is that she’s jockeying for every last vote and delegate so she has the leverage to demand that Barack Obama choose her as his running mate. Sources close to the campaign say that her husband, Bill, is, in fact, pushing for her to be vice president. The No. 2 job, he believes, will best position her for the real goal, which remains to be president someday. But Clinton’s own strategists are doubtful Obama will bring her aboard, and it’s unclear that she really wants to spend four or eight years playing second fiddle to the man who beat her. That leaves even those closest to her wondering what she’ll demand in return for surrendering. As a top Clinton strategist confessed, “I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

She’d better not count on being vice president, said Dan Payne in The Boston Globe. The “superficial logic” of an Obama-Clinton ticket is that it would heal the divisions in the party and ensure that her passionate supporters come to the polls this fall. But in reality, having Hillary on the ticket would create more problems than it would solve. Hillary’s home state, New York, is guaranteed to go Democratic with or without her, and though some Democrats adore her, she remains incredibly divisive; more than half of all voters view her unfavorably. Besides, said John Judis in The New Republic Online, when the opponent is not a black Harvard Law graduate but the white war veteran John McCain, Clinton will no longer be able to deliver “white male, working-class voters.” Nor will she help win any state—with the possible exception of Arkansas—that Obama couldn’t win on his own.

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