I’m pretty sure that Hillary Clinton has been thinking about running for president for a while. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement in November 1998, Hillary and Bill Clinton saw the incumbency opening and bought a house in New York State in 1999 so that she could run for Congress. She could have run for President in 2000 and challenged Al Gore or George Bush with no campaign experience but that wasn’t realistic. She could have run in 2004 and challenged Kerry for Bush’s incumbency with four years of experience. But her plan was to wait for a much more favorable eight year launch window in 2008, avoiding incumbents and obvious challengers while letting her accumulate an optimal amount of “experience”. Eight years was not too little and not too long, it was “just right”. It was a good plan.
And the collapse of that good plan is why I think Hillary seems especially hostile toward Obama drinking her milkshake. She doesn’t want to go back to being “the Senator from New York” the way that other senators do when they lose a primary because she’s not from New York and her game plan didn’t involve going back to being a Senator. That’s not what was supposed to happen. … He’s not just winning the primary, he’s ruining her eight-year plan.
