Novak: 2008 Is Hillary Clinton’s Last Chance For Democratic Presidential Nomination

Conservative columnist Robert Novak has an item that suggests Senator Hillary Clinton could have problems if the emerging conventional wisdom is correct and she goes for the Democratic nomination in 2012 should Senator Barack Obama be the nominee and lose:

Al Gore, despite the lowest political pro file, is talked about among prominent Democrats as their leading candidate for 2012 if they fail this year.

The Democratic consensus is that there will be no second chance for Sen. Hillary Clinton. She is blamed for wounding Sen. Barack Obama so severely that he might fail in November.

Gore has kept out of the 2008 Democratic presidential contest, in contrast to his embarrassing 2004 endorsement of front-runner Howard Dean just before Dean flamed out. Since then, Gore’s prestige in Democratic ranks has soared while winning the Nobel Peace Prize and Hollywood’s Academy Award. He will be 64 in 2012.

That makes a great deal of sense. I haven’t been able to quite figure out how it stands to reason that if Obama gets the nomination, and a lot of the material and charges used by the Clinton campaign are used to defeat Obama, AND if Clinton voters stay home in enough numbers for Obama to lose, Clinton is automatically in line to get the nomination in 2012. If she gets it, the process will likely be as unpretty as what we’re seeing in the primaries.

There IS a precedent on the GOP side: Ronald Reagan’s challenge of President Gerald Ford is considered by some to have contributed to Ford’s defeat 1976 and Reagan came back four years later to capture the nomination. But Reagan was a “movement” candidate. Clinton is more a “machine” candidate.

Additionally, a large chunk of the emerging current press coverage with its conventional wisdom focuses on (a) a belief that Clinton can’t win and should drop out (Obama has noted she has a right to stay in the race and Clinton now insists she will fight all the way to the convention) and (b) many reports that the Clinton campaign has a specific strategy to raise Obama’s negatives so he is unelectable by convention time.

Couple that with persistent comments from the Clintons praising GOP likely nominee Senator John McCain — Bill Clinton has now made yet another one – and it’s clear the Reagan-Ford battle was an entirely different animal.

When Reagan challenged Ford, there was no huge clamor for him to drop out on the grounds that his case was perceived as useless and it was never reported that his campaign strategy was to raise Ford’s negatives so Ford was un-reelectable,

In other words: as Novak notes, it is highly likely that this is indeed Hillary Clinton’s last real chance. She could still win in 2012 but she will face a party peppered with a lot of new enemies in it that she did not have at the start of Campaign 2008 — when it began in earnest in 2007.

Enter Al Gore?