Don't Quit--Just SUSPEND Your Campaign

I'm going to start this short piece on a conciliatory note that the Clinton campaign almost certainly does not merit, and offer a quick piece of advice to the campaign that it will almost certainly ignore.  The justly proferred condemnations of your remarks have already spread far and wide, and there is nothing I could add to them that would offer anything new or insightful.  But there is something that has been left largely unsaid to this point (except tangentially by Booman) that needs saying.

Hillary and friends, I have good news: there is a way out of this hell.  A way for you and your adherents to accomplish what you want, and save face in the wake of the "assassination" debacle all at the same time.

Don't quit--just suspend your campaign.

If we give Hillary the benefit of the doubt, her statements yesterday indicate that she believes she is staying in the race in order to be the backup plan in case something terrible were to befall Barack Obama.  Let's ignore the morbid and completely unacceptable nature of Hillary's musings about what might befall Obama: one needn't go all the way to assassination to foresee a way in which Obama's nomination might be completely derailed.

Obama could have a Spitzer moment.  He could be caught "with a dead girl or live boy", as the old saying goes.  He could have an aneurysm.  He could be kidnapped by space aliens.  He could be a space alien (remember The Simpsons, anyone?).  The point is, there are any number of increasingly far-fetched scenarios that could arise between now and August that would necessitate choosing another more electable/alive/human nominee.

But Hillary would not need to continue in full campaign mode to be the backup plan in these unlikely scenarios.  She doesn't need to quit.  All she would need to do is exactly what Mitt Romney did when it became clear that he would not be able to overtake John McCain, barring a similar event (much more likely in McCain's case due to his advancing years, such as stroke, heart attack or worse): suspend her campaign.  She would not need to quit her campaign, give up her delegates, or end her aspirations.  She would simply need to step back, end the attacks on her opponent, and lie in wait in the wings in case the worst should happen.

And it's clear that Hillary could not win this nomination any other way.  With her campaign bleeding superdelegates seemingly every single day and only three contests left, it's all over but for the counting at the convention even if she should decide to pursue the race all the way until Denver--unless, as she says, something terrible should happen to Obama either from a scandal or worse.

And now that she has openly mused on more than one occasion about Obama's possible death, it's almost certain that she would never become the vice-presidential nominee at this point--lest more than a few someones believe that she have an actually direct reason to wish for Obama's demise.

And at this point, the media aren't going to give her a free pass on her campaign, either.  It's only going to get uglier from here.  And yet, with so much of the party behind her still and three more contests yet to go, simply dropping out of the race may not be desirable for her or her (shrinking) base.

So the choice is actually very simple: don't quit.  Just suspend the campaign.  Graciously.  And let the Party know that you're there, behind the scenes, just in case those Martians really do descend from the sky to snatch our nominee.

There's really no other way forward for you--and nothing to lose, either.