Congrats to Obama. So Now What?

Quick hits:

• Clinton might not have won, but she certainly gets to play kingmaker. She set the pattern for the fall: black people and people under 40 for the O-man, and everybody else for her. Once you add in the masses of lily-white crotchety Republicans and extrapolate that same pattern, it looks like Obama loses by a lot. But if Hillary decides to swing her weight behind him, then that could change things.
• Does Hillary really want the vice-president slot? I don’t know that she does. From a purely self-interested perspective, things might work out better for her if she sits this year out and then makes a comeback in 2012. By then we’ll either have a McCain presidency and she can argue that the Democrats should have picked her in 2008 and certainly should in 2012, or she can find enough Obama mistakes from four years in office to drop in like Reagan in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980.
• Unfortunately for her in that latter scenario, the Republicans lost the general election in 1976 and the Democrats lost it in 1980. Whoops.
• Back to the first point, your man McCain is no political slouch: he sees what I just pointed out and is trying to win over Team Hillary. Under what other circumstances would a Republican ever dare to say something nice about Hillary Clinton? His best option is for her to sit on the sidelines and be pissed, because if she does, that’s just what her supporters will do too.
• It is weird how the fact that a black man is the major-party nominee for President of the United States isn’t being played up a lot more. But then that tends to happen with all significant moments: no matter how big something seems in your own life, the world won’t bother stopping to congratulate you. There’s always more to be done, so the sooner you get down to brass tacks and do it, the better.