Over the last couple of weeks I've been getting increasingly nervous that the continuing degeneration of the Democratic presidential campaign will tear the party far enough apart to let the otherwise unthinkable happen: four more years of GOP terror. One thing that stimulated this fear was reading Donald Critchlow's The Conservative Ascendancy, which has capsule recaps of all the presidential elections, at least from 1964 on. In three cases incumbent presidents were defeated, each following primary challenges that Critchlow puts a lot of weight on: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and the former George Bush. One could also add Johnson/Humphrey in 1968 to that list. Admittedly, the Democratic nominee isn't the incumbent this year, but a unified Democratic party would have been presumed to be a strong favorite. That expectation is palpably weakening as the nicks and scratches of a campaign has gone through a stretch that has been barren of real election results.

The degeneration is mostly coming out of the Clinton camp as they try to find some traction with the nomination slowly slipping from their grasp. At present, Clinton is trailing slightly in delegates and in votes, slightly ahead in early superdelegate endorsements but losing her edge lately, and way behind in money. I figure the last of these will prove fatal: the Republican Party can usually finance promising candidates, but the Democrats especially like someone who can raise his or her own money. Meanwhile, Clinton's favorite tactic is to hypothesize tests that supposedly put Obama at a disadvantage, but which she's hardly rock solid on either. Most obvious is the "Commander in Chief Test" -- her experience at rubber stamping DOD expenses and her propensity for hot-headed posturing don't make for much of a case. Most insidious is the whole debate over electability, which all too readily slips into race baiting, even though polls show prejudice against voting for a woman is if anything stronger than prejudice against voting for a black man (unless, that is, the polls are tainted by the woman in question). Then there's the whining over Michigan and Florida. The problem with all of these things is not just that they induce division among Democrats but that many of them are readymade for McCain to exploit in the fall.

But the biggest problem with Clinton's campaign is and always has been the sense of inevitability. She was the front runner because she started with an incumbent-level brand name campaign organization, backed by the sense that Bill Clinton was the only Democrat in recent times to have solved the problem of how to beat the Republicans. The effect was that were Obama tries to sell change, Clinton promises restoration. I don't see that as an idea that's been at all well tested. The Bush restoration, which a Clinton return unfortunately recalls, at least moved a generation forward with mostly different people and priorities. Clinton promises something unprecedentedly close to a third term -- of the regime if not strictly the figurehead -- and no one really knows how that will play with the voters.

That's hardly the only baggage Clinton carries. For whatever combination of reasons, she's fallen behind Obama. She's managed to avoid being eliminated by winning some big Democratic-leaning states, benefitting from labor, city and state machines, white ethnics (who seem, along with Republican-leaning southerners, to be the last redoubts of racial backlash). She'll probably do that again in Pennsylvania, then lose North Carolina and Indiana to wind up about where she is, not quite numerically eliminated but still behind, having accomplished nothing but to drag the decision out.

But there would be a simple way for Clinton to undo much of the damage her campaign is causing. That would be to withdraw and go a couple of steps further: endorse Obama and offer her services as a vice-presidential candidate, which would remind her supporters every day of their stake in the Obama campaign, and dispell any notion that Democrats are divided in such a critical election. Right now I'm unfavorable enough on Clinton I'm not sure this would be a good thing. But it's probably an option if she wants it. For one thing, it would go some ways toward mitigating some big problems I see with her in the top slot: it seriously cuts down on her patronage, which means her ability to reconstruct the previous Clinton administration; it keeps Bill Clinton out of the White House, with its inevitable who's-in-charge confusion; it keeps her away from the commander in chief conceit, limiting her greatest liability, which is a tendency to get belligerent in foreign affairs. Conversely, it sets Obama up to set the public tone, to work his vision mojo. There's at least one precedent for this: JFK/LBJ. That didn't work out perfectly in every respect, but at least it held the party together to win a close election reversing an 8-year Republican hold on the White House.

Postscript: It occurs to me that Clinton could even take the Cheney vow, promising she won't run for president to succeed Obama. Of course, she wouldn't be as effective, not to mention destructive, as Cheney, whose unique power is partly a reflection on Bush. She also wouldn't be as good assassination insurance, especially given that most bullets come from the right.