New York's John Heilemann tries to answer the question:
Whenever this query is put to me — which only takes place, oh, on the order of 100 times a day — my response is simple: She wants to be president. Duh. And if it ain’t gonna happen this year, then her central objective is to make it as likely as possible in 2012. As I’ve written many times, Hillary believes with every fiber of her being that Obama is going to lose this year. (And so does her husband.) So her aim is to put herself in the best position possible to stand up on November 5 and say, if perhaps a tad more subtly than this, “I told you so.”
Given this, Heilemann predicts she'll probably drop out by the end of the week and that she'll be a loud--albeit insincere--Obama cheerleader come the fall. All of which sounds plausible enough to me. My one question, though, has to do with yesterday's RBC meeting. If Hillary's really focused on 2012, was it smart of her campaign to bus in protestors to the meeting, which led to the ugly scenes Eve vividly described, not to mention this one of a female Archie Bunker supporter of Hillary's (which has been flagged by Drudge)? It just seems that if she really wants plausible deniability in the case of Obama's defeat, memories of her angry supporters blasting Obama as "an inadequate black male" and pledging to vote for McCain isn't going to help matters.
--Jason Zengerle