The Junior Senator from Illinois...Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hendrik Hertzberg presents a scenario I hadn’t considered before:

“When and where, it is not too soon to ask, did she go wrong? Well, here’s one answer: eight years ago, in New York. If she had chosen, instead, to move to Illinois, where her accent is familiar and her connections deep (Chicago’s her home town, after all), she could have settled in and sought her Senate seat there, in 2004. She didn’t do that, presumably for reasons both marital (Bill’s not really a Second City kind of guy) and political (she would have had to run for President as a first-term senator rather than as a reelected one). But Barack Obama would still be a local or regional up-and-comer and, most likely, a Hillary supporter.”

Could it be so simple? If the Clintons had only moved to Winnetka rather than Chappaqua and Hillary had pretended to be from Illinois rather than New York, then this entire race would have been different. It really could have happened—and she would be the nominee today if it had. In fact, against a field of only Edwards, Richardson, Biden and Dodd, the campaign's plan to wrap things up by Super Tuesday would have come to fruition. This race would have never been close.

Running for President of the United States is not an undertaking you do on a whim. It takes a lifetime of planning, some of it even subconsciously. The dominoes you line up have to be perfectly placed and perfectly sized. The senate seat Hillary Clinton carpetbagged her way into back in 2000 looked like it was both. Sometimes you can’t tell for sure until you knock the first one over—and by then it is too late to fix the mistake.