Is Bill jumping the Hillary ship?

From USA Today:

Two of the newsier things CNN says former president Bill Clinton tells Larry King tonight at 9 p.m. ET, during their prerecorded interview:

• The Democrats running for president "are gifted people and they deserve to be seriously listened to," and "you have got the prospect that vice president Gore might run."

• His wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, "would be the best president by a good long stretch, for all kinds of obvious reasons -- or at least they are obvious to me. ... But she also genuinely loves her job in the Senate. ... So for her personally, she is going to (be) fine regardless. "

Whatever else you can say about Bill Clinton one thing you can't take away from him is his excellent political instincts. And coming from a man with such an ability to read the political climate this looks like nothing more than hedging.

The campaigns have the best polling and the best analysis. It could very well be that Boy Clinton has already read the tea leaves and knows in his heart that Hillary is not going to be the next president. He may feel that the fact that she can't win the general election will become so manifest that the Democrat Party will choose another candidate to head the ticket and he is pushing for Gore.

Gore would be an excellent candidate from Clinton's point of view because as Clinton's former Vice President he would owe Bill for catapulting him onto the national stage. He could step in as Gore's unofficial campaign manager and end up with almost as much access to the White House om a Gore administration as he would have had with Hillary in the Oval Office.

The mainstream media has convinced a majority of the American people that both human caused global warming is both real and a serious threat and that the war in Iraq is unwinnable. Those things could combine into a Gore presidency dedicated to surrender on the military front and full unilateral implementation of Kyoto on the domestic front.

This is a disaster which must be avoided. I never would have thought that there could be a worse prospect than a Hillary Clinton presidency but there is.