Hillary not the VP?

The Washington Times is reporting that Hillary Clinton is losing her chance to join Obama in the ticket as vice president:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is conceding the Democratic presidential nomination to Sen. Barack Obama, as party leaders and strategists began to openly oppose the former first lady's aggressive efforts to join the ticket.

"Senator Clinton will be hosting an event in Washington, D.C., to thank her supporters and express her support for Senator Obama and party unity," the Clinton campaign said in a statement Wednesday night. The event is set for Saturday.

A series of other events Wednesday consolidated Mr. Obama's power over the party as its de facto nominee - a continuing surge of superdelegate endorsements, statements by party elders that the race is over, and his naming of a vice-presidential team, which brought about the inevitable debate over Mrs. Clinton as a running mate.

Most likely this, if true, just means that she never wanted the VP slot in the first place. If that is the case it means that she either wants one of the Supreme Court appointments which will open up in the first year of Obama's administration or that (and this is much less likely) she either believes that Obama will do so poorly as president that he will either not seek reelection or that she can challenge him in the 2012 primaries. Well, it could also mean that she thinks that Obama will lose to McCain and she wants to be positioned to be the logical choice for the Democrats in 2012.

Of course there is another possibility we have to consider. Given what we now know about Hillary's incompetence it is possible that she desperately wanted the VP position and tried as hard as she could to get it but simply screwed it up the way she screwed up health care in her husband's administration and her own presidential campaign.