Does Hillary Clinton really want the vice presidential nomination? Let’s set aside whether she’s owed it or deserves it or whether her place on the ticket might provide the Democrats with a crucial edge in November. Does she really want it?

Let me start by saying this is speculation. And my record is not good. Not long after Hillary won her senate seat (actually before she was even sworn in) I wrote an article in Slate in which I explained that while I thought she’d be a great senator I found the idea of her running for president ridiculous. So clearly I didn’t get that one right. And re-reading the article almost eight years on reminds me of how difficult it is to see even clearly a handful of years into the future.

But past mis-prognostications aside.

Does Hillary Clinton really want the vice presidency? It seems to me that the senate offers her a better venue for achieving her ambitions and goals personally, politically and in public policy — and a future in public life with much greater longevity — than anything she’ll find as Barack Obama’s number two.

Let’s run through a few of the scenarios. And let’s start with what I believe is the unassailable assumption that if and when Hillary relinquishes her senate seat to become vice president she won’t get it back and there will no other office she can run again for beside presidency.

So the scenarios.

If Obama wins the presidency, Hillary would not be able to run in her own right until 2016, when she will turn 69. As John McCain is showing, that’s certainly not too old to run for president. But she will be nearing the age when ‘age’ becomes an issue in her candidacy.

Most people who accept the vice presidency do so either because they believe it will line them up to succeed to the presidency or because it brings them to a level of power and honor their careers held little prospect of bringing them otherwise. But neither applies to Hillary Clinton. She’s already of the stature and standing to run for president. She’s a genuinely historic figure. And she’s already been heavily involved in a successful two term administration.

Remember too that the recent trend for greater vice presidential involvement in key administration decision-making has brought with it a flat requirement that vice presidents be strictly loyal and politically subservient to the president. Quite simply, the vice presidency is beneath Hillary’s stature. It’s not clear to me why Hillary would want to spend four or eight years in a position that I think would actually diminish her stature for the possibility of running for president again almost a decade from now.

On the other hand, Hillary has and can probably hold her seat in the senate for the rest of her life. One never knows, but the prospects look good for the Democrats to hold a majority in the senate — perhaps even a substantial one — for a number of years into the future. And some key leadership role would probably eventually be in her grasp, perhaps even hers for the taking. So whether you think Hillary’s ambitions are political, ideological or personal — altruistic or selfish — her range of action for achieving is better as a lion in the senate than a second banana in the West Wing.

I actually believe that Hillary would really only come into her own in the senate after she set her presidential ambitions aside precisely because they have so tightly constrained the range of actions she’s allowed herself and made others so closely scrutinize those actions in light of her ambitions for higher office.

Now, I grant there are some other scenarios. You might speculate that if she ran hard with him and lost she’d line herself up for another try in 2012. But I’m not cynical enough to believe she’d run a race she hopes to lose. Alternatively perhaps she’s so committed to her agenda of public policy goals that she’d go for the reduced stature and constraints of the vice presidency for a chance to have great influence on the executive branch from the inside.

Put it all together and whether or not Obama would offer it to her, and even though she might want to be asked, I just don’t see where she’d really want it. She should stay in the senate.

(See the ed.note below for a correction on what campaigns can and cannot legally do to settle an opposing campaign’s debt.)

According to the Huffington Post’s Tom Edsall and a number of others, one of the possibilities in the offing if Hillary Clinton quickly ends her presidential campaign is that the Obama campaign will not only retire the $10 to $15 million in unpaid campaign related expenses the Clinton campaign owes but will also help the Clinton campaign pay back to the Clintons personally the $11.4 million they have loaned to the campaign during the last three months.

Helping to retire an opponent’s campaign is not unprecedented and can sometimes be justified in the interests of party unity. (Remember, this isn’t just money in the abstract. A lot of it is payment to people who provided services or goods of various sorts to the campaign and need to be paid or paid back.) But using more than $10 million raised in large part by small individual donations to pay back the Clintons who appear to be worth many tens of millions of dollars simply seems wrong.

This isn’t meant to sound ungracious. I don’t begrudge the Clintons their very substantial wealth. And even for really, really rich people, $11 million isn’t nothing. But that is simply too much money raised from small givers to give to people who loaned it with full knowledge of the odds and have more than enough money to really know what to do with.

Frankly, I’m surprised that it’s even being suggested. It would be a mistake for the Clintons to ask (and just because people are chattering about it — don’t assume they have or will), a mistake for Obama to offer and one that would risk a severe backlash.

That’s not what people gave their money for.

(ed.note: I fear I was led a bit astray by Edsall’s article in Huffpo on this issue of repaying Clinton’s sizable campaign debt. Edsall wrote that “One of the most inviting [rewards to be reaped from withdrawal from the race] is the near certainty that the Obama campaign would agree to pay back the $11.4 million she has loaned her own bid, along with an estimated $10 million to $15 million in unpaid campaign expenses.” However, as DHinMI points out at DailyKos, Obama is not allowed to take millions of dollars from his own campaign and give them to Clinton’s campaign. The most his campaign could legally give would be $2,000. Any deal to help Clinton with her debt would have to be in the form of Obama helping to raise additional money on Clinton’s behalf. So anyone whose money was going to the Clinton campaign would have to know just where it was going. I don’t see any way to interpret what Edsall wrote other than as saying that Obama would actually use his cash to pay the money back. But that’s wrong. And I should have checked this out more thoroughly before passing on the error.)

Noted without comment, because what can you say …

From USAToday’s new interview with Sen. Clinton …

“I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she said.

A couple points and then a question.

There’s a good argument that Democratic losses in the 90s and the early part of this decade were due to poor showings among non-college educated white voters. And as I’ve noted several times before, the idea that the constituencies you don’t win in a Democratic primary are not winnable for you in the general, is literally nonsense.

But what about the general question of the ‘problem’ of Democrats consistently losing the white vote in national elections. Think about it this way. Since Democrats usually win upwards of 90% of the African-American vote in general elections, and African-Americans constitute something like 13% of the population, if Democrats consistently won the white vote they’d win every election by a crushing margin.

I’m sure Democrats wouldn’t mind that. But it brings one point into sharp relief: though America’s racial make-up is much more complex than just black and white, in the context of blacks and whites, the Democrats are the bi-racial coalition. They win elections by winning overwhelming margins of African-American votes and keeping the margin close among whites. (Obviously this is different in individual states with larger or smaller African-American populations.) Indeed, if Democrats continue to run strong, though not overwhelmly so, among Hispanics (something that seems probable in the short term with all the recent immigrant bashing on the right) this pattern could well become more pronounced.

There’s nothing wrong with studying these percentages in terms of demography. Nor is there anything wrong with Democratic strategists recognizing that their candidates need to win this or that percentage of white voters to win. But creeping in the shadows of these conversations about how Democrats can no longer manage to win the white vote and are only saved from political oblivion by running up big margins among African-Americans is a little disguised assumption that African-American votes are somehow second-rate.

I don’t think there’s any getting around that.

I’m going to be stepping aside from my normal duties at TPM for the rest of the week for some family time. I’ll be leaving you in the able hands of the rest of the TPM staff. Next week or the week following we’ll have some announcements about new projects and personnel at TPM.

Time recounts the top 5 mistakes made by Hillary’s campaign. This one jumps out:

Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game.

That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state’s 370 delegates.

It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all.

Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. “How can it possibly be,” Ickes asked, “that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn’t understand proportional allocation?”

And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don’t get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she’d be the nominee.

Late Update: Greg Sargent unearths a 2007 memo from Penn that seems to suggest the same winner-take-all analysis.

The ACLU continues its undefeated streak in challenging FBI National Security Letters.

Rep. Vito Fossella (R-NY) has just issued a statement confirming what the New York tabloids have been in a tizzy about since Fossella’s DUI arrest in suburban DC last week: He fathered a child with the woman — not his wife, the mother of his three other children — who picked him up from jail that night.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

“I have had a relationship with Laura Fay, with whom I have a three year old daughter,” Fossella said in a statement.

“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly sorry.

“While I understand that there will be many questions, including those about my political future, making any political decisions right now are furthest from my mind.

“Over the coming weeks and months, I will to continue to do my job and I will work hard to heal the deep wounds I have caused.”

The buzz is that this episode will force Fossella, the only Republican congressman representing NYC, not to seek re-election this year.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is running primarily on the sheer defiant enthusiasm of her supporters and staff, and perhaps no one embodies that doggedness more than former Special Counsel to President Clinton, Lanny Davis. In today’s episode of TPMtv we present Lanny’s pièce de résistance, his stint on CNN’s Tuesday night North Carolina and Indiana primary coverage …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

In the course of scanning the news to populate our news section to the right there, I occasionally come across items that are unrelated to our focus on politics and muck but are so cool they’re worth sharing. So indulge me for a moment my fascination with geology and check out these amazing photos from the eruption of Chaitén in Chile.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.