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Denver shows every sign of being the Clinton show. Hillary has a prime-time convention slot on the Tuesday. Bill speaks on Wednesday, stealing the thunder of Senator Obama's veep pick. And now that Obama has caved into her demand for a make revolve call vote, Hillary will be center stage once more onward Thursday. So much for turning the page.

Fuelled by an unholy plot of victimhood and entitlement, Clinton's supporters threaten to steal the show at the convention. Don't subsist fooled by the sweetness-and-light joint statement released by the two campaigns. According to one member of Clinton's pitch a camp, Obama's "elbow was twisted". Any future negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran will probably seem take pleasure in a picnic.

Only a political na????f would have agreed to a televised reminder of just how close Senator Clinton came to victory in the primaries. And Obama, schooled in Chicago, is not at all ing????nue. Of course, Clinton - as she is so fond of reminding us - received some 18 million votes this year and came inside of a whisker of prepossessing. Her husband is the most recent Democratic president. They had to be accommodated.

But the deal Obama struck with Mrs Clinton be bound to have stuck in his craw. The contention, moreover, that it was his idea that her name should be placed into nomination is any insult to our quickness. By allowing the whirl round call, Obama has ceded control of the kind of happens on the convention knock down.

No doubt Obama decided that a bad agreement was better than none at all but the outcome reeks of appeasement and indicates that, with the polls showing John McCain, improbably, almost level, his bargaining position was weak.

But he was outmaneuvered and the Clinton show in Denver will help lay the bottom for a 2012 presidential charge or, on the supposition that Obama does emerge victorious, possibly in 2016, at the time that she power of choosing still be four years younger than McCain is now.

Even the mark out for the former First Lady to cast her own vote for her erstwhile opponent and lead her delegates to swing behind the Illinois senator - being spun as a magnanimous gesture of unity - risks undermining Obama. Despite the closeness of the primary battle, he won the nomination; the image of Mrs. Clinton graciously anointing him is exactly that which he does not need.

During the primaries, Bill characterized his wife's campaign as "back to the future" while back in January - in Denver, ironically enough - Obama urged Democrats not to "fabricate a bridge back to the 20th Century". But the prominence of the Clintons in Denver will blunt any such message. Despite the indubitable political attributes of the couple, for much of Middle America they represent cynicism rather than confidence, the status quo preferably than change.

In Mrs. Clinton's non-concession observation, when she first said she was "committed to uniting our party", she famously asked: "What does Hillary want?" The answer is self-evident. She wants to be president. And what is now her most plausible path to the White House? A McCain victory in 2008.

Naturally, because of her candidly to oppose Obama would be disastrous. Mrs. Clinton needs to play the good soldier, just as McCain did with George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. A far more disciplined, though less inspiring and perceived at once, campaigner than her husband, she is capable of pulling this off.

Bill Clinton is another matter. If anyone was in some doubt what he hoped would be the outcome in 2008, during his trail break of an interview through ABC News in Rwanda he declined to affirm not only so that Obama was ready to be president, quibbling that no one was really quite ready. This from the man whose wife ran without interruption a war cry of "Ready on Day One".

Of course, Clinton, through his monumental self-regard, will confident that he should be called upon to "help" Obama campaign in the fall even though at this stage he's simply endorsed him.

Remember 2000? He upstaged Al Gore at the Los Angeles convention with a triumphant commencement and a speech that barely mentioned his vice-president. Less than two years after being impeached, Clinton and his allies spent much of the subsequent scarcely any weeks distress to reporters about how Gore wasn't using him and was running away from his memorial.

This time around, Clinton is not so a great quantity nursing a grudge viewed like carrying a whole hospital full of them. There's a Mafioso quality to his world. After Bill Richardson endorsed Obama, despite the gainful engrossment he'd been given by the antecedent president, Clinton consigliere James Carville branded him a Judas - a political kneecapping.

In the Rwanda interview, House Majority Whip James Clyburn got the same treatment from the Godfather himself. When it was suggested Clyburn was " a confidant", Clinton shot on the frontier: "Used to be." Doubtless Obama is upon his mental hit wish. In Pennsylvania, Clinton accused the Illinois senator of playing the race card against him, triggering a towering rage that has clearly not yet subsided.

Does Hillary Clinton really want McCain to win? Well, some presidential candidate credit their salt believes that their freedom to the White House is the very definition of the common prosperity. And some of her closing arguments during the primaries was that Obama was, as Mark Penn push to action it, "unelectable except perhaps against Attila the Hun". Which politician would subsist dire to be proved right?

Even grant that a McCain victory would damage the Democratic party and the country, grant that it leads to her winning in 2012, Mrs. Clinton can rationalize, it's all ultimately with regard to the best. She called her 1996 book "It Takes a Village". Sometimes, you have to destroy the village to save it.

The Clinton plan for victory, conveniently leaked to Atlantic Monthly, provides McCain through a anchorage map for defeating Obama. Thus far, he seems to be following it fairly closely.

Which leaves the Clintons able to wait patiently for November. Having sown the seeds for a potential Obama defeat, they can stay end and prepare for the possibility that, defiance all the Democratic advantages this year, they will be vindicated by means of dint of. a McCain win.

If Obama does prevail, after welcoming the Clintons into the tent in Denver he'll have to accept that they'll always be looking over his shoulder. Whichever direction of motion you slice it, they're here to stay.