If Obama wins another term, there’s no reason whatever to assume that he’ll quit after two and leave anything but wreckage in his wake. And Hillary isn’t going to want to help Obama out anyway; the only reason she slunk off to the DoS in the first place is that she had monster campaign debts and Obama bought her by paying them off (which is his style–clear as much opposition from the field as possible). I’m guessing the purchase was permanent, and he owns her still.

Unless Hillary’s lost every bit of brains she ever had, she knows that being #2 to Obama is worthless to the #2, and wouldn’t want it even if she were free to seek it. The only real question remaining is, why did they have that nice 3-party luncheon in the White House today? My guess is that it was a get-together explicitly set up to make sure the, er, “principals” knew what was what, in case Sarah had suckered any one or more of them into groundless speculation and/or planning. All information flow was in the from-the-top-down direction. No one was offered anything, no one had the option to accept or reject anything, and if anyone didn’t know that would be the case going in, they all certainly knew it coming out.