Recent speculation discounting a run for the White House by Hillary Clinton in 2012 fails to consider the obvious:  The former first lady/U.S. senator has not stopped running for president since well before Barack Obama defeated her and was himself elected.

Nor has her husband stopped campaigning tirelessly toward that end.

The junior senator from New York surprised nearly everyone when she accepted Obama’s offer to become his secretary of state, a move by the new president widely considered at the time to be brilliant: He could unite his party, obtain a competent high-profile cabinet member who would support his policies, satisfy female voters, and remove his major rival from presidential consideration — all in one fell swoop.

What everyone failed to consider is that William Jefferson Clinton is the shrewdest politician in this country in recent memory; that he sees his wife’s election as the missing element/fulfillment of his own presidency and as necessary to cementing his place in history — and that he has the uncanny ability to read the political future.

It is that uncanny ability that his and Hillary’s political opponents continue to underestimate. And it is that ability to see things unfold before they occur that most likely prompted the former president to advise his wife to take the job, and set the stage for her ascent to the highest office in the land.

Don’t believe it? Let me explain.

NOT IN THE CLINTONS’ BEST INTERESTS

It was not in the Clintons’ best interests for Obama to be elected — they would have been better positioned to campaign against a President McCain. Still, they touched all the right bases and did all the right things to support their party’s nominee, campaigning enthusiastically for Obama — albeit with mostly verbal support — but not really wanting him to win.

So it seemed brilliant when the first black president — not Clinton, who was often called that by many African-Americans, but Obama — made it clear he wanted contradictory cabinet officials and advisers peopling his presidency, as President Lincoln had done (cf., Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, 2005).

Like Lincoln in selecting his cabinet a century and a half before, Obama named his chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination he had recently won to be his chief cabinet officer in the new administration. Or did he “pick” Hillary because that was the price he had to pay for the Clintons’ show of support during the campaign against John McCain?

Conventional wisdom during the general election campaign of 2008 was that it was not in Hillary’s interests to be secretary of state. Having just been defeated by Obama, why would she want to help or join him?

Even more important, how could she hope to become president if she became a member of the Obama team? In eight years she would be too old to be a viable candidate. Wouldn’t it be better for her to remain in the Senate, where she could maintain her independence, assert and extend her leadership, and criticize the new president — if and when the time became right — from the sidelines?

The flaw in that line of thinking is that Obama could have easily thrown a monkey wrench into the scenario simply by appointing her to the first vacancy on the Supreme Court, thereby eliminating her as a rival permanently.  She would have been hard-pressed to refuse the appointment — no one refuses a president’s nomination to the Supreme Court — and would thus have been removed from presidential contention for life.

Bill Clinton sees those things, with his uncanny ability to look into the political abyss that is the future. He frequently makes mistakes, to be sure, but he learns from them:  He doesn’t make the same mistake a second time.  For example, in the last campaign, he hurt his wife’s candidacy against Obama by, among other things, taking center stage.

He won’t do that again.

PAULA JONES AND MONICA LEWINSKY

(One might argue that he repeated his mistake regarding girlfriend Paula Jones with intern Monica Lewinsky. But consider the fact that the former president got caught with the one because he used state troopers to set up their liaisons, whereas with the other he kept everything within the confines of the White House, with no third party involved. It was only Lewinsky’s ill-advised and loose-lipped confidence in false friend Linda Tripp that did him in.)

Newt Gingrich, the former GOP speaker of the House whom Clinton vanquished in 1996 despite being under threat of imminent impeachment — and himself a Republican presidential prospect for 2012 (albeit a weak one) — has described Hillary as “one of the two most shrewd and savvy politicians” he has encountered in his lifetime. “The other one,” Gingrich says, “is her husband.”

Consider therefore, that Bill Clinton foresaw the prospect of Obama’s eliminating Hillary from contention by appointing her to the high court, thus removing her from the Senate and marginalizing her political base — and also Clinton’s own place in history by preventing his wife from fulfilling his presidential legacy.

Consider in addition the prospect that Clinton, and probably also Hillary — she may not be as shrewd as he is, but she certainly runs a close second — recognized from the outset that Obama’s inexperience would ultimately bring about his failure, that his rhetorical skills would not suffice in the absence of real political acumen, that too much promise accompanied by too little delivery would quickly wear thin with the electorate — and that by 2012 the president might well be vulnerable to a serious challenge from within his own party.

Add to that the growing perception that Obama, while well-intentioned, is out of his depth as chief executive, that he just isn’t up to the job; that he isn’t Harry Truman firing an immensely popular but insubordinate Douglas MacArthur, he’s merely an inexperienced president firing a brilliant and successful, albeit loose-lipped, Stanley McChrystal.

There were no wusses in President Truman’s White House. And MacArthur was warned repeatedly by Truman before the president took the drastic step of firing him in the middle of a war.

Obama’s never had to make a decision like whether or not to drop a nuclear bomb, shut down the steel industry, or institute a Marshall Plan to repair and rebuild a former military monolith his nation had just defeated in a World War.  Iraq and Afghanistan are not Japan and Germany.

Nor is history on the president’s side. The only Democratic chief executive since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected to a second term is Obama’s adversary’s husband Bill, only the second White House Democrat since 1916 to accomplish the feat of reelection.

NO CHALLENGER HAS BEEN SUCCESSFUL

However, it’s not unprecedented for incumbent presidents to be challenged for renomination, although no such challenger has been successful since the late 1800s. The closest to winning in the 20th century was Theodore Roosevelt, followed by Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. In 1968 former Senator Eugene McCarthy caused incumbent President Lyndon Johnson to drop out of the renomination race.

Will Hillary run in 2012? It’s probably too soon to know. If President Obama can prevent the Democrats from losing a substantial number of seats this year in the House of Representatives and Senate, then likely no.

But if the Republicans do well in November — especially if they regain control of either house of Congress — the president will have to absorb a substantial portion of the blame, thereby further weakening his own candidacy two years hence. He already has been blamed for high-profile Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts this past year, where he foolishly put his personal prestige on the line in support of losing candidates.

And just last week a Rasmussen poll revealed that a majority of Americans think Hillary is more qualified to be president than the president.

A Clinton candidacy, while not a certainty by any means, is nonetheless a distinct possibility.

No one doubts she wants it. No one doubts her husband wants it.

If she runs, he can be counted on to not make the mistakes that hurt her in the last campaign. If she makes the decision to do what’s only been done three times in more than a hundred years, he can be counted on to be a major player by her side.

She can’t do it without him. But with him she can change history. It’s a heady challenge.

Whatever one may think of the Clintons’ political marriage, they are in tandem and in synch when it comes to waging political war to win elections.

And this time, she will have yet another credential to recommend her to the voters, that of secretary of state — an office held by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison when it was a steppingstone to the presidency, as well as other presidents before they became chief executive.

Thanks the Village Voice.