When we face the likelihood of at least a semi-brokered convention, there will come a point at which one candidate, through surrogates, will ask another, "What will it take to make you concede the most important thing in your life for the past two years, maybe your entire life?" What range of possible answers exists for that question?
Others have explored, beyond my skill set, the superdelegate math for Senators Obama and Clinton, the effect of the Edwards delegates still retained, etc. I defer to those folks; they have the skills, so be it.
What I want to explore is this: how does Barack tell Hillary, or Hillary tell Barack (more hypothetically) to surrender?
Normal people have dinner, have vacation, have fun, have sex. All that these two will have done, really, for two years come August is "have campaign." That's it. No life. No ability to sit in a chair at home with a novel and a Diet Coke and listen to the radio. They have lived this. Better, the "campaign" lives through their personalities; they are not so much people as human beings in suits through home "the campaign" flows, oozes. It's what they are, until they rediscover normal life.
Having made the personality, lifestyle, attitudinal (including habits), etc., changes to become "candidate" in the generic, each will want to be in a position either to claim the nomination outright OR to force or the other to surrender by "choice." They each will recall the javelins still stuck in their backs, the backs of their families and those of their teams by the other; each will see in the other not a fellow Democrat but a teeming colony or fountain or unworthiness, fakery, lies, bigotry, cheating, dirty pool, pretentiousness and arrogance. Each will want the ability to break the other's jaw without legal or political consequence, Democratic unity speeches notwithstanding.
Yet one will eventually be asked to surrender to the other, not flippantly but with serious intent. So what could either offer to the other?
More likely by the numbers, it will be Obama asking Hillary to lay down her sword, to get it over with. What can Obama offer to Hillary?
Well, he could make her ambassador to Belgium, but I doubt she would bite. She actually has a job in the Senate and probably doesn't want to leave Bill Clinton. Ok, maybe she might but not to be an ambassador, a functionary. It's difficult to envision an office that she would accept from him.
Policy concerns? Well, there's not enough "delta" change between them to make a difference, at least not the biggest difference. I don't see some change to the tax code or even a major change in U.S. health coverage as a motivator to surrender. "You give me a promise to propose single payer and I go back to my townhouse in Georgetown?" I don't see it.
It's conceivable to me that Senator Clinton would surrender if Obama were to promise to something major involving her husband's legacy as President. Obama has expressed some pointed criticisms of Bill Clinton and I think for Senator Clinton to surrender, he would have to repudiate those comments in some meaningful way AND to bolster President Clinton's standing, his legacy in some way.
I just don't see any other way that she surrenders by choice. It would have to be Appomattox, where she would rather die a thousand deaths than surrender, in the famous words of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, facing and ultimately acceding to surrender.
Please share your thoughts below on what sort of carrots, short of utter futility i.e. final defeat, could lead one of these candidates to surrender. Many thanks!