Will Hillary Clinton run in 2012 while being Secretary of State?

[Mr. Morden]

Politics is crazy. In 1991, if you have said that the next three Presidents would be an unknown Governor from the South who would defeat the massively popular Bush/Quayle administration....

Depends on what you mean by "unknown".  Clinton didn't declare his candidacy until late 1991, but even by early 1991, he was considered a likely presidential candidate (heck, even as far back as 1989, he was considered a likely presidential candidate).  He was unknown to the general public, but he certainly would have been known to the politically informed by early 1991.....at *least* as much as Mike Huckabee was known in early 2007.

If, back in 1991, you were to guess the next Democratic president, you might have been most likely to say Bill Bradley or Dick Gephardt, but Clinton certainly would have been a reasonable darkhorse guess.

[Mr. Morden]

Nowadays, there seems to be less tolerance within each of the two parties for challenges to an incumbent president in the primaries, even if the incumbent president is rather unpopular.  It's hard for me to imagine something like Ted Kennedy's challenge of Jimmy Carter in 1980 happening today, at least in a scenario where Kennedy remains in good standing within the party after the fact.  And of course, the only challenger within the party to an incumbent president we've had since then was Buchanan running against Bush in 1992, and Buchanan was hardly a figure in good standing with the GOP establishment in the same way that Hillary Clinton is with the Democratic Party.

Heck, even challenges against incumbent *vice* presidents running for president seem to be less accepted than they used to be, at least as given by the example of Gore in 2000 only attracting a single primary opponent.