Chuck Todd made a startling claim yesterday on Meet the Press: that the Hillary Clinton camp was behind the leaks about the Biden family urging the vice president to enter the race for the Democrats’ nomination, challenging Hillary Clinton.  Implicitly, he was addressing the maudlin Maureen Dowd column that recounted Beau Biden’s deathbed wish that his father run – a scene that could only have come from family members.

Watch as Todd says with certainty that the Hillary camp was behind the leaks (hat tip: The Right Scoop):

The only logical source for Todd’s contention has to be the Hillary camp itself.  I may disagree with Todd’s political orientation, but I do not think that he would make up something like this and speak with such certainty.  So why would the Hillary camp whisper to a friendly reporter that they were behind the deathbed story?

The theory being advocated is that Hillary wants to “smoke out” Biden – that she is tired of having him waffle.  But why?  One possibility is that she would see Biden as dividing the anti-Hillary vote, which is now flocking to Bernie Sanders.  However, this makes little sense.  Sanders simply cannot win because the Democrats’ moneybags puppetmasters will not stand for him.  And when the time comes for get-out-the-vote efforts in the black community (which accounts for a quarter of the Democrat vote), the anti-Semitism that exists among blacks to a far higher degree than among any other major demographic group would threaten turnout to the degree that down-ticket Democrats would face peril.

On the other hand, if Biden were to openly declare, he would implicitly have the backing of the Obama administration, which could easily lean on him to prevent his entry.  Although nobody in the mainstream media is interested in reporting it, there is little doubt of serious tension between the Obama and Clinton wings of the Democratic Party, despite all the public professions of mutual admiration between the president and his first secretary of state.

As Gerald Seib points out in the video above, the party apparatus and major donors are already committed to Hillary.  But that was largely true in 2008, when Obama toppled the empress with no clothes.  A Biden candidacy would signal that it’s OK with the sitting Democratic president to defect and put your money elsewhere.

I think the Hillary camp told Todd that they were behind the leaks out of an effort to control the damage, to metaphorically jump in front of the parade and pretend to be leading it.  The biggest fear among Hillary supporters is that momentum will continue to build and that somebody more realistic as a popular standard-bearer (specifically, Elizabeth Warren, or potentially Cory Booker) would see Biden jump in and think that now that the door is open, why not me?

Sometimes I have to pinch myself when I remember analyzing the media in the old USSR, where the story itself never told you the truth, but by careful weighing of why a particular line was being put forth, you could figure out what was going on beneath the surface.  Which faction was trying to enhance itself at the expense of another?  Why would one particular lie be featured more than other possible lies?

We’re getting closer and closer to that state of affairs here in the United States.  I guess that’s the way of all socialist oligarchies.