If Clinton joins the Obama campaign, will she bring the baggage that defeated her?

Despite all the gooey media coverage about how Hillary Clinton threw her support so completely to Barack Obama in her sayonara speech on Saturday, I don't buy that take. The Sunday New York Times story, already on the paper's website -- "The Long Road to a Clinton Exit" -- confirms for me that there's such a long trail of blunders, feuding and regrets in the Clinton campaign that Hillary might well prove to be counter-productive in winning votes for Obama. The co-author of this devastating story is Peter Baker, making his first appearance in the Times since he recently left the Washington Post as its White House correspondent in protest against the Post removing his wife, Susan Glasser, as assistant managing editor for national news because of her sharp elbows in managing her staff.

If Clinton is going to lug the bad-karma baggage of her own campaign into the Obama effort, how would that help the Democratic nominee in what the polls are showing is a dead-heat race against Republican John McCain? Obama has enough problems of his own -- the Rev. Wright history, his fumbling over the status of Jerusalem in Israeli-Palestinan negotiations, his inexperience in foreign affairs even compared to Bill Clinton in 1992. Would Clinton -- never mind her hair-trigger husband -- end up being one more addition to Obama's gallery of "bitter" people?