Earlier this week, ABC News senior correspondent Jake Tapper interviewed a Democratic Party official who predicted that Sen. Hillary Clinton could still win the party’s presidential nomination –- but she would have to exercise what he called the “Tonya Harding option” to do it.

In other words, she would have to destroy her rival. She would have to make Sen. Obama totally unacceptable as a candidate for the nation’s highest office.

The DNC official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, asked, plaintively, “Is that really what we Democrats want?”

It remains to be seen whether Sen. Clinton will exercise the “Tonya Harding option” –- but there are plenty of people in both political parties who wouldn’t put it past her.

Some time back, I offered my readers a selection of political quotes from H.L. Mencken as an antidote to the hothouse rhetoric of a presidential campaign season. Today, I’m going to offer a quote from one of my favorite political novels, Democracy by Henry Adams. Although it was published in 1880, it contains many passages that still ring true, even today.

In particular, the novel contains a devastating portrait of an unscrupulous and ruthlessly ambitious senator named Silas Ratcliffe, who intends to be president –- whatever the cost. At one point, Ratcliffe frankly avows to the heroine of the novel that the pleasure of politics lies in the possession of power: “He agreed that the country would do very well without him. ‘But here I am,’ said he, ‘and here I mean to stay.’ He had very little sympathy for thin moralizing, and a statesmanlike contempt for philosophical politics. He loved power, and he meant to be president. That was enough.”

Sound like anyone we know?