Hillary Clinton wasn't the only one with a lot riding on the vicious contest for the Democratic nomination. Had things turned out differently earlier this year, Inder Dan Ratnu could legitimately call himself a psychic. But history hasn't been so kind to the self-made Indian scholar of western politics (he's an expert on Winston Churchill, having written three books on the former British Prime Minister).

In First Lady President, Ratnu's latest novel, a fictionalized Clinton successfully runs for president, besting her rival, an African-American senator from Chicago, whom she names her VP.

The names are tweaked slightly, but it's obvious who they represent. That it was written back in 2003 suggests that Ratnu has been following US politics pretty darn closely, but isn't the clairvoyant he hoped the book would prove.

Ratnu self-published the book, and sadly, it shows. I met the author in St. Paul last week and had a pleasant chat with him at a Starbucks. He was more than eager to discuss his work and show me passages in his novel that predict now-famous aspects of Obama's campaign -- namely the repeated use of the word "change."

Yet the book is rife with typos that undermine the passion of Ratnu's effort. Semi-colons appear mid-sentence with no purpose, spaces between words and punctuation marks permeate the text, and the writing isn't great. But Ratnu claims that he sent his novel to both Clinton and Obama in 2004, and that huge parts of Obama's campaign -- his rhetoric, his platforms, his methods -- were taken right from its pages. Had Clinton read the book, he says, we'd have a different Democratic nominee.

Who knows...