There are a lot of things to admire about Hillary Clinton: her tenacity, her killer debate prep, her advocacy for children's healthcare, and many of her pantsuits. But Hillary Clinton is not going to be Barack Obama's vice presidential choice, no matter how badly her supporters may want her to be. Why? Let me count the ways...
1. The primary
Hillary Clinton made such a vehement case against Barack Obama's qualifications to be president, she essentially exempted herself from qualification from the prime directive of the vice presidential candidate: believing that the person you're running with is capable of running the country. The ads featuring the newly minted v.p. attacking her would-be boss would be too juicy to resist for the GOP. Yes, we all know that GHWB called Ronald Reagan's economic policies "voodoo economics" and still wound up on the ticket, but the truth is, Reagan was headed to a landslide, and nobody cared what George Bush Sr. had to say. Barack has a potentially much tighter race on his hands.
2. The oxygen
The Clintons have a way of sucking it up, big time, and as a very senior Republican operative here in South Florida told me today, the best chance John McCain has to win the White House is for Barack Obama to choose Hillary as his running mate. With Hillary on the ticket (and her husband in the proverbial background,) the fall campaign would be A-B-C: all about the Clintons -- Bill's finances, Bill's possible dalliances, Bill lurking around the West Wing, Hillary's 2016 ambitions, and the Clintons' possible machinations behind the president's back. We'd be arguing about them all general election season, and Barack would be left scratching his head, wondering where his narrative went.
3. The weakness
If Barack Obama chooses Hillary, he would have a hell of a time convincing most people, including the press sharks, that he didn't do it under duress, or because he had to, or because he was otherwise certain to lose the "hard working white Pennsylvania vote." By picking her, he looks weak, and she looks like Dirty Harry. Not a good look for a would-be commander in chief.
4. The theme-breaker
In sharp contrast to Barack Obama's theme of breaking with the politics of the past, and forging a new, youthful, energetic American narrative, Hillary Clinton and her husband are a two-person 1990s time capsule. Their entire purpose is to bring back the good old days between 1992 and 1999. By attaching their narrative to his, Barack Obama would forfeit his future-focused campaign for one that inevitably looks backward -- a restoration rather than a refutation of the past. John McCain's people would love that, because then, both campaigns would be fought on a backward-looking narrative, and McCain's meme of choice is the Reagan era. In a battle of the 1980s versus the 1990s, which do you think would win? Maybe we should ask Al Gore.
5. The bottom line
Even if you believe that Hillary could deliver Arkansas, which I doubt, the other states she supposedly locks down for Barack are ones that he damned well better be able to lock down on his own: Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio... and I see no evidence that she hand-delivers states like West Virginia and Indiana, where recalcitrant white voters recoil from anything but a Republican who promises to further impoverish them. With or without Hillary, Obama probably can't win those states. Florida is the only state where Hillary makes a strong case that she helps make him more competitive against John McCain, and the costs of doing business with her out-weigh the potential benefit of having her deliver the sunshine state. At the end of the day, if Hillary is a team player, she will help deliver Florida anyway, without being on the ticket. Besides, the key to winning Florida will be maximizing the black vote in the two most populous counties in the state: Miami-Dade and Broward. That's how Bill Clinton pulled it off (along with attracting a larger than normal share of Cuban-Americans, which Barack is doing on his own with his policy of allowing more family visitation to Cuba.) Clearly, after the kind of primary the Clintons ran, they can't do a damned thing to help Barack with black turnout, in or out of Florida.
With apologies to Hillary fans, what Barack Obama needs is a white guy with a drawl of some kind, preferably with military or executive governing experience, or extreme popularity in a key swing state. He can't pick Jim Webb because of his past, harsh words for women, but someone Webb-like would work for him. I still like Chuck Hagel the best, because he reinforces Barack's message about reaching across the aisle. But there's also Wes Clark (even though he's much, much shorter than Barack), or Montana's Schweitzer, or Ohio's Strickland or even Joe Biden. If he goes the woman route, he could roll with Kansas' Kathleen Sebelius, or skip the woman as ticket-mate and choose someone with a really popular wife (John Edwards comes to mind, though he has apparently taken himself out of the running...)
But Hillary Clinton it will not, and should not, be.
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%>
Tell a friend
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%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
