The Case For Hillary as Veep

Let me be clear: I despise the Clintons. I can excuse the race-baiting strategy of Hillary's '08 campaign as part of a legitimate effort to win at all costs, and while I find her incompetent - from the health-care and fundraising debacles during Bill's administration to the blindly overconfident manner in which ran her campaign (whose pig-headed "stay-the-course" strategy brings uncomfortable comparisons with our current President's leadership style) - my distaste for the Clintons focuses almost entirely on Bill. I don't hate Bill Clinton because of the right-wing mudslinging on his sexual mores or his own sleazy relationship with the truth, but because of what he failed to do while in office: this was a President with the cowardice to ignore genocide in Bosnia, to actively attempt to hide even worse genocide in Rwanda, who forced our military to engage in lies with "don't ask-don't tell" rather than have the bravery to end that bigotry outright, and then institutionalized that bigotry with the Defense of Marriage Act, who back-stabbed the industrial middle class with NAFTA, and worst of all, became the leading example of the DLC philosophy (pro-corporate, anti-progressive) that betrayed everything the Democratic Party has stood for since FDR brought us a New Deal. While Clinton-lovers deify him for leading the party out of the wilderness of losers like Dukakis, Mondale, and Carter, Clinton the DINO did much more to harm the party in the past few decades than anything else, damage that can only now be healed by the truly progressive values and populist strategy of Barack Obama.

That said, I think there is a very strong case for Obama to take Hillary as his running mate. It has nothing to do with what I think Hillary adds to an Obama Administration, nor what she could do to bring her supporters in-line with Obama's presidential bid. The current polls as they stand show that Obama can beat McCain, narrowly but at a time when the Clinton backlash is at its strongest. Those numbers can only get better for Obama as he nears the convention, so I don't find a lot of legitimacy in the idea that Obama somehow needs Hillary to win this. However, Hillary can do a great deal of damage to torpedo Obama's chances in November, and indeed, considering her age and better chance to win in 2012 than in 2016, it may be in her interests to see Obama lose. That is the most compelling reason for Obama to make her his nominee: Hillary as Veep would mean that if Obama loses so does Hillary, in such an open and irrevocable manner that even Hillary (and Bill) would understand that she can't safely torpedo Obama without sinking her own chances to win at a later date. Keeping her within the campaign would also mean keeping an eye on her and Bill, so that they can be kept on message. It follows the basic philosophy of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.

My only concern is how much this might alienate some Obama supporters, particularly among Independents and Republicans. The charge that Hillary will dilute Obama's "change" message by allying him with such Washington old guard as the Clintons has little weight when we look at the alternatives: with the exceptions of Kathleen Sebelius, Janet Napolitano, and Claire McCaskill, every other potential Obama Veep is an old white male whose going to dilute the "change" image just as much (if not more) than Hillary. As for those three, Napolitano is probably a lesbian (I dearly wish my bigoted country were ready for that, but I'm afraid they aren't... yet), McCaskill would be fantastic but she's a serving Senator in a seat the Democrats can't yet afford to lose, and Sebelius would be nearly 68 when she runs for her own presidential seat in 2016 following a successful two-term Obama administration. Honestly, I would still be very happy with Sebelius, but I don't think her advantages outweigh the opportunity to keep the Clintons in the fold and unable to make as much mischief.

And there is still this: if Obama takes Hillary as his veep and wins the Presidency, she is most likely to want to spearhead the administration's universal health care proposal. Hillary's current plan has zero chance of getting through even a Democratic-controlled Congress, and all evidence points to her inability to create bipartisan compromise. So I believe that if Obama gave her enough rope to hang herself with this, she'd do so, her health-care proposal would go up in flames, laying the groundwork for Obama to step in and get his more reasonable plan passed. This would also give Obama the excuse to ask her to step aside in 2012, allowing him to almost bloodlessly replace Clinton with a second Veep during his second term, perhaps Sebelius or (my hope) someone from his same generation that could maintain the youthful vigor and progressive values he is bringing back into the party.

For Want of a Nail... and a Brain Cell

So Ed "We don't vote for blacks here" Rendell decides to play Utau (if the Watcher was a whiny white male) and gives us an issue of What-If... Obama Was the Poor Loser:

"Just flip it for a second," Mr. Rendell said. "Let’s say Senator Clinton was ahead by about 110 delegates and ahead by less than 1 percent of the vote cast, and she and her supporters started to call on Senator Obama to get out. Just picture what the media would be saying. They’d be saying you’re being racist, you’re being everything in the world. It’s nuts! It’s nuts!"

Forget the fact that the mainstream media, in all their racial sensitivity, has been using the Wright controversy to hammer Obama as a dangerous black man come to roost his chickens because whitey gave us all the AIDs. That alone makes me suspect they'd be less likely to call an Obama a consumate survivor and scared to declare his chances over, even if the math makes it so - which has been the MSM line on Clinton even in this late hour.

No, the most salient point here is that the right course for alt-Obama is the same one for the Clinton in our timeline: quit. Alt-Obama would be in the same position, whose only hope is that alt-Clinton stumbles into a scandal big enough to wreck their inevitable victory. And, presuming that alt-Michelle Obama doesn't engage in gender-baiting after their upset loss in South Carolina and alt-Samantha Power doesn't spew bigotry about how the only way alt-Clinton got her position was because she was a woman, alt-Obama would actually be in an even better position than actual-Clinton, because he'd still have enough goodwill to negotiate a vice-presidency.

Clinton is quickly waning as a threat to Obama, so whether she stays in or quits really only hurts her at this point. And it is hurting her - dirty politics has manuevered her out of the vice-president position on Obama's ticket (unless he seriously swallows his pride and offers it to shore up the base); she is quickly destroying her goodwill in Congress through hard-selling the superdelegates, which creates enemies that block her chances of eventually becoming Senate Majority Leader; and if Obama does go on to lose in November, she will be painted as the Democratic Nader, whose political ambition caused her to tear the party apart, so that she has no chance of coming back to win it in 2012. She might still salvage her career by going after the governorship in New York, but does a state that has now had one governor fall and another one tarnished by sex scandals really want to invite Slick Willie to Albany?

Mythbusting Clinton

So Politico, and at least one Clinton staffer, is admitting what anyone not sticking their head in the sand has realized since the Potomac primaries: "Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning." It has long been improbable that Clinton could make up her deficit in the popular vote with Obama (which would have illegitimate even if she had, considering that the caucuses, mostly won by Obama, don't calculate well for an honest popular tally), but with the failure of Michigan and Florida to create a re-vote those odds go from improbable to impossible. Barring video footage of Obama cooking a baby while fellating Osama bin Laden, he's going to win the popular vote, the delegates, and maybe, with his own set of political miracles, reach the magic number of 2025 before the August convention.

The only narrative for victory left for Clinton is that she will have momentum in the last rounds of this fight, that Obama is too flawed to win November and that the people who would have supported him now have buyers' remorse. The problem with this fantasy is, firstly, that the national polls show recent decline for Obama but nothing apocalyptic; so, barring another Wright-style scandal, Obama is still in control and his momentum will continue. Secondly, and more importantly, Pennsylvannia is going to be followed directly by Indiana and North Carolina on May 6th, states that Obama is still likely to carry. And if Obama does carry those major states in the same overwhelming manner he did before the Texas and Ohio votes, Clinton will not simply be done but will be crushed in a humiliating manner. West Virginia on May 13 will probably be a repeat of Pennsylvannia, but the real contests will be in Kentucky and Oregon on the 20th, a match-up that will, at worst, be a tie between them. Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota end the primary season, and while Clinton can pick up a lot of delegates in Puerto Rico, it won't be enough to give her the lead (or probably even narrow the margins). Looking at these contests, even the most optimistic Clintonite has to admit that April and May will be, at best, see-saw battles, and certainly not the landscape by which Clinton will be able to claim signs of momentum in her favor.

All that she can hope for is that Obama will implode through some monkey business, but even there she is setting herself up for failure. The kitchen-sink attacks and negative campaigning by the Clintons, continued today by Bill's not-so-sly disparagement of Obama's patriotism, is putting HRC in the position, not of saviour of the Democratic Party, but as the lesser of two evils, unlikely to mobilize the base and quite possibly setting November as a massive failure when the African-American and youth vote simply stay home on Election Day. While I agree with Politico that Clinton has no chance to win this thing, rather than wanting to see her drop out of the race, I'd rather see her run a clean campaign that focuses on the issues, respects her Democratic opponents, and builds momentum by taking McCain, not Obama, to the woodshed. If she did that, then if the heavens part and her chances are saved by an Obamaplosion, she will be in the proper position to take advantage of it.

On a seperate matter, Richardson's endorsement of Obama has lead into some discussion on the blogosphere as to when John Edwards will finally endorse, one way or the other. Looking at the primary schedule, my gut is telling me that Edwards will endorse Obama after Pennsylvannia but before North Carolina. That's his home state, where he can have the most effect. And perhaps more importantly, I think both he and Obama realize that his endorsement is unlikely to change the outcome in Pennsylvannia, and don't want to repeat the media chattering that the Kennedy and Kerry endorsement failed because Clinton won in Massachusetts, ignoring the enormous deficit that Obama shrank, giving him significant delegates even when he didn't win - which was the real story of the Super Tuesday primaries.