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Thursday, May 8, 2008
Vice President Clinton? [Politics]
Vice President Clinton?
Vice President Clinton?
Vice President Clinton?posted by Nicholas von Hoffman on 05/08/2008 @ 11:49am
May 8, 2008
Why would a smart woman like Hillary Clinton continue her campaign when the odds are against her? In her public appearances as a newly cast woman of the people she says she is doing it for us. If so, thanks but no thanks.
Speculation assigns her pertinacity to other motives. Some are guessing that she is continuing to campaign as a means of crowbarring herself into being chosen as the vice-presidential candidate. According to this line of thought, the longer she campaigns the more she binds white women of a certain age to her and can argue that unless she is on the ballot they will be so disaffected that they will stay home on election day.
Others whisper that she hopes by soldiering on to make a deal with the Obama campaign that, in return for a.) her withdrawal and b.) her promise to stump for him against McCain, her campaign debts will be taken care of and she will be repaid the money she loaned herself. She does have a reputation for grasping for a buck.
If the tens of thousands of Obama contributors were to learn that their money has been given to Hillary Clinton, there might be something of a backlash. Such a deal would have to be done secretly, a mode of doing business which Ms. Clinton has some familiarity with. In fact the Washington Times reports that her penchant for keeping things in the dark brought her to the edge of being indicted by a federal grand jury for lying during the first Clinton presidency. The paper says that she escaped because the prosecutors had doubts that a jury would convict a first lady.
Barack Obama will have to ponder whether he will lose more votes by keeping Clinton off the ticket than putting her on it. She does bring her legion of devoted women as well as an unspecified number of Caucasian males to the voting booth. But will her presence as running mate discourage Obama's most enthusiastic and idealistic supporters? For weeks now he has been saying that Clinton is the essence of the old politics, whose page he promises to turn.
If she does force her way onto the ticket it will not be the first time. In 1932 the price Franklin D. Roosevelt had to pay for the nomination was accepting as his running mate John Nance Garner, a Texas reactionary of the whiskey-drinking, tobacco-chewing variety. The two men despised each other and spent the next eight years staying out of each other's sight.
The modern vice presidency is a much bigger deal than it was in Garner's day. Then the VP supplied his own housing and did nothing but preside over the Senate. Roosevelt neither worked with nor confided in his vice presidents. When he died and Harry Truman assumed office, he had not even been told of the existence of the Manhattan Project.
Nowadays the vice president has a mansion and a retinue. Although a modern president could exclude his veep from the White House, the present-day custom is to give the vice president and staff a White House office.
If Obama has a sense of self preservation he should place one proviso on choosing Clinton as his running mate: extract a promise that Chelsea Clinton be installed in the White House as his official taster. You can imagine the intrigues for power and the placement of her liegemen in top jobs coming out Ms. Clinton's office. And where would Bill fit in? What happens when it is revealed that he made a deal with a Central Asian despot for an oil concession for one of his billionaire buds?
For some people Obama-Clinton is dream ticket. For others it's a dream swarming with poisonous spiders, snakes and elephant-sized rats. Instead, for the new politics of national unity of which Obama speaks he might think about putting a Republican on the ticket.
The Republican Abraham Lincoln put a Democrat on the ticket in 1864. In 2008 Democrat Obama could choose Republican Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel or independent Mike Bloomberg. Such a ticket might not be dreamy but it would be a turn of the page.
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