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Hillary isn't going anywhere |
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Monday, 09 June 2008 |
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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron Yes, Saturday had to be a rough day for her. But all in all, this is not a bad time to be Hillary Clinton.
The former first lady still holds a lot of cards — more than 18 million, she would tell you. So her voice will be heard and her political muscle will be felt, all the way to the Democrats’ convention in August, beyond that to the November election, beyond that to the swearing in of the new president on Jan. 21, 2009 and, yes, beyond that, too.
For all of my colleagues in political columny, particularly those at the national level, who are right now busily writing obituaries of The Clinton Era, let me offer this: Hillary isn’t going anywhere. She is going to be around in high-level government circles and she is going to be a force that must be dealt with.
The idea we hear most often these days is that Clinton will get the number-two position (that’s an excellent designation for the vice president) on the Obama for President ticket. That is highly improbable, for a number of reasons:
n She said a lot of unfavorable things about Obama during the primary campaign that have been running on cable news and YouTube ever since and would be exceedingly difficult to explain as the campaign wears on and Tim Russert keeps showing them at debates, asking Barack and Hillary to comment on them.
n She has too much baggage. Her negatives are way too high for a candidate with a tough race ahead of him to want to add to his ticket, and she doesn’t bring anything in the form of being able to win a state Obama couldn’t — Obama is going to win New York anyway, they both can claim Illinois as a home state. Are you going to accept Hillary’s downside in exchange for having a chance to maybe pick up Arkansas’ paltry six electoral votes, votes that you could possibly win on your own?
n She has Bill and Bill has even more baggage than she does. (Did you feel the ground rumbling a little bit in the past weeks since the buzz about that Vanity Fair article about Bill and women on the road started? That was another bimbo eruption preparing to spew over the political landscape. Now that Hillary has dropped out, it will likely go dormant again.)
n She is too dynamic and dominant a personality to be any president’s idea of a good vice president
But perhaps the principal reason that Sen. Hillary Clinton will not be tapped as Obama’s veep or for any other administration is the same reason that, alas, Rhode Island’s Sen. Jack Reed won’t: it is that “Sen.” before their names.
Obama knows that if he is going to do anything meaningful as president, his administration is going to have to be able to get legislation passed. In the U.S. Senate these days, that means having 60 votes. After their much-ballyhooed “take-over” of the Senate in 2006, Democrats have 51 votes — O.K., 50 and a teetering Joe Lieberman — and as a result they have accomplished doodley-squat on the Iraq war and array of other problems they were elected to solve.
Obama therefore can’t go plucking senators for plum positions in his administration (although after only four years in Washington, all of them in the Senate, who else does he know?)
So, with the route of being her party’s vice-presidential nomination seemingly cut off, what are Hillary’s possibilities?
Well, that John McCain has a reputation as a maverick. The presumptive GOP nominee cultivates a reputation for “reaching across the aisle” and working with Democrats. McCain needs the votes of disaffected “Hillary Democrats” if he is going to win this election, especially with the “third-term Bush” albatross the Democrats are going to try to hang around his neck.
So why not? Nothing revs up a moribund presidential contest like big blast of the unexpected and untraditional. McCain could ask Hillary to be HIS running mate.
His Republican base would go ape-bleep, but most of the hard-core Republicans don’t much like McCain anyway and are likely to either stay home or cast a protest vote for Bob Barr on the Libertarian ticket. McCain would pick up a much higher number of independents and Hillary Democrats than the relatively few rock-ribbed Republicans he would lose.
Picking Hillary as veep might just be the one Hail Mary pass that could put McCain in the end zone to avoid an otherwise almost certain defeat.
The press would love him again, if only temporarily, and Hillary has already said that she and McCain are ready to be president and Obama, well, not so much. You have undoubtedly heard this clip of a Hillary speech: “I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.” Ouch! That’s one Tim Russert is sure to ask about.
And McCain can always try to make a last-minute appeal to the Republican base, saying: “Stay home if you want to, but if I don’t win, the next two, perhaps three, maybe even four Justices of the Supreme Court are going to be picked by Barack Obama. Is that what you want? Is it?”
Obama could also use the Supreme Court card.
If he wants to keep all of the Hillary Democrats in the tent and voting for him, and make sure Hillary remains the loyal Obama supporter he said she was on Saturday, he could decide early on whom he would like to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy in his administration and make it known, either privately to his future appointee, or publicly for maximum political advantage, that he thinks Hillary would look better in a black robe than those pantsuits she’s been wearing.
That would still lose President Obama a Senator, but having one of nine votes on the Supreme Court is even better than one of a hundred in the Senate.
So don’t worry about Hillary Clinton. She’s not gone, and she’s not going to let herself be forgotten.
There are many possibilities out there for Hillary Clinton. Let’s see which ones come her way, and which ones she reaches for.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 21 June 2008 )
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