8 Reasons Why Obama Should Not Pick Clinton as VP

[Herb Schaffler]

8 reasons why Obama should not pick Clinton as VP

By [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. | The Hillary Project



By: Eric Zorn
I know, I know. More than 15 million Democrats have voted for Hillary Clinton in the primaries and many of them are so invested in her candidacy that they're threatening to stay home in November or vote for Republican in waiting John McCain in the very likely event that the Democrats nominate Barack Obama for president.
Obama should choose her as his running mate to honor and woo those Clinton supporters. He should choose her as his running mate to help soothe the still escalating intra-party hostilities. He should choose her as his running mate because she runs far stronger than he does among certain core Democratic constituencies.
And for those reasons he probably will offer her the No. 2 spot on the ticket.
Yet here are eight reasons it's a bad idea:
1. Choosing Clinton would belie Obama's message of change. Whether you admire her or not, you have to acknowledge that Clinton's an old-style, legacy Democrat. Obama's candidacy is premised on a break with the past.
2. Choosing Clinton would belie Obama's repudiation of the old way of doing politics. Clinton and her surrogates are tough campaigners who have gone hard after Obama (see below) trying to draw him into the fight. And on those occasions where he and his team have responded in kind, Team Clinton has smirkingly asked whatever happened to the politics of hope?

3. Bill Clinton. He's a brilliant man and an amazing politician, but he's shown an inability to stay on message and keep his foot out of his mouth as he campaigns for his wife. Obama already has Rev. Jeremiah Wright to worry about -- he doesn't need another loose cannon out there ready to fire.
4. She's polarizing. For all that she's shown how popular she can be with certain groups of primary voters, Hillary Clinton also remains a controversial and unpopular figure. Here are [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. among all voters in a set of recent national polls, with [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. in parenthesis: 37 (30) ; 45 (37) 46 (38) 49 (40) 54 (39) 53 (37).
5. She'll be the star of anti-Obama commercials: "It’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold," she said on [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. . "I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy.”
6. She's gone beyond the pale in attacking Obama: "I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. Sen. John McCain has a lifetime of experience that he'd bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002," she said on March 4. Clinton delivered this insulting, dismissive, destructive critique several times, and it's a bell she can't unring.
7. She's toting unpacked baggage. Clinton likes to claim that she's been thoroughly vetted and withstood all the Republican attacks of the 1990s and now any bad news about her is simply old news. It's not so. Obama hasn't called her on this claim because he's trying to preserve the image that he's above the politics of scandal. And the Republican operatives are lying in the weeds, boosting Clinton's candidacy and licking their chops, waiting to pounce.
Not only are there all the "--gate" scandals from her husband's administration that were set aside rather than fully resolved in the public's mind (travel, file, cattle and so on), but the issue of the pardons Bill Clinton granted on his way out of the door and the mysterious funding sources from the Clinton Presidential Library are still out there.
8. Picking a real teammate is better than picking a political counterweight. Bill Clinton of Arkansas himself surprised the pundits in 1992 when he chose as his No. 2 another young moderate Democrat from from the mid-South -- Al Gore of Tennessee -- and the two ran a vigorous, consistent campaign. Obama would do better to pick someone of his generation who shares his general outlook and who can speak passionately and convincingly to voters about why they should support Obama.
Source: [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link.

[Herb Schaffler]

Could the following that I have copied from the Obama blog be an indication that Hillary is going to take down her tent on Tuesday?

By [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. 14 minutes ago
Saw this over at DK:

"An acquaintance of mine and fellow Democratic Committee member has been working as a paid campaign organizer for Clinton. He was brought on six months before Iowa and he had told me that he would work right on through the general election. He was told yesterday, along with several other campaign staffers, that his last day will be Tuesday.

This says to me that team Clinton will take their loss in Oregon and their win in Kentucky and concede."

Tantalizing to say the least.

[nohil-billy]

She may as well fold it up as even the MSM is now shilling exclusively for Barack Obama. I think she proved her point though, that Obama can not win the white working class vote, with her trouncing of him in West Virginia. Howard Dean and the DNC moved quickly after the WV primary to avert peoples attention away from this fact.

I think she'll still take her case to the convention and who knows what could come out between now and then???

[Herb Schaffler]

The white working class demographic isn't the only demographic in the US. As far as that goes, labor unions have come out for Obama and he has carried a lot of states with a large white working class demographic. I don't think too many white working class people will be willing to vote for McCain once they find out that he supports NAFTA. That's why Hillary ran away from her former support of it.

Maybe Hillary has a lot of appeal with hillbillies. The only two states she carried with over 60% of the vote were Arkansas and West Virginia. She also carried Tennesee and is expected to do well in Kentucky. Maybe, they like her and Bill's collective name, "Hillbilly". LOL

[nohil-billy]

He has carried a lot of states with a white working class demographic, but that was before the revelations about his church and his remarks about bitter small town folk. Since then, I believe he's won only one primary and that state, North Carolina, had a demographic much more favorable to him.

You keep wanting to tell only half the story Herb. you're beginning to sound like the MSM. She racked up wins in major states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, but she was toast as soon as she lost North Carolina, even though she won Indiana the same evening. She said he couldn't win the white working class vote and proved it by trouncing him in West Virginia. This resulted in the MSM and DNC cranking up the propaganda machines to trivialize her chances. If she spanks him again in Kentucky, she will further prove her point.

Yeah Herb, he won some primaries and caucuses with major white working class demographics, but can he do it again?

[Herb Schaffler]

Hillary barely won Indiana and without the dittoheads voting for her, she would have lost. Granted, the guilt by association Wright phenomenon has hurt him a lot, but polls still show he's ahead of McCain by 7 points which is much more than Hillary is. Obama will win the general election, maybe just not as much as he would have. The white working class demographic isn't the only demographic in the country and he will carry some of that demographic anyway.