Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

8 Reasons Why Hillary Should Not Be VP

[digg-reddit-me] [The bulk of this is a re-post, because it seems that the issue is newly and especially relevant.

After last night’s non-concession – in which Clinton revved up her crowd of supporters as they began to chant, “Denver! Denver! Denver!” – and in which she conceded nothing to reality, it seems clear that Clinton wants something. That something – according to reports from various news sources – is the vice presidency. Others indicate that she just wants to be offered the vice presidency. Either way, rather than graciously bowing out (as I rather prematurely asked her to do in January when she had won two of the four contests), she is bitterly clinging to her candidacy: pretending to win in her defeat, avoiding Barack Obama’s phone calls, and putting off the meeting that it is reported he requested.

There are better candidates out there for Obama to pick. Hillary Clinton has undoubtedly run an historic and groundbreaking campaign – and has come into her own as a political figure in her own right. She is a force to contend with. But it is time for her to withdraw unconditionally and endorse Obama. And she must let him choose his own Vice President – based on who would make the best ticket. Clinton is not it.

So here, modified and expanded, are eight reasons why Hillary Clinton should not be chosen as Obama’s vice presidential running mate:

  1. Her eerily familiar refusal to concede to reality.
    She still refuses to admit that she has lost after Obama has mathematically achieved the required number of delegates.
  2. From Rachel Maddow on MSNBC’s Inside the War Room two weeks ago:
  3. [It would be] very awkward for a vice presidential candidate to be on a presidential candidate’s ticket after she has made repeated references to his potential death. Yes, that would be weird.

  4. It will undermine the rationale behind Obama’s candidacy and make Obama look weak. As Reihan Salam of The Atlantic wrote:

    A backroom deal with Clinton would make a mockery of Obama’s language of hope and change. It would make Obama appear weak, and it would reward Clinton for running a campaign more vicious than anything Lee Atwater could have cooked up. More importantly, Obama would be choosing a fundamentally weak and unpopular running mate who has masked her marked executive inexperience through endless misrepresentation of her role in the Clinton White House – a role that begins and ends with a healthcare debacle that would have gotten anyone other than a First Lady fired.

    Or, to put it as John Edwards did:

  5. She doesn’t put a single state or demographic group on the board for Obama.
    She is a highly polarizing figure. The demographic splits in the primaries so far have been best explained by the Peabody award-winning Josh Marshall over at the Talking Points Memo: The only areas where Hillary has decisively beaten Obama are in the Appalachian region of the country. But Hillary is far from the best candidate to appeal to this group. Former Senator John Edwards, Governor Ed Rendell, Governor Ted Strickland, and especially Senator Jim Webb all would seem to have greater appeal to the Scotch-Irish Reagan Democrats of the Appalachia. Clinton’s base is entirely in the Democratic party where she is relatively popular, while Obama has substantial support among independents and even some Republicans. That is why Clinton has done better in closed primaries than ones open to independents or all parties (at least until Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos gained traction).
  6. Bill.
  7. She’s run a terrible campaign so far. Would she run a better campaign if she trying to win for Obama?
    Her campaign is already $21,000,000.00 in debt. She squandered enormous institutional and name recognition advantages. Does anyone still remember that she was the prohibitive favorite before “a skinny kid with a funny name” expertly managed one of the hardest fought campaigns in history?
  8. She shouldn’t be rewarded for trying to bully her way onto the ticket (after being told no “politely but straightforwardly and irrevocably“, threatening an “open civil war“) and for her bullying tactics during the rest of the campaign (threatening to withhold funds from the DNC; attacking Nancy Pelosi; lying about Obama’s record on abortion, NAFTA, and other issues; using voter suppression tactics in Nevada and Iowa; and undermining the legitimacy of the delegate selection process she agreed to when she thought it was to her benefit.) And all this was before she lost the race and still refused to concede, suspend her campaign, or endorse Obama.
  9. Her sense of entitlement.

As a bonus:

Let’s get on to the main event already.

Drop out, Senator, and settle for becoming the next Secretary of Defense or a Supreme Court Justice.

The zeitgeist, the Force even, is with Obama in this American moment.

So, let’s get on to November before Obama loses his opportunity to get in the requisite attacks on McCain and his dangerously misguided policies before the entire country goes on vacation for the summer.

This is a fight we can win, and one we must win:

America, this is our moment. This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

Shameless

Watching Hillary’s performance tonight, I think the best response is to let her stand alone.

She just asked everyone to share their opinions with her about what she should do next on her website, HillaryClinton.com. I for one will be sharing my opinion in a respectful tone.

Edit: Andrew Sullivan summarizes the difference between Clinton’s speech and Obama’s speech very well:

As classy as she was classless; as graceful as she was rigid; as generous as she was stingy.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

The Last Plausible Woman Candidate

With the primary winding down and many top Hillary Clinton supporters blaming her loss on sexism, the press has turned its collective attention to what Clinton’s campaign will mean for future female candidates. A number of editorial writers – sympathetic to Clinton – have posited that Clinton’s loss has shown that a woman candidate cannot succeed given our media environment. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate uses her usual incisive analysis to shred this line of argument:

They argue that Clinton had a legitimate shot at the presidency only because she represented a once-in-a-lifetime lightening strike of marriage, fame, and experience that is not only unique to her but that will die with her failed nomination. Silva quotes commentators who have argued that “only Clinton, a former first lady in an administration that presided over eight prosperous years and a second-term senator who has established her own credentials, could have achieved the successes she has this year.” Zernike’s experts echo this: “Mrs. Clinton had such an unusual combination of experience and name recognition that she might actually raise the bar for women.” Under this theory, Clinton was never really a strong woman candidate; she was just the lucky one who’d married a future president.

By advancing the argument that no woman will ever win the presidency without the advantages of a Hillary Clinton because only those advantages account for her success, we do more to disrespect her enormous talents than all of the oily misogynists on Fox News. All across the country, in the most unlikely ways and places, Hillary Clinton kicked ass as a woman. Why take that away from her now?

In an amusing coincidence the argument being put forward by Clinton supporters now is based on the same premise that I used as my number four point in my call on Hillary Clinton to withdraw from the race back in January. Kate Stone, among others, called this point “classically sexist“:

According to the writer her success would be based on who she married and what she put up with and how conniving she is. In other words, she is a viper. And it has everything to do with her gender when the writer flatly states that if she wins IT IS A LESSON IN HOW WOMEN GAIN POWER. ((I don’t think Clinton is a viper; and I have never called her conniving, so Kate’s summary of my position is a bit off.))

Now, Clinton’s supporters are saying that her loss proves that our country is too sexist to elect a woman president – and basing this view on how exceptionally positioned Clinton was due to who she married, what she put up with, etcetera.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

The Kitchen Sink

Clinton partisans have said that Obama has run a vicious campaign and attacked her unfairly.  Obama partisans have said the same about Clinton’s campaign.  In the scheme of things, each candidate benefited from some of the less savory aspects of America.  And the candidates themselves have stayed mainly within typical intra-party bounds in their criticisms.

But I think the best illustration of the difference between the two campaigns is this list written by davefromqueens over at the Daily Kos of “35 Things the Obama Campaign Never Did.”  Obama has run a hard-nosed campaign but he showed a very classy and winning restraint as well.  I don’t think anyone can come up with a similar list of attacks the Clinton campaign didn’t launch.

Categories
Election 2008 Politics The Clintons

Noonan on sexism

Peggy Noonan isn’t known for her enlightened thinking, but on occasion her riffs are truly enlightening:

So, to address the charge that sexism did [Hillary] in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they’d give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they’d call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they’d realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say “Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other’s bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it’s like that for the boys and for the girls.”

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

7 Reasons Why Hillary Should Not Be the VP

[digg-reddit-me]Although I was never crazy about the idea, there was a time – several weeks ago now – when I considered the idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket to be a potentially good idea. Andrew Sullivan’s excellent column floating the idea moved me somewhat – even as I tended to think that Senator Jim Webb would be a better choice. I had thought of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s description of Lincoln’s genius in organizing his “team of rivals” even before Sullivan mentioned it. And I thought that Obama could pull it off if any politician today could. But Maureen Dowd’s description of Obama’s and Clinton’s interpersonal dynamic struck me as accurate enough, and Clinton continued to campaign – standing up for her supporters – “hard-working white people”; comparing her efforts to de-legitimatize the process of delegate selection she at first endorsed to abolition; and in general acting as if Obama’s nomination were not only a personal affront to her but the end of the Democratic party.

So, I’ve soured on the idea. Here’s seven reasons why Hillary Clinton should not be chosen as Obama’s vice presidential running mate:

  1. From Rachel Maddow on MSNBC’s Inside the War Room just a few minutes ago:
  2. [It would be] very awkward for a vice presidential candidate to be on a presidential candidate’s ticket after she has made repeated references to his potential death. Yes, that would be weird.

  3. It will undermine the rationale behind Obama’s candidacy and make Obama look weak. As Reihan Salam of The Atlantic wrote:

    A backroom deal with Clinton would make a mockery of Obama’s language of hope and change. It would make Obama appear weak, and it would reward Clinton for running a campaign more vicious than anything Lee Atwater could have cooked up. More importantly, Obama would be choosing a fundamentally weak and unpopular running mate who has masked her marked executive inexperience through endless misrepresentation of her role in the Clinton White House – a role that begins and ends with a healthcare debacle that would have gotten anyone other than a First Lady fired.

    Or, to put it as John Edwards did:

  4. She doesn’t put a single state or demographic group on the board for Obama.
    She is a highly polarizing figure. The demographic splits in the primaries so far have been best explained by the Peabody award-winning Josh Marshall over at the Talking Points Memo: The only areas where Hillary has decisively beaten Obama are in the Appalachian region of the country. But Hillary is far from the best candidate to appeal to this group. Former Senator John Edwards, Governor Ed Rendell, Governor Ted Strickland, and especially Senator Jim Webb all would seem to have greater appeal to the Scotch-Irish Reagan Democrats of the Appalachia. Clinton’s base is entirely in the Democratic party where she is relatively popular, while Obama has substantial support among independents and even some Republicans. That is why Clinton has done better in closed primaries than ones open to independents or all parties (at least until Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos gained traction).
  5. Bill.
  6. She’s run a terrible campaign so far. Would she run a better campaign if she trying to win for Obama?
    Her campaign is already $21,000,000.00 in debt. She squandered enormous institutional and name recognition advantages. Does anyone still remember that she was the prohibitive favorite before “a skinny kid with a funny name” expertly managed one of the hardest fought campaigns in history?
  7. She shouldn’t be rewarded for trying to bully her way onto the ticket (after being told no “politely but straightforwardly and irrevocably“, threatening an “open civil war“) and for her bullying tactics during the rest of the campaign (threatening to withhold funds from the DNC; attacking Nancy Pelosi; lying about Obama’s record on abortion, NAFTA, and other issues; using voter suppression tactics in Nevada and Iowa; and undermining the legitimacy of the delegate selection process she agreed to when she thought it was to her benefit.)
  8. Her sense of entitlement.

As a bonus:

Hillary’s not going to help Obama win in November. Let’s get on to the main event already.

Drop out, Senator, and settle for becoming the next Secretary of Defense or a Supreme Court Justice.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

Clinton inciting an “open civil war”

This is not very promising.

According to David Edwards from RawStory, CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux is reporting that “Clinton insiders” are suggesting “open civil war” to get Senator Clinton the Vice Presidential slot.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

Obama-Clinton?

Al Giordano of The Field is reporting that an Obama-Clinton ticket is a non-starter:

The Field can now confirm, based on multiple sources, something that both campaigns publicly deny: that Senator Clinton has directly told Senator Obama that she wants to be his vice presidential nominee, and that Senator Obama politely but straightforwardly and irrevocably said “no.” Obama is going to pick his own running mate based on his own criteria and vetting process.

h/t Andrew Sullivan.

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Election 2008 Politics The Clintons Videos

Hillary’s Qualifications

A bit unfair of a characterization of Ms. Clinton’s position, but pretty damn close.

Categories
Election 2008 Obama Politics The Clintons

Gaming the System

[Photo by joshp over at Flickr]

[reddit-me]Terry McAuliffe of the Clinton campaign on Meet the Press this morning described Barack Obama’s campaign as one of “gaming the system” which is something he says Senator Hillary Clinton would never stoop to:

Listen, we have played hard and we didn’t want to game the system.

The statement is one that doesn’t ring true on several levels and is certainly an odd way to describe the Obama campaign – and an odd way to excuse the total lack of preparation or foresight that has characterized the Clinton campaign. I don’t mean to use the phrases “lack of preparation” and “lack of foresight” as weapons here – but as objective descriptions of the campaign. Her campaign simply assumed she was going to sweep the early primaries and even now still lags behind the Obama campaign in organization in the remaining states, months after the nature of this campaign became clear.

Yet McAuliffe used the phrase “gaming the system” to describe the Obama campaign winning by every available measure – the popular vote count, the number of contests won, and especially the delegate count.

Gaming the system has been defined as “using the rules, policies and procedures of a system against itself for purposes outside what these rules were intended for.” By implication, Obama – by playing by the rules, and winning – is using the rules against the Democratic party itself.

This whole reading makes sense, of course, only if the Clintons are the Democratic party.

McAuliffe’s comments also called to mind the Susan Faludi piece in the New York Times a few days ago in which she described the appeal of Ms. Clinton’s campaign:

…our first major female presidential candidate isn’t doing what men always accuse women of doing. She’s not summoning the rules committee over every infraction. (Her attempt to rewrite the rules for Michigan and Florida are less a timeout than rough play.) Not once has she demanded that the umpire stop the fight. Indeed, she’s asking for more unregulated action…

Faludi insightfully, and perhaps even accurately, described the gender and competition-related stereotypes at play – and how these stereotypes which were once used against Ms. Clinton are now working in her favor:

Maybe the white male electorate just can’t abide strong women whom they suspect of being of a certain sort. To adopt a particularly lamentable white male construct, the sports metaphor, political strength comes in two varieties: the power of the umpire, who controls the game by application of the rules but who never gets hit; and the power of the participant, who has no rules except to hit hard, not complain, bounce back and endeavor to prevail in the end.

For virtually all of American political history, the strong female contestant has been cast not as the player but the rules keeper, the purse-lipped killjoy who passes strait-laced judgment on feral boy fun. The animosity toward the rules keeper is fueled by the suspicion that she (and in American life, the regulator is inevitably coded feminine, whatever his or her sex) is the agent of people so privileged that they don’t need to fight, people who can dominate more decisively when the rules are decorous. American political misogyny is inflamed by anger at this clucking overclass: who are they to do battle by imposing rectitude instead of by actually doing battle?

The specter of the prissy hall monitor is, in part, the legacy of the great female reformers of Victorian America….While the populace might concede the merits of the female reformers’ cause, it found them repellent on a more glandular level. In that visceral subbasement of the national imagination — the one that underlies all the blood-and-guts sports imagery our culture holds so dear — the laurels go to the slugger who ignores the censors, the outrider who navigates the frontier without a chaperone.

I think this helps explain why the figure of “Hillary the bare-knuckle brawler” is so much more attractive than “Hillary, the inevitable”, or indeed, many of the other “Hillary Clintons”. It helps her to play against type – including certain elements of her own reputation.