Billcap:

Obama has won ALL of the ten contests since Super Tuesday, by margins ranging from 17 to 82 percentage points. Hillary Clinton is most definitely NOT collecting half the vote, unless you are following Mark Penn in deciding that certain states and demographic segments "don't count."

I understand the disappointment that Clintion supporters must feel about their candidate's failure, but this does not excuse, much less justify, rewriting the laws of mathematics.

Contrary to the claims made by some posters above, married women are on average happier than unmarried women. (The same holds true for men, but no one questions this.) Anyone who wants to review the scholarly literature on this subject can start with Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's book The Case For Marriage, especially chapter 12 and the books and articles cited in the bibliography.

To state the obvious, this is a statistical generalization. It does not mean that all married women are happier than all unmarried women, or that any individual single wonman would necessarily be happier if she were married. The evidence is unambiguous, however, since there are MANY primary studies on the subject. People who believe otherwise should identify the sources that support their conclusion.

Kathleen Sebelius has many excellent qualities - integrity, competence, administrative success, the ability to appeal to and work successfully with individuals from all political backgrounds and, last but by no means least, an excellent working relationship with the presumptive Democratic nominee. If she is selected as the Vice Presidential nominee it will be because of these attributes, not because she is a woman.

Only Barack Obama can decide whether she is the single best choice. There is, however, no reason why selecting her should "rub salt in the wounds of the millions of women who so very much wanted to elect Senator Clinton the leader and Senator Clinton the woman." The only people who hold this view are those who see Sebelius as a woman first and as a leader second. To judge from his comments Barack Obama does not share this view.

Nor should he. Apart from anything else, he cannot allow himself to be blackmailed by die-hard Clinton supporters who publicly annnounce that they will not vote for him unless Clinton is on the ticket. That would lose him far more votes than he could possibly gain.

Stormfree:

I did not say that the Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees had to like each other. I said that Obama and Sebelius have an excellent working relationship. Some of us can establish such relationships even with people that we do not particularly like - although this does not seem necessary in this instance. Moreover, this is only ONE of the attributes that Kathleen Sebelius would bring to the job.

I don't think that the Kennedy-Johnson relationship is a model for contemporatry Presidential candidates. Johnson was more or less frozen out of policy making during Kennedy's term. His selection as Vice President did, however, make sense, because he enabled Kennedy to win Texas, which he probably would have lost otherwise. The only potential VP nominee who might help Obama to carry a purple state is Gov. Kaine of Virginia. Mark Warner has already ruled himself out of the running, and I doubt whether Jim Webb (who also ruled himself out today) would have made much of a difference.